The Farm Security Administration
(FSA)
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) employed over 20
photographers - spanned almost 20 years – and created more than
175,000 photographs during that time. Many of these images
have never been published, and almost 80 years after the FSA’s
creation, most people don’t even know they exist.
The FSA began in 1935 as a New Deal program called the Resettlement
Administration (RA), meant to help impoverished farmers and
agricultural workers. It gave them financial assistance, relocated
large groups to more fertile land, and educated them in techniques
that were better for the environment – and better for farmers’
wallets. It contained several smaller agencies, including the
Information Division, which hired photographers under the direction
of Roy Stryker. These photographers were meant to raise public
awareness of the financial problems that faced rural Americans –
and also to popularize government assistance. But Stryker had an
additional goal: recording American life and culture. His
photographers shot everything from road signs and corn fields to
union protests and environmental depletion, and their images made
effective propaganda.
Even though no more than five full-time photographers worked for
the RA at any given time, both Congress and the media critiqued
this as an unnecessary expenditure. Rather than disband the RA, the
government chose to rebrand it as the Farm Security Administration
in 1937. The greatest body of work was done during the next six
years, and certain images were highly publicized. In 1942, as
America edged toward the beginning of World War II, the FSA began
recording military preparations. Eventually, as government budgets
were slashed, the FSA was totally absorbed into war documentation,
and became a third agency: the Office of War Information. In 1943,
finding his editorial freedom drastically curtailed and his staff
severely reduced, Roy Stryker left the OWI to work for an oil
company in New Jersey. Although this was generally speaking the end
of the FSA, images continued to be added to the government archives
– called the FSA-OWI Collection – for another decade.
In contrast to certain other photographers who worked during the
same period, the FSA photographers were interested, broadly, in
humanizing their subjects rather than recklessly dramatizing them.
Today, their work provides an invaluable visual history of the
1930s and 1940s, reviving a period slowly passing out of living
memory and forever preserving the culture and climate of the
time.
Margaret Williams