A Cultural History of Thirties Photography

A Staggering Revolution
A Staggering
Revolution
A CULTUR AL HISTORY
OF THIRTIES PHOTOGR APHY
John Raeburn
University of Illinois Press

Urbana and Chicago
Frontispiece:
Anna May Wong,
(Courtesy of Corbis, Inc.)
by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States
of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data
Raeburn, John, A staggering revolution :
a cultural history of thirties photography /
John Raeburn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
-: ---- (cloth : alk. paper)
-: --- (cloth : alk. paper)
-: ---- (pbk. : alk. paper)
-: --- (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Photography, Artistic. . United States
Pictorial works.
I. Title.
.
.'dc
For Kathleen
and
in memory of
Irene Wiest Raeburn

[blank page vi]
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
A Calendar of Thirties Photography xvii
. The Rebirth of Photography in the Thirties

. Disestablishing Stieglitz
. Group f. and the Problem of California Photography
. An Eastern Beachhead
. Edward Steichen and Celebrity Photography
. MoMAs Big Top Show
. Camera Periodicals and the Popular Audience
. Culture Morphology in Berenice Abbotts New York
. Farm Security Administration Photography and the
Dilemmas of Art
. Farm Security Administration Photography in the Aura of Art
. The Nations Newsstands
. The Photo League, Lewis Hine, and the Harlem Document
. Seeing California with Edward Weston
. Photography at High Tide
Afterword: The Cultural Establishment of Photography
Notes
Index
Photographs follow page
Preface
By the mid-s photographs made a generation earlier under the aegis of the
Farm Security Administration (FSA) became ubiquitous enough to be visible even
to someone like me, trained to do an American studies mostly grounded in written
documents. Although Leo Marxs The Machine in the Garden and Alan Trachten-
bergs Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol had indicated how visual art might enlarge
and enrich cultural analysis, even in those pathbreaking books verbal sources did
most of the heavy work of clearing the way and mapping the terrain; the visual evi-
dence on which they drew came from the prestigious medium of easel painting. If I
ever thought of photographs it was as illustrations, diverting addenda that brighten
a book but could without signicant loss be dispensed with. That they might be
resources for cultural history in their own right didnt occur to me. But my imper-
viousness couldnt withstand the ood of FSA photographs that suddenly seemed
to be everywhere, in monographic collections by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange,
compilation volumes edited by the projects director Roy Stryker and Hank ONeal,
an institutional history by F. Jack Hurley, andmost revealing for meWilliam
Stotts exploration of the intertwining of the documentary impulse with thirties
x culture. With so many books about the FSA appearing almost simultaneously, even
I wasnt blind enough to fail to appreciate the superb artfulness of these pictures or,
with Stotts help, grasp what they might reveal about life in the depression.
My parents came of age in the thirtiesthey were twenty at the time of the
Crashand seeing the FSA photographs made the atmosphere in which they began
their adult lives palpable to me as nothing else ever had, not even their own stories. I
also soon found a less intimate use for them in a course I taught from time to time on
the thirties. There, I used them to supplement the mostly literary texts in a manner
not so different from discrete book illustrations. But over time as I read up on the
FSA project I began to learn how to think about them in ways that honored their
independent specicities so they contributed more substantively to illuminating
the depression eras culture. I had no reason to question the implicit assumption
of this new scholarship from which I was learning so muchthat the documentary
pictures of the FSA and thirties photography were virtually synonymous, not least
for purposes of cultural history. But then, browsing in a bookstore sometime later,
I came upon a reprint edition of Berenice Abbotts New York photographs, which
seemed to me as artful and culturally rich as the FSAs although with considerably
different valences. Stott had not mentioned her project, nor in my other reading
had I run across discussions of it.
My admiration for Abbotts photographs unwittingly supplied the impetus for
this book, for it led me to want to read about them. But I discovered that little had
been written about them since the thirtiescatnip to a scholaralthough much in
the decade itself, including a number of articles in camera publications and proles
in two of the eras most successful new magazines, Coronet and Life. From these
contemporary sources it became apparent that at the time Abbotts project had been
at least as admired as the FSAs.
From perusing the periodicals I couldnt help noticing as well pieces about a
remarkable number of other talented photographers, among whom Margaret
Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston showed up most often.
Bourke-Whites visibility came as no surprise because later writers about the FSA
had reiterated James Agees derogation of her studies of impoverished southerners
in You Have Seen Their Faces. Its stature as a best-seller exacerbated the pictures
offensiveness for these critics, although I couldnt help noticing that their objec-
tions hadnt occurred to most of her contemporaries. But Steichens and Westons
public prominence surprised me more because the photographic histories I had
been consulting emphasized Steichens participation in the Photo-Secession, say-
ing little about his later career, and characterized Weston as a formalist whose work
appealed primarily to an esoteric circle of admirers. Clearly, like Abbott both had a
Preface
larger visibility and more appreciative audience during the thirties than these his-
torians had acknowledged.
The disparity between later imputations of the FSAs preeminence and the
broader array of talent hailed in contemporary sources led me to want to recon-
struct the photographic culture that was actually visible in the thirties. Who were
the eras leading photographers, which of their pictures were seen, how were they
contextualized, and what conduits made them accessible to audiences? It soon
became apparent that to answer these questions required moving beyond attention
to Alfred Stieglitzs impresario activities and those of the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), which dominated what modest attention scholars had given to photog-
raphys diffusion. A group of young middlemen and women had come to the fore
and developed a number of new channels to bring photographs to the public, and
they invented means as well to educate viewers about them. The result was that
artful photography entered the public arena to a degree it never had before. These
activities produced an atmosphere in which its audience became a genuinely pop-
ular one thatthanks to periodical and book reproductions and traveling exhibi-
tionsspanned the nation rather than being concentrated solely in metropolitan
centers. New venues and audiences inevitably invigorated photographers, too, so
much so that the term renaissance aptly characterizes their collective achievement
in these years.
Examining thirties photography through this wider-angle lens produced some
surprising revelations besides enlarging the census of its leading workers. Rather
than a force for promoting the gospel of photography as art, some young people
viewed Stieglitz as an impediment to it, and they sought to disestablish the author-
ity he had accrued over the previous three decades. As a consequence, no individual
or institution enjoyed the exclusive power he had once exercised to dene artistic
photography or denominate its reigning adepts. MoMA, through its photography
exhibitions, bid for gatekeeping authority, but a signicant fraction of photogra-
phys art world did not concede it. The museums shows reected the mediums
increased visibility but did not initiate it or alone sustain it. In fact, several omni-
bus exhibitionsmounted without institutional backing and displayed in uncon-
ventional spaces in such locations as Rockefeller Center, department stores, and a
Worlds Fairattracted far more attendees than any MoMA show. Moreover, they
better indicated photographys public appeal and the democratic composition of
its audience. Finally, MoMAs establishment in of a departmentusually
regarded as the triumphant conclusion of the long campaign to install photography
as a ne artactually seemed to me to spell the end of the special circumstances
that allowed photography to ourish in the thirties.
Mapping the sociology of photographys art world thus revealed a more varied
and complex terrain than I had rst imagined. The FSA still gured importantly
Preface
xi
in it but as one prominent feature among several others. Two chapters here discuss
the FSAits ambivalent tacking between being an artistic undertaking and a pub-
xii lic relations one, the special circumstances that government patronage imposed on
the photographers, and its efforts to secure the approbation of the art worldbut
I have not examined in much detail any body of work made by the several talented
photographers who worked for it. There are two reasons for this exclusion. First,
of all the achievements in thirties photography, pictures by the FSA staff have been
most fully and intelligently assessed by Stott, James Curtis, Cara Finnegan, Paul
Hendrickson, F. Jack Hurley, Karin Ohrn, Miles Orvell, Maren Stange, Sally Stein,
Alan Trachtenberg, and others. There is a rich body of literature about them that I
didnt want to reiterate. Evanss contribution to the eras masterwork, Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, has especially attracted substantial and intelligent commentary,
although inasmuch as the books impact in its time was small it had only modest
relevance to my survey. Second, and paradoxically, the FSA le is so capacious and
various that no single photographers work can represent it. Because my focus is on
the projects institutional activities, highlighting specic photographers would have
been too partial. Much remains to be discovered about the FSA picturesmany
are still largely unknownand a satisfactory history of the entire project remains
to be written, but a less comprehensive account serves my special purposes.
I instead examine concentrated bodies of work that have attracted less careful
attention in our time but were widely admired in the thirties and highlight the rela-
tionship between a photographers creative afatus and broader cultural themes.
Steichens celebrity portraits for Vanity Fair reached the largest audience any pho-
tographer had ever enjoyed for a related group of pictures, earning him the sobriquet
of the greatest of living photographers. They not only comprised a pantheon of
widely admired Americans but also indicated how little the depression diminished
the nations romance with consumer culture. Abbotts New York studies hardly
alluded to the depression but formulated an ambitious cultural history of the city
that charted the economic, political, social, cultural, and even psychological altera-
tions that accompanied its transformation in two centuries from a provincial outpost
of empire to the worlds leading metropolis. MoMAs Beaumont Newhall hailed
Bourke-Whites ethnographic survey of Muncie, Indiana (the Middletown of
the Lynds famous study) as the eras nest documentary effort. When You Have
Seen Their Faces appeared later that year her pictures elicited unanimous critical
praise for the very characteristics for which Agee and others would later indict them.
Westons project of photographing the West, supported by the rst Guggenheim
Fellowship ever awarded to a photographer, supplied copious opportunity to dem-
onstrate his extraordinary formal mastery. It also served his cultural ambition to be
a force in transforming the consciousness of fellow citizens, to open new roads for
those ready to travel as he put it. California and the West, the projects most impor-
Preface
tant outcome, gave literal expression to his metaphoric ambition and recounted in
prose (by his wife Charis Wilson Weston) and photographs the Westons travels
on western highways in discovery of sites that when seen through his lens would
make his vision palpable.
Ive also given special attention to two other bodies of less widely seen work
because both grew out of organizations that played key roles in thirties photog-
raphy. Group f. in California owed its existence to its members resentment of
eastern hegemony in photographys art world, which they determined to counter
with a group exhibition at San Franciscos de Young Museum in . This event
has usually been understood as motivated by a formalist agenda, specically to
derogate Californias neo-impressionist pictorialists by asserting the primacy of
the groups purist esthetic. At least equally, the exhibition put forward an argu-
ment for a distinctive western way of seeing and bid for national recognition of it.
In New York, the Photo League campaigned for documentary and more generally
made itself a center for photography with an ambitious schedule of classes, lectures,
and exhibitions. It also encouraged members to undertake collaborative projects,
one of which, the Harlem Document, is among the decades nest photographic
achievements, although that may only be inferred from its surviving remnants
because it never achieved the book publication for which its makers hoped and its
archive no longer exists.
When Newhall proclaimed that in the thirties we were on the brink of a revolu-
tion as staggering as any photography in its hundred years of existence had experi-
enced, he was thinking of the new channels for its dissemination and the popular
and heterogeneous audience they created. But these circumstances equally affected
photographers; venues for display expanded, encouraging an extraordinary num-
ber of gifted workers to step forward so audiences enjoyed access to pictures by
an eforescence of talented adepts unmatched before or since. The work reected
enlarged condence in the mediums potential as several of the most gifted under-
took integrated investigations that aspired to formulate cultural arguments too
complex to be addressed by discretely conceived images, however masterful. In
an unprecedented way such superior photographs became integral to popular cul-
ture, and in what follows I explore the reciprocity of these sociological and artistic
developments and how the dynamic they set in motion made the thirties the most
vigorous and creative decade in American photographys history.
Preface
xiii
[blank page xiv]
Acknowledgments
Research and writing are mostly solitary pleasures but periodically become sociable
ones as well for reasons of the spirit as well as practical outcomes. It is a pleasure
to thank those who provided aid, advice, support, and comradeship while I was
writing this book.
I have beneted from the helpfulness and efciency of the staff at several insti-
tutions, including the Archives of American Art, the George Eastman House, the
Library of Congress Division of Prints and Photographs, and the Museum of
Modern Art as well as the interlibrary loan department at the University of Iowa.
I especially want to thank Amy Rule at the Center for Creative Photography for her
assistance, particularly for alerting me to materials in the centers archive relating
to the Photo Leagues Harlem Document group.
Harold Corsini, a member of this group, and his wife Mary warmly welcomed
me into their home, and he patiently and thoughtfully answered my questions about
the Photo League. Nick Natanson generously provided key information about an
exhibition that he had gathered during his own research on African Americans in
FSA photography.
xvi A number of students in the American studies department at the University of
Iowa gave me valuable research assistance, including Sharon Lake, Matt Nelson,
Eriko Ogihara, Shawn Peters, Whitney Soenksen, Deanna Thomann, and Lori
Vermaas. Bill Bryant supplied useful information about western travel in a paper
written for a course I taught. Chrys Poff undertook productive research for me in
California and also read an early draft of chapter on Group f..
Several friends and colleagues also generously read chapters and provided valu-
able criticism and much appreciated encouragement, including Roger Aikin, Harry
Dawson, Ed Folsom, Hanno Hardt, Neil Hertz, Joni Kinsey, Eric Sandeen, Barb
Shubinski, and Garrett Stewart.
I am also grateful for opportunities to deliver preliminary versions of chapters
as lectures and to have listeners responses. Chris Lohmann invited me to Indiana
University, William Stott to Texas, and Eric Sandeen to Wyoming, and during a
semester I taught at Nijmegen University in the Netherlands Hans Bak asked me
to present some of my ndings, as did Paul Levine at Copenhagen and Walter Gru-
enzweig at Dortmund. On my home ground Garrett Stewart invited me to lecture
in the Freedman Lecture Series, and my American studies colleagues kindly slated
me for talks twice in the departments lecture series. Jack Salzman gave me the
opportunity in Prospects to try out a very early version of my inquiries into Berenice
Abbotts New York project (chapter ).
The University of Iowa has materially expedited this work in several ways. The
Ofce of the Vice President for Research funded research trips to the Library of
Congress and the Center for Creative Photography, and it also subsidized the expense
of illustrations. The Department of English also helped with travel expenses to
the George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art, as did the Depart-
ment of American Studies for my visit with Harold Corsini. Some of the work on
this book I undertook during residencies at the universitys Obermann Center for
Advanced Studies, where Jay Semel and Lorna Olson created an ideal mix of pro-
ductive isolation and conviviality.
My wife, Kathleen Kamerick, to whom this book is dedicated, read chapters,
offered sound advice, and bucked me up when I needed it. I am thankful every day
to have her as my lifes companion.
Acknowledgments
A Calendar of
Thirties Photography
1929 Berenice Abbott returns from Paris with Eugne Atgets archive
Hound and Horn begins to publish artistic photographs
Steichen, the Photographer by Carl Sandburg
1930 Fortune begins publication

Edward Westons rst New York show at the Delphic Studios
The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art exhibition, International
Photography
Atgets rst American exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery
1931 Julien Levy establishes a New York gallery to feature photography

Charles Sheeler gives up photography to concentrate on painting
One-person shows at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, by Willard
Van Dyke and Weston
1932 One-person shows at the de Young Museum by Ansel Adams,
Imogen Cunningham, and Brett Weston
xviii Group f. founded; exhibits at the de Young Museum
MoMA exhibition of photomurals
Alfred Stieglitz fty-year retrospective at An American Place
Edward Weston published by Merle Armitage
Men at Work by Lewis W. Hine
Hound and Horn features Charles Flatos essay on Mathew Brady
1933 Lloyd Rollins dismissed as director of the San Francisco museums

Adams meets Stieglitz at An American Place
Adams and Van Dyke open galleries in the Bay Area
Adamss rst New York show at the Delphic Studios
Carmel Snow becomes editor of Harpers Bazaar
Walker Evanss one-person show of nineteenth-century architecture at
MoMA
1934 America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait edited by Waldo Frank
et al.
Stieglitzs seventieth birthday exhibition at An American Place
Death of Doris Ulmann
Martin Munkcsi joins Harpers Bazaar
Levy attacks the great Ss of American photography
1935 Lincoln Kirsteins national broadcast on the history of photography

U.S. Camera annual commences publication
First annual U.S. Camera exhibition, Rockefeller Center and traveling
venues
First annual Leica photography show, Rockefeller Center and traveling
venues
Beaumont Newhall joins the staff of MoMA
Resettlement Administration (RA/FSA) photographic project begins
Works Progress Administration hires Abbott, and the project Changing
New York results
Making a Photograph by Adams
1936 Vanity Fair merges with Vogue
Adamss one-person show at An American Place
Life commences publication
Coronet commences publication
Formation of the Photo League, New York
1937 Photography, exhibition, MoMA and traveling venues

Look commences publication
Weston awarded the rst Guggenheim Fellowship to a photographer
Evans leaves the Farm Security Administration (FSA)
You Have Seen Their Faces by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret
Bourke-White
Popular Photography commences publication
1938 Land of the Free by Archibald MacLeish

Edward Steichen retires from the Cond Nast magazines
U.S. Camera Magazine commences publication
First International Photographic Exposition, Grand Central Palace,
New York
American Photographs, Evanss one-person exhibition, MoMA
1939 Changing New York by Abbott, with captions by Elizabeth McCausland

An American Exodus by Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange
Hine retrospective at the Riverside Museum, New York
Documents of America, FSA traveling exhibition sponsored by MoMA
1940 Lange laid off by the FSA

Look publishes selections from the Harlem Document
Evans awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
California and the West by Charis Wilson Weston and Edward Weston
A Pageant of Photography at the San Francisco Worlds Fair
MoMA Department of Photography established
A Calendar of Thirties Photography
xix
1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Evans
Twelve Million Black Voices by Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam
xx Lange awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
U.S. Camera Magazine changes format and becomes a monthly
In the Image of America, FSA exhibition at Rockefeller Center and
the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia
[blank page xxii]
1
The Rebirth of Photography

in the Thirties
A Democratic Art
Triumphantly concluding his survey of photographic art for the Ency-
clopedia Britannica, Edward Weston observed that the thirties had witnessed
a perceptible growth of interest in and understanding of photography as an
art medium. His experience encouraged that gratifying assessment. Ten
years earlier his audience had been miniscule and mostly regional because no
means existed to bring pictures like his before a broader viewership. He had not
even exhibited in New York. But by hundreds of thousands had seen his
work, in that year alone visitors to the Golden Gate International Exposition
(the San Francisco Worlds Fair) and the Museum of Modern Art, readers
of the U.S. Camera annual and Popular Photography magazine, and purchas-
ers of two new books, Seeing California with Edward Weston and California
and the West. Not only was his audience larger but it was also, as he suggested,
better informed thanks to a plethora of new display and educative channels
invented by energetic impresarios determined to make photography a more pub-
licly robust enterprise.1
2 Nor had only experienced photographers like Weston beneted from changed
circumstances. So, too, did the remarkable number of younger talents who emerged
during the decade, including Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-
White, Walker Evans, Horst P. Horst, Dorothea Lange, Martin Munkcsi, Ben
Shahn, Ralph Steiner, and Aaron Siskind, to name just some. Like Westons, their
pictures found an appreciative audience among the legions who attended the mam-
moth exhibitions that ourished in these years and with the even greater numbers
who saw them in periodical and book reproductions. Photography as an artistic and
cultural enterprise reached this zenith in the thirties because of four complemen-
tary, mutually reinforcing developments. New venues for displaying pictures and
pedagogical efforts to educate viewers about them collaborated to create a vast and
informed audience whose voracious appetite for images stimulated gifted photogra-
phersnew and experiencedto create for it. Taken collectively, the body of work
they made was the most distinguished, prolic, and widely seen of the century.
So omnipresent had photographys vitality become that as it approached its cen-
tenary it seemed to many observers only just to have established itself as a central
medium of artistic expression. Inspired by the appearance in of a new annual
reproducing the years best pictures, The Nation editorialized that they enlarged
the consciousness of the average man, who was encouraged to look at things
from points of view he has never taken and to see them in arrangements he has
never made. The New York Herald Tribune proffered similar praise for the new
imaginative worlds revealed in a museum exhibition but emphasized that such
visual revelations had become even more profusely available outside art institutions
and in every corner of the nation. Whereas traditional visual arts had perforce a
circumscribed audience because their artifacts were unique, the reproducibility of
photographs made the daily world of modern man a pictorial world to a degree
beyond anything in human experience. James Agee put the case most succinctly.
The camera, he said, was the central instrument of our time.2
Photography became a democratic art in the thirties and not only because some
of its most skilled practitioners turned their cameras on ordinary people and the
depressions calamities. It was also democratic because its audience became a pop-
ular one, far more so than earlier or with the other ne arts, and because a unied,
tastemaking elite did not govern photographic culture. These circumstances cre-
ated an atmosphere in which a number of photographic practices rubbed against
one another, and that eclecticism also encouraged the growth of heterogeneous
audiences.
Photographys keynote in these years was its accessibility as cultural middlemen
devised innovative means to bring it to new audiences and educate them about it.
Ironically, abetting the success of these enterprises was photographys still-uncertain
artistic status, which the eforescence of distinguished work and popular appeal
had only begun to transform; it was an ambiguity that retarded centralization of
its gatekeeping authority. In this sense the medium was egalitarian in the perme-
ability of the channels that mediated between artists and viewers. The republic of
photography was unsettled, boisterous, and vital in the thirties, and the democratic
atmosphere that encouraged those qualities undergirded both its distinguished
artistic achievement and its much-enlarged cultural visibility.3
An Art World
Photography had secured a toehold on cultural legitimacy a generation earlier
through the activities of Alfred Stieglitz, whose efforts to promote it in his pub-
lication Camera Work and at his New York gallery, , culminated in the
Photo-Secession exhibition at Buffalos Albright Art Gallery, the rst time pho-
tography had been displayed on an American museums walls. But his commitment
to being photographys evangel began to wane after the Albright show and even
more after , when his energies turned to a group of painters who largely sup-
planted the photographers previously composing his circle. His passion for his own
work remained undiminished, and he did not relinquish his role as photographys
preeminent arbiter. Without his promotional efforts, however, and because no one
else stepped forward to assume them, its standing as an important artistic activity
languished. During the teens and twenties, photography shows were rare, and the
medium did not elicit much attention from publishers or journalists. The momen-
tum the Albright exhibition promised did not materialize.4
Stieglitzs propensity to dismiss as inferior the work of most photographers, more-
over, and his narrow conception of photographys audience, comported poorly with
the invigorated interest that began to be apparent around . Since his discovery
of Paul Strand in he had sternly withheld his imprimatur and shown no other
photographers but himself and Strand. His view of artful photographys audience
was nearly as exclusivea small, select, and discriminating group whose cynosure
was New York. Such people would be served by uptown galleries; elegant, limited-
circulation publications; and, in time perhaps, major metropolitan museums. He
abhorred mass reproduction and almost always refused to allow his own work to
be reproduced.5
If other artists were to become visible, seen by a less constricted audience, the
commanding authority that Stieglitz had exercised for a generation would need
to be subverted, and new venues beyond the exclusive one he imagined devised.
This necessitated the reformulation of photographys art world, in fact required
3
its reinvention because it had become so attenuated. An art world, in the sociolo-
gist Howard Beckers formulation, is the cooperative network through which art
4 happens, with artists at one boundary and their audience at the other. Two main
groups of intermediaries compose the laments that link creators and viewers, one
responsible for displaying the artists work and the other in charge of reception
activities such as evaluation and providing the education by which viewers learn to
make knowledgeable judgments.6
Although an art worlds participants share a common interest, they do not self-
consciously think of themselves as an organized group. An art world is a heuris-
tic construction rather than a real-world afliation. Some of its practitioners and
intermediaries will be acquainted, but its evolution is usually guided less by coor-
dinated undertakings than discrete activities (although sometimes with dynamic
interplay among them). But even if personal alliances link some participants loosely,
the size of the United States and its numerous regional centers militate against
an art world being a tightly cohesive entity, and that was especially so for pho-
tography in the thirties. New York continued to be its most active site, but it had
other important nodes as well, notably California and the District of Columbia.
Two of the decades most important exhibitions were in the former, and the lat-
ter extended government patronage to some leading photographers. Neither was
photographys audience drawn only from the Northeast, and in that respect it is
important to recall that audiences are also key participants in an art world as more
or less permanent parties to the cooperative activity that makes it up.7 Some of
the art worlds most active members took as their mission increasing the breadth
as well as the knowledgeability of this audience, and they did not construe it as a
strictly metropolitan one.
It is possible to measure the most important activities of artists and intermedi-
aries, but more challenging to calculate is the intensity of audience participation.
Quantitative dataattendance at exhibitions and circulation numbers of the new
camera periodicalsindicate that public attention increased substantially after .
Qualitative data about reception are rarer. Reviews expressed individual responses
that were not necessarily representative, although when several reviewers arrived
at an identical conclusion and used similar language to do so they likely indicated
broader consensus. Gallery and museum professionals as well as journalists some-
times characterized the responses of exhibition attendees. On a few occasions, as
at a show of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs in , visitors
were invited to submit judgments, and many energetically did so. Readers letters
to magazines provide yet another gauge of audience response, and in one camera
magazine these became a prominent editorial feature. This patchwork of data sug-
gests a pattern of uncommon audience commitment to, and involvement in, char-
acteristic art world activities.
Abetting the remarkable array of gifted photographers who nourished this enlarged
audiences appetite for pictures were a number of intermediaries without parallel
in earlier years. Some located themselves within channels by which visual art ordi-
narily reached its audience. Alma Reed, Julien Levy, and the Photo League opened
galleries in New York, as did Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyke on the West
Coast. The director of San Franciscos de Young Museum, Lloyd Rollins, made it
a regional photographic center, with a number of exhibitions, one of which became
legendary, by Group f., an organization of California workers. Alfred Barr, the
Museum of Modern Arts director, had been ambitious to show photography since
the museums founding; assisted by Lincoln Kirstein, he succeeded in doing so with
an exhibition of photomurals in . Kirstein subsequently contributed as well to
getting Walker Evanss work before MoMAs audience through its rst one-person
photography shows. In a gambit aimed at enlarging photographys standing in the
museumand against the advice of colleaguesBarr hired Beaumont Newhall to
be MoMAs librarian in and then charged him with assembling a comprehensive
exhibition of the medium to occupy MoMAs entire four oors. When the museum
launched its photography department in Newhall would be its rst curator.
Other impresarios created new and untraditional channels. The manufacturer of
Leica cameras sponsored annual exhibitions, as did the publisher of U.S. Camera.
Comprising ve hundred or more exhibits, the shows would premier at Rockefeller
Center and then travel to some seventy-ve cities throughout the nation, attracting
hundreds of thousands of attendees. Likewise without institutional backing, Wil-
lard Morgan in organized a mammoth event in New York that exhibited three
thousand images to more than a hundred thousand visitors during its week-long
run. For the San Francisco Worlds Fair, Ansel Adams assembled the most
ambitious and comprehensive exhibition ever seen in the West and far and away
the best-attended anywhere.
Important as such occasions were to photographys diffusion, reproductions
reached even more viewers. Their dissemination depended upon numerous edito-
rial intermediaries committed to publishing the leading photographers. Thomas
Maloney of the U.S. Camera periodicals was among the most energetic, assisted by
Edward Steichen, who exchanged his photographers hat for the impresarios. Van-
ity Fairs editor Frank Crowninshield promoted Steichens work as well as that of
other leading photographers not associated with the magazine. At Coronet, Arnold
Gingrich made photographs his popular new magazines hallmark. Fortunes and
Lifes editors published pictures by some of the decades leading photographers
such as Abbott, Bourke-White, Lange, and Weston. Few appeared in Look, Lifes
main competitor in the expansive photo-magazine market, but Look nonetheless
provided the Photo League with a national showcase for its most important project,
a photographic ethnography of Harlem.
5
The Harlem Project was intended to become a book, which never happened, but
several leading photographers did publish monographs, which had not been the
6 case for Stieglitz, Strand, and Charles Sheeler, the previous eras leading workers.
Abbott, Bourke-White, Evans, Lange, Steichen, and Weston had copiously illus-
trated volumes. The FSA staff, including Evans and Lange and also others, did
as well, sometimes with commentary by important literary gures. Abbott and
Adams also wrote generously illustrated how-to manuals, nominally practical but
also self-consciously educative in proposing photographic standards and sketching
the mediums history. All this publishing activity substantially multiplied the vis-
ibility of the eras most important workers.
The editorial wing of photographys art world served its educational ambitions
as well, providing practitioners with opportunities to elaborate on their work and
apprising audiences of what made it signicant. The ourishing new camera peri-
odicals most obviously took up this task and featured illustrated proles and spec-
ulative pieces by such authors as MoMAs Newhall, the art journalist Elizabeth
McCausland, and M. F. Agha of the Cond Nast magazines. Some mass-market
magazines also abetted it, as did Life, with pieces not only on contemporary pho-
tographers but also on their most inuential predecessors such as Brady, Nadar,
and the daguerreotypists, or Coronet, which over two years published twenty-two
well-illustrated proles of leading workers, the ensemble providing a conspectus
of contemporary photographic practices. Ralph Steiner articulated the pedagogi-
cal intentions behind these activities. As photography editor of PM, a new national
newspaper, he aspired to educate the reading and picture looking public . . . about
photography, photographs, and photographers. And we hope to do it without bor-
ing them, or even letting them know theyre being educated.8
American photographys art world, in short, no longer resembled the one over
which Stieglitz had presided. He had been its major impresario and enjoyed the
powerthrough editorship of Camera Work, exhibition activities, and the com-
manding authority his artistic reputation providedto dene what constituted
serious photography and who were its important practitioners. During the thirties,
however, such authority became dispersed. Each element in the network through
which art happens expanded greatly and became more complex, pervasive, and
vigorous. A sizeable number of photographers began to create estimable bodies of
work for which novel, highly visible venues for exhibition and distribution emerged
that were complemented by energetic efforts at public education. Audiences became
larger, more heterogeneous, and popular. It was as if a dam had burst, but instead
of the inundation submerging the idea of artistic photography, something Stieglitz
had seemed to fear, what resulted was refreshment and revitalization as the medium
enjoyed its most lively and fertile period ever.
Simultaneously Popular and Elite
Americans picture hunger in the thirties became virtually insatiable in the judg-
ment of James McCamy, a contemporary social scientist. A long history had stoked
this appetite, beginning as early as the invention of engraving and lithography in
early modernity and accelerating in the mid-nineteenth century as photography
made pictures more widely and cheaply available. With the half-tones invention
toward the centurys end they proliferated further, and the availability of inexpen-
sive roll-lm cameras about the same time put the power of making images into the
hands of virtually everyone; photographs were ubiquitous by the twentieth cen-
tury. If picture hunger was not a new circumstance, what distinguished it during
the thirties was how many gifted photographers became well known during that
decade and the key role their pictures played in satisfying the publics omnivorous
appetite. One contemporary journalists enthusiastic testimonial became a com-
monplace: Photography is perhaps the most alive and promising of all the arts
being practiced today.9
Several theories have been employed to explain the thirties avidity for such pho-
tographs and usually nd their sources in the economic crisis. One proposes that
crisp, well-made images delivered something permanent and rich when so much
otherwise seemed to be lost. A related explanation emphasizes that photographs
capacity to evoke sensuous pleasure became especially compelling when people felt
deprived of material goods. Another argues that the depressions exigencies encour-
aged Americans to heightened curiosity about themselves and their culture, which
photographs could satisfy with exceptional vividness. Yet one more theory explains
picture hunger in viewers innocent assumption of an unmediated relationship with
what the images depicted; pictures seemed reliable when words no longer did. All
these theories are suggestive and likely true but can never be more than specula-
tions because they depend on the mostly undocumented feelings of viewers. What
is more certain is that the extraordinary expansion of photographys art worldand
the structural changes that expansion brought about in how, where, and with what
frequency photographs were displayedmeant that larger, more varied audiences
had unprecedented access to pictures by leading photographers.10
Lawrence W. Levine traces a similar dynamic in the expressive culture of the
nineteenth century and the artistic institutions sustaining it. Museums and pro-
ductions of Shakespeare and opera, he observes, were simultaneously popular and
elite and attracted heterogeneous audiences that had differing orientations toward
art. That is, [they were] attended by large numbers of people who derived great
pleasure from [them] and experienced [them] in the context of their everyday nor-
mal culture, and by smaller socially and economically elite groups who derived both
7
pleasure and social conrmation from [them]. The keynote of this shared public
culture was accessibility. Performance spaces had not yet been rigidly subdivided
8 between popular entertainment venues for the unwashed and decorous, quasi-sacred
precincts for the elite. Theatrical and operatic audiences were highly participatory,
often raucously so. They shouted comments, hissed villains, applauded favorites, and
even egged performers deemed inadequate. Behind their passionate involvement
lay familiarity with the arts they patronized. Tocqueville noticed that even the rud-
est pioneer hut often contained a volume of Shakespeare, and operatic music, said
another observer, was everywhere popular: you may hear their airs in the drawing
rooms and concert halls, as well as whistled by street boys and ground out on hand
organs. But performers and audiences did not yet regard texts as inviolate, and the
former freely altered them to suit the latters taste, promiscuously mixing burlesque,
acrobatics, and contemporary allusions with Hamlets soliloquies or Verdis arias.
Museums, too, were guided by a democratic ethos that made them strive to appeal
to the broadest range of visitors who might see original art as well as copies of it
alongside natural history exhibits and curiosities. They were part of the general
culture, Levine says, and were experienced in the midst of a broad range of other
cultural genres by a catholic audience that cut through class and social lines.11
Expressive art could at once edify and entertain. Cultural enrichment and sensu-
ous pleasure proceeded hand in hand.
By the turn of the century though, once-popular expressive arts had been seques-
tered in spaces that implicitly excluded all but the most rened. Drama, opera,
and symphonic music were removed from the sphere of everyday life and relocated
in temples for the initiated, theoretically open to everyone but only on the terms
proffered by those who controlled [them], namely adopting a mien of reverent,
informed, disciplined seriousness. Museums that had begun as educational and
self-consciously popular institutions abandoned those aims and dedicated them-
selves to connoisseurship and the acquisition, conservation, and exhibition of origi-
nal works of art proclaimed as ineffable expressions of timeless genius, capable of
being appreciated by only a discriminating few. These developments paralleled a
broader movement to crystalize professional elites that would wield centralized
cultural authority. Sacralization of the expressive arts authorized a bifurcation
between high and low forms of culture. Levine, as his epilogue commending
a late-twentieth-century impulse toward their reintegration makes clear, believes
that separation had a pernicious effect on the arts and on the idea of expressive art
as an integral element in national life.12
Levine adverts only briey to photography because it was, as a putatively mechani-
cal art, excluded in the nineteenth century from the pantheon and therefore not
liable to sacralization. When Stieglitz strove to enshrine it in the oughts, however,
he, like contemporary museums, laid emphasis on the individual unique creator
and the single image and purposefully limited popular access to it. But Levines
exposition of the atmosphere in which nineteenth-century expressive art reached
audiences, and their response to it, anticipates artful photographys circumstances
and audiences in the thirties. Stieglitzs authority had been great enough between
about and to align photography with the sacralizing transformations
Levine traces in the high arts. As it weakened, however, a window opened for
less elitist views.13
Like the nineteenth-century expressive arts, photography in the thirties attracted
popular, heterogeneous audiences to venues unlike the spaces where art was usually
displayed. The hundreds of thousands who visited Adamss A Pageant of Photogra-
phy at the San Francisco Worlds Fair and the First International Photographic
Exposition in at New Yorks massive Grand Central Palace experienced pho-
tographic art in atmospheres far more boisterous than hushed galleries or museums,
as did a comparable number who attended the annual Leica and U.S. Camera exhibi-
tions at Rockefeller Center and across the nation. After MoMAs rst comprehensive
exhibition of photography in closed at the museum, eight department stores
in Baltimore, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and other cities rented a scaled-down version
of it. Other shows appeared in such commercial establishments as well.
Such exhibition sites made artful photography uncommonly accessible to a
broad public, as did its reproduction in popular magazines. Moreover, assignment
photographs by the staff of some magazines were featured in exhibitions mounted
both in art institutions and more unconventional spaces, erasing the distinction
between personal and commissioned work. Camera magazines combined practi-
cal advice to amateurs with generous selections of work by leading photographers,
and U.S. Camera annuals dispensed with advice to concentrate on articles about
photographic excellence and mingled examples of it with commercial and occa-
sionally amateur efforts.
The ubiquity of reproduction and promiscuity of display practices clashed with
principles ercely upheld by proponents of a ne-arts approachthat an original
print alone adequately represented its makers genius and that Greshams Law
required that artistic photographs appear only in consecrated settings sanitized of
inferior work. Such beliefs resembled those behind turn-of-the-century sacralizing.
The text was sacred, tampering with it was heretical, and art ought to be segregated
to avoid contamination by everyday vulgarity. Leading photographers did not give
up allegiance to the ne print, but they sanctioned publishers who did and impre-
sarios who routinely commingled artful and commonplace pictures in venues of
broad popular appeal.
Amateurs constituted an unknowable but sizable proportion of photographys
audience. More than percent of American families owned a camera and made
some six hundred million pictures yearly, spending $ million doing so. Snap-
9
shots marking family and social occasions accounted for much of this, but many
who wielded cameras had more artistic goals. There were a hundred camera clubs
10 in New York City alone, enrolling some six thousand members. On average, these
devoted amateurs shot a roll of lm each week. Given that mm cameras had only
recently come on the market and were expensive, it was especially striking that by
the mid-thirties a hundred thousand were in use. Celebrities such as Paul Whiteman,
Eddie Cantor, and Charles Lindbergh numbered among the minicams devotees,
but so did many enthusiastic amateurs. The explosive growth of avocational pho-
tography fueled the creation of camera periodicals and gave rise as well to some of
the decades most popular exhibitions.14
Amateurs signied their sense of being full-edged members of photographys
art world by engaging in public and semipublic acts of esthetic judgment. Not long
after its inception, U.S. Camera Magazine asked readers to enumerate their favor-
ite genres, and nearly two thousand, percent of its readership, did so. It was an
astounding response inasmuch as their only reward was the opportunity to sound
off. The readers especially wanted to see landscapes, portraits, industrial studies,
and still lifes. Smaller numbers urged attention to fashion work and documentary,
and only a few expressed interest in abstractions. The magazine also made read-
ers letters a conspicuous editorial feature. Correspondents frequently quarreled
with distinguished contributors or debated the quality of leading photographers
images. Such an unabashed readiness to express evaluative opinion was also appar-
ent at exhibitions. A reporter covering the U.S. Camera show remarked that
he had overheard many animated discussions about the virtues and deciencies of
exhibits, anticipating the formal vote attendees were asked to cast for their favorite
pictures.15
The cultural circumstances under which this audience experienced photography
differed sharply from those of its established siblings among the ne arts. Muse-
ums do not ask visitors to vote on exhibits, and the line they draw between profes-
sional and amateur work is unmistakable. No museum would send its paintings to
a department store. Nor do art journals provide much opportunity for ordinary
readers to impeach the opinions of experts, and it is impossible to imagine one
running articles on Rembrandt or Matisse alongside advice to Sunday painters. It
seems inconceivable, even in a later age of blockbuster shows sponsored by museums
with an invigorated sense of public relations, that it would be necessary to designate
special trains from a half-dozen cities as far away as Chicago to bring visitors to a
show, as was the case for the First International Photographic Exposition.
Intimations of change in the circumstances that had encouraged photography
to thrive began to appear in the late thirties and came to a symbolic culmination at
the end of when MoMA established its Department of Photography, the rst
at any major museum. Ansel Adams played a leading role in the endeavor at about
the same time he was organizing A Pageant of Photography. The two events have
Janus-like signicance. The Pageant of Photography, with hundreds of thousands
of visitors and eclectic exhibits, climaxed the efforts of the preceding ten years to
make artful photography a democratic enterprise that would attract vast popular
audiences. MoMAs department foreshadowed photographys future as a sacralized
art form that would centralize tastemaking and the gatekeeping authority, narrow
the range of acceptable practices and venues for display, and cultivate a smaller,
more homogeneous and culturally elite audience.
Adams grasped that the Pageant and the MoMA department worked under dif-
ferent assumptions and what such assumptions meant for photographys reach. He
explained to David McAlpina well-to-do MoMA trustee who provided nancial
backing for the department and who, as chair of the committee overseeing it, invited
Adamss participationthat the museum ought to make a sharp discrimination
between functional and expressive work. He meant by this that the denition of
what constituted artistic photography ought to be rened at MoMA to avoid what
he believed to be the greatest menace to photographic development[,] . . . the con-
fusion of the Expressive, the Documentary, and the Socio-Economic functions.
In the Pageant Adams had featured an eclectic variety of photographic practices,
including alongside expressive works the documentary investigations of Harlem
by the Photo League, the socio-economic fashion work of Louise Dahl-Wolfe,
and photojournalism by Life staffers. A museum, Adams believed, ought to enforce
more exacting standards than such a self-consciously popular exhibition.16
The new department elicited enthusiastic endorsements from across the nation.
The New York Journal-Americans headline epitomized this response. Photography
Now an Art, it announced. The departments establishment was regarded then,
as now, as a pivotal moment in photographys development, a key node in its slow
but determined progress. Such a view is not wrong, of course; MoMA and other
artistic institutions have encouraged photographers, ably conserved their work, and
provided important exhibition opportunities. Its Whiggish assumptions, however,
neglect the cultural circumstances that made artful photography in the thirties such
an uncommonly robust enterprise.
With Stieglitzs hegemony diminished and institutional jurisdiction not yet estab-
lished, authority in photographys art world had become widely diffused. This mili-
tated against limiting denitions of what practices constituted artistic photography,
brought forth novel venues for displaying it, and encouraged newcomers to step
forward. In these uid circumstances audiences felt empowered to be active par-
ticipants in a democratically welcoming enterprise. Photographys cultural prestige
for being uniquely truthful and revealing reached its zenith during the thirties, and
photographs were ubiquitous. Not all, or even most, were more than commonplace,
but to an unprecedented degree pictures by leading workers entered the public arena.
11
The presence of such a vast audience, and the invention of new means to satisfy its
picture hunger, could not help but affect photographic artists as their work became,
12 in Levines terms, a shared public culture among Americans.
The Complicated, Inter-related Aspects of

Our Modern Environment
The appetite for pictures encouraged photographers to turn their cameras on nearly
all conceivable subjects, and any enumeration is bound to be partial. Nevertheless,
some trends are evident. Most obviously, the nations economic calamity demanded
attention, and some of the decades strongest and most enduring photographs
depict its victims. The FSA staff made many of these, but so, too, did others such
as Margaret Bourke-White, members of the Photo League, and the freelancers Luke
Swank and Horace Bristol. Such attention to human erosion, as Dorothea Lange
denominated the effects of the Depression on individuals, shaded into scrutiny of
environmental despoliation in the Dust Bowl especially and also elsewherethe
cut-over forests of the West and Upper Midwest, eastern landscapes scarred by coal
mining, and eroded, exhausted land in the South. Possibly, though, the extent of
photographys preoccupation with the decades social and ecological disasters has
been retrospectively exaggerated. Although these investigations became important
threads in its photographic fabric, other strands were also prominent.
The thirties were an age of celebrities as well as social distress. The postwar expan-
sion of mass leisure activitiesespecially movies, radio, and spectator sportscre-
ated a class of people known for [their] well-knownness in the historian Daniel
Boorstins phrase. Economic calamity dampened not at all a fascination fed by
syndicated gossip columnists, proles in popular periodicals, and a magazine genre
devoted entirely to the movies. Photographs were essential to creating and main-
taining public fame because their faces were these celebrities trademarks. Flatter-
ing portraits of movie stars by such workers as Ernest Bachrach, Clarence Sinclair
Bull, and George Hurrell, all employed by Hollywood studios, ooded the nations
periodicals and were made available to anyone who requested them. Ubiquitous as
they were though, they remained infra dig in photographys art world and did not
appear in exhibitions or even much in camera publications. Perhaps they were too
blatantly conceived with instrumental ends in mind, although that did not exclude
other brands of photography. More likely, however, they suffered by comparison
with Edward Steichens celebrity portraiture, widely seen rst in Vanity Fair and
then in other display venues that emphasized his genius. Not everyone agreed with
his frequent appellation as the worlds greatest photographer, but his pictures of
entertainment personalities, sports stars, and other celebrities ranked among the
decades most admired.17
Steichens celebrity portraits conveyed an air of expensive elegance consonant
with Vanity Fairs editorial aim of promoting consumerism, and that was even more
apparent in his fashion work for Vogue, entirely dedicated to selling merchandise.
In this branch of photography he was also the preeminent worker, although not so
exclusively as with celebrity portraiture. Several others who photographed for Vogue
and Harpers Bazaar also enjoyed artistic reputations strong enough to be repre-
sented in exhibitions, including George Hoyningen-Huen, Horst P. Horst, Louise
Dahl-Wolfe, Cecil Beaton, Martin Munkcsi, and Toni Frissell as well as Man Ray.
Their thousands of pictures of haute coutureand, increasingly, mass-produced
sportswearnot only failed to acknowledge the depression but also aunted an
alternative universe of sumptuous luxury and glamorous chic. In the art world, as
more generally in the public sphere, these pictures coexisted alongside those of
deprivation and want. Some four hundred thousand readers of the two leading
fashion magazines saw them every month.18
Many fashion photographs revolved around travel. Mannequins posed in front
of sleek airliners or streamlined locomotives to underscore the fashionable moder-
nity of their garments and extol the glamour of tourism. As smaller, more exible
cameras allowed fashion specialists to work outside the studio, posh resorts like
Palm Beach and Sun Valley began to be used as settings. Many other publications,
too, favored travel pictures, so much so that U.S. Camera Magazine dedicated an
entire issue to the genre. According to one of its writers, photographys truest
genius lay in allowing the less traveled populace an opportunity to see places they
dreamed of visiting. Most travel pictures were commonplace, and few considered
them among the mediums nest achievements, but Edward Westons landscapes
of the West were an exception. Awarded the rst Guggenheim Fellowship to a
photographer, he explicitly formulated his project to center on travel. The book
that was its most important outcome revealed what an observant tourist could
discover along western highways. The publisher of Berenice Abbotts New York
photographs hoped her book would serve as a souvenir for visitors drawn to the
city by the Worlds Fair. The FSA photographers traveled incessantly and abun-
dantly depicted sites in all forty-eight states. Although they did not aspire to make
travel photographs, some of their work served that purpose. The pictures became
the most numerous source for illustrating the Works Progress Administrations
American Guide Series, and Travel magazine would conspicuously feature them
in articles on Montana and Texas.19
If such strong pictures of touristic opportunities seem anomalous in a decade
remembered mostly for economic catastrophe, so did two other categoriesphoto-
13
graphs of engineering marvels and American industrial might. These, too, featured
conspicuously in exhibitions, camera periodicals, and popular magazines. A massive
14 enlargement of Steichens monumental view of the just-completed George Wash-
ington Bridge held pride of place in MoMAs show of photographic murals
and at the New York Pavilion at the Chicago Worlds Fair, was published in
Vanity Fair, returned to MoMA for its Photography, exhibition, and
then was featured in U.S. Camera . Peter Stackpoles pictures of construct-
ing San Franciscos bridges also appeared in Vanity Fair and U.S. Camera as well
as in A Pageant of Photography. Charles Krutch, the TVAs chief photographer,
provided studies of its mammoth engineering projects for U.S. Camera and also
exhibited them at MoMA in and again in . Several numbers of U.S. Cam-
era reproduced Ben Glahas government-sponsored photographs of the Bonneville,
Boulder, and Grand Coulee Dams, and in another camera magazine the Group
f. founder Willard Van Dyke hailed him as the rst photographer ever hired to
do a big recording job [who] also turns out photographs of rare beauty from every
standpoint. The most prominent photographer of both engineering and indus-
trial sites was Bourke-White, whose dramatic pictures of American technological
prowess reached hundreds of thousands of viewers in Fortune and Life and were
mainstays of exhibitions and camera periodicals.20
A number of the subjects that thirties photographers addressed evoked American
exceptionalism. What historical circumstances had shaped modern American cul-
ture, and what continued to be distinctively characteristic of it? Abbotts exploration
of New York made only occasional reference to the depression. What interested
her was formulating a history of the cityand, implicitly, the nationto reveal
the economic, social, and cultural forces that had coalesced in just over a century
to transform the United States from a marginal, undeveloped nation to one among
the worlds leading powers. Less methodically but with distilled poignance, Walker
Evanss photographs similarly disclosed how past and present mingled. Studies
of nineteenth-century architecture composed his rst one-person exhibition at
MoMA in . When he joined the FSA two years later he continued to focus on
subjects such as graveyards, historical monuments, and timeworn structures that
exemplied William Faulkners observation that not only is the past never dead, it
is not even past. Westons Guggenheim project also addressed history, but as a foil
to accentuate the indelible spiritual qualities immanent in natural forms, thus car-
rying on what Robert Hughes has identied as one of American arts most enduring
functions, depicting the landscape as a repository of transcendental perception and
thus afrming the cultural myth of a matchless American nature as an assertion
of national identity.21
As both Abbotts and Westons projects indicate, the depiction of regional or
local particularities was also important. Group f., in which Weston played a key
role, likewise represented that tendency. Although nominally it evangelized for an
intensive mode of straight photography it also asserted the special qualities of a
western setting that made such superior photographs possible. The Photo League
narrowed its compass even further, concentrating on specic New York neighbor-
hoods in features that delineated their distinctive characteristics in built environ-
ment, institutions, and daily activities. Much FSA work also emphasized regional
and local typicalities rather than generalized representations of social distress, mak-
ing FSA pictures a rich lode for numerous compilations later in the century center-
ing on a particular state.22
Such intensive attention to specic localities also encouraged photographers to
be ambitious about generating ethnographies in which a related group of pictures
revealed cultural patterns that were muted or even invisible in any single photograph.
That principle guided Abbotts New York project, although her emphasis on how
the built environment revealed such patterns distinguished it from ethnographys
focus on human activities. At the FSA, Roy Strykers acquaintance with Robert
Lynd, coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, led him to
draw up shooting scripts based on Lynds suggested anthropological categories, a
redaction that gestured toward a similar ambition to delineate American culture
holistically. The photographers produced much work in this vein, including Rus-
sell Lees study of Pie Town in New Mexico, John Vachons of Omaha, Marion
Post Wolcotts of Miami, and Ben Shahns of central Ohio towns. One of Bourke-
Whites most important Life assignments took her to Middletown itself, Muncie,
Indiana, to illustrate the books delineation of the community. The most self-con-
scious such ethnography, though, and the most ambitious, was of Harlem and cre-
ated over two years by a collaborative group within the Photo League. It now exists
only in a fragmentary state, but even its remnants indicate its ambition to portray
the community comprehensively.
While the Photo League made the only systematic effort to depict Harlem, African
American photographers thereJames Van Der Zee has become the best knownas
elsewhere served their communities as portraitists, recorders of social occasions, and
photojournalists. They created a rich photographic record that found local viewers
but has only recently begun to enjoy wider renown and which has added consid-
erably to the historical recreation of African American culture in the interbellum
years. Racism excluded black photographers from participating in opportunities
that the expansion of photographys art world otherwise afforded; their work never
appeared in the exhibitions, books, and periodicals that gave their white coevals
such national prominence. In that sense photography lagged behind literature and
painting, where such artists as Richard Wright and Jacob Lawrence enjoyed national
stature by .23
Although FSA photographers documented the circumstances of black Ameri-
15
cans regularly enough to make their representation in its le equal to their pro-
portion in the nations population, other leading workers rarely paid attention to
16 minority groups. Just two photographs in Abbotts Changing New York portrayed
the citys more than quarter-million black residents, and on the few occasions that
Steichen photographed minority Americans his depictions tended to be clumsy or
trite. Abbotts pictures of New Yorks ethnic communities did address American
pluralism, though, and FSA photographers also began to foreground ethnicity more
after , when the threat of war encouraged increased emphasis on the national
motto e pluribus unum to rally Americans around a common identity. With these
important exceptions, though, cultural diversity did not feature largely in photog-
raphers attention to American cultural patterns.
The FSAs pictures of minority and ethnic groups gured prominently in its most
ambitious exhibition entitled In the Image of America and shown at Rockefeller
Center and the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. A panel of eighteen portraits in
the exhibit illustrated the proposition that All of Us . . . Are Americans. The
shows other sections likewise organized exhibits conceptually under rubrics
emphasizing ethnographic, regional, or institutional commonalties. By employing
this presentational strategy, In the Image of America epitomized a tendency to dis-
play photographs less as discrete entities than as a related group implying an argu-
ment. The development attested to enlarged condence in photographys capacity
to undertake integrated, ideationally complex investigations of natural and social
environments. Book publication of thematically unied photographs by Abbott,
Bourke-White, members of the FSA staff, and Weston also exemplied this trend,
and it was evident in exhibitions as well by these workers and others such as mem-
bers of the Photo League.
The thematic impulse entailed another, of joining photographs with texts, each
element treated as equal and an enhancement of the other, their sum exceeding
its addends. The co-equal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative pho-
tographic and textual portions of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were unusual
only in how sedulously the books structure and format insisted on distinguishing
between the two modes of representation by isolating Evanss images as distantly
as possible from Agees text, preceding even the title page, and reproducing them
without titles or captions to forestall any implication that they were merely illus-
trative. No other photography-text collaboration went to such lengths to advertise
its constituent parts discreteness, but all were predicated on the assumption that a
text did not threaten the photographs autonomy and thus implied photographers
increased condence in their medium.24
If the thirties witnessed a fundamental transformation in its photographic cul-
turewith a reinvigorated creative energy that inspired distinctive new bodies of
work, an entrepreneurial bustle that made them public, and the cultivation of a new,
much expanded audiencein another sense American photography remained conser-
vative. Formal experimentation played little role in it, and practitioners overwhelm-
ingly employed the straight esthetic inherited from leading gures of the teens and
twenties (the Great Ss as Julien Levy would denominate them), Stieglitz, Strand,
Sheeler, and Steichen. Straight photography uses pinpoint focus that crisply denes
the objects portrayed, a lucid delineation of tonality, and lighting that emphasizes
the images overall brilliance and clarity. It tends to eschew unexpected composi-
tional strategies and employ conventional frontality. The experimental modes that
had begun to nd favor with European photographers held little appeal for Ameri-
cans. Some of Group f.s work approached abstraction although through impec-
cably straight means, as did Stieglitzs Equivalents. A few workers such as Barbara
Morgan and George Platt Lynes created montages that beckoned toward Surreal-
ism, but there was little interest in cameraless images, solarization, expressionistic
chiaroscuro, multiple exposures, or the employment of unexpected shooting angles,
all represented in British and European avant-garde photography.25
A conventional explanation for such esthetic conservatism adduces American
retardation in the ne arts, timidly following rather than leading, the consequence
of their insecure place in the national life, the diffuseness of cultural activity that
militates against the coalescence of cross-fertilizing avant-gardes, and artists geo-
graphical isolation from continental centers where such experimentation thrives.
These factors may have contributed to the continuing dominance of a straight
esthetic, but another explanation seems at least as likely. American photography
had a revolutionary ambition in the thirtiesto enlarge its ambit and increase its
visibility, to create an art world consonant with its revitalized creative energy. Pur-
suing that aim did not preclude experimental work but neither did it encourage it.
The legibility and technical nesse of straight photographs would be more likely
than experimental ones to nd sympathetic viewers among the larger public that
photographers and impresarios hoped to cultivate. The revolution they proclaimed
was cultural rather than esthetic, and straight photography served it admirably. In
any case, American photography enjoyed such a distinguished international repu-
tation that there was little impetus to experiment. American daguerreotypists had
been without equal in artistic merit, the emigr former curator of the Austrian
State Museum told a reporter in , and contemporary Americans were again
surpassing their European counterparts.26
Endorsing straight photographys sovereignty, Lewis Mumford articulated the
sentiments of most participants in photographys art world. Various kinds of mon-
tage photography . . . are not in reality photography at all, he wrote in Technics and
Civilization, but a derivative of painting. In its faithfulness to representing legibly
the palpable world, contemporary photography served as the hopeful antithesis
to an emasculated and segregated esthetic sensibility and negated the escapism
17
of the cult of pure form. With its omnivorous eye and capacity for enhancing
a rounded sense of reality, he argued, photographyand perhaps photography
18 aloneis capable of coping with and adequately presenting the complicated, inter-
related aspects of our modern environment. Inasmuch as Stieglitz was the sole
contemporary Mumford specically named when he proffered this testimonial in
to photographys artistic and cultural centrality, he misapprehended the bur-
geoning vitality bringing a plethora of other talents to the fore. He was more acute,
however, about its popular appeal. Of all our arts, he said, photography is per-
haps the most widely used and the most fully enjoyed, and by a heterogeneous
audience of professionals and amateurs as well as by the common man. Photog-
raphys extraordinary vigor in the thirties depended on the ambition of its leading
practitioners to address a full range of the complicated, inter-related aspects of
contemporary life and on development of new venues for bringing their pictures to
the public as well as for educating viewers about them. As Mumford realized, how-
ever, it also thrived because its audience had grown to a magnitude unprecedented
not only for photography but also in any of the ne arts.27
2
Disestablishing
Stieglitz
The Atget Tradition
Before a revitalized art world could coalesce, Alfred Stieglitzs longstand-
ing authority needed to be diminished. Leading that effort were two young
photographers, Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans, and two recent Harvard
undergraduates, Julien Levy and Lincoln Kirstein. Although they knew one
another, theirs was not a group effort, and none except Evans at rst saw
himself or herself as confronting Stieglitzs authority. Their initial aim was
more innocent, to enlarge artistic photographys purview. In order to achieve
that, they put forward another model of photographys development than the
one Stieglitz represented and proposed as masters photographers he had not
acknowledged. In doing so they implied that his conception of photography
had become pass. Their alternative tradition centered on the photo document
and the geniuses of that form, Eugne Atget and Mathew Brady.
Atget was the more immediately important because Abbott owned his lifes
work. In Paris she had purchased it from his estate, saving it from being scattered or
lost. Levy, who staked her to part of its cost, shared ownership. Atgets European
20 reputation was already in the ascendancy. In the Stuttgart Film und Foto exhibi-
tion (), he was the only nonliving exhibitor. The next year saw the publication
of a book of his pictures, rst in Paris and then in German and American editions.
When Abbott returned to the United States in she brought the Atget archive
with her and energetically set about promoting his reputation as one of photogra-
phys masters.
The details of Atgets career remain cloudy more than seventy-ve years after
his death. Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century he made thousands of
photographs of Paris and the Ile de France, selling some to painters as aide-mmoire.
Man Ray and other surrealists valued them for their silent, dreamlike aura, odd
juxtapositions, and evocative reections. They were, for avant-garde artists, the
equivalent of the objects trouvs they favored, and Atget himself was a kind of
idiot savant. Abbott was not insensitive to the images surreal overtones but valued
more their lucidity, clarity, and documentary integrity, qualities she stressed in an
appreciation in Creative Arts in , Atgets rst American notice. His pictures,
she wrote, represented an inspiring alternative to the slick portraiture, bland jour-
nalism, and enervated art photography that presently dominated the medium. By
hailing Atgets documentary style as the more vibrant practice and designating him
the modern forerunner she implicitly challenged Stieglitzs standing as photogra-
phys standard-bearer. Subsequently, her formulations became more pointed. No
one man has played a greater part than Atget in creating the model for contempo-
rary photography she wrote in , although by then she also included D. O. Hill,
Nadar (the nom de camra of Felix Tournachon), and Brady among the sources of
an authentic photographic tradition. By eliding except for Atget the long inter-
val between photographys earliest years and the present Abbott thus proposed its
irrelevance to thirties photographers.1
Besides contributing to Abbotts purchase of Atgets archive Levy arranged for
publication of the Paris books American edition by his employer, the Weyhe Gallery
in New York, and for the gallery to sponsor Atgets rst American exhibition late
in . Levy had studied art at Harvard University but left three months before
graduation to go to Paris with Marcel Duchamp, with whom he had vague plans
to make a lm. His father, a realtor whom the son thought prosaic, wanted him to
take up a business career, but Levy fell into friendships with artists and writers in
Paris and became convinced that his future lay in art. After returning to the United
States he tried working in his fathers business but despised doing so and took the
Weyhe Gallery job, leaving it two years later in to open his own gallery for
photography. He would feature Atget in one of its rst shows.
The nucleus of an art world had begun to coalesce around Abbotts article and
the Weyhe Gallerys activities, and it was independent of Stieglitz, promulgating a
competing esthetic and historical tradition to the one he represented. Evanss efforts
were less strenuous but no less important because he already had begun to be noticed
as a promising young photographer with a distinctive style. Like Abbott and Levy,
he lived for a time during the mid-twenties in Paris, where he hoped to become a
writer. Eventually he realized he had only modest literary talent and, back in New
York, began to experiment with making photographs. Later he would say that the
best early training for a photographer was to have informal access to an established
master and that his had decidedly not been Stieglitz, who was, Evans added, nev-
ertheless important and strong enough to arouse a galvanic response. Speaking
for himself and his contemporaries, and emphasizing Stieglitzs cultural presence,
Evans remembered the photographer creating a formative reaction. Stieglitzs veri-
tably screaming aestheticism, his personal artiness, he said, veered many younger
camera artists to the straight documentary style; to the documentary approach for
itself alone, not for journalism. Evans had not known of Atgets pictures in Paris,
but through his friendship with Abbott he could study them in her New York stu-
dio and then at the Weyhe show. For Evans, Abbott, and others, Atget became the
master from whom to learn, and they set about making him as honored in America
as he was becoming abroad.2
Evanss contribution to that undertaking came in his review of the Weyhe book
(and several others) in a number of the little magazine Hound and Horn. In
it he formulated a history that made Atget the fount of a revitalized photographic
culture. The medium had entered its third period, he said, the earlier two having
led to dead ends. Victorian dishonesty infected the rst, and in the second, around
the turn of the century, the art photographer became no more than an imitative
if maladroit painter. But the camera was especially well suited to postwar sensibili-
ties, capable of manipulating time and space and reecting swift chance, wonder,
and experiment. Thus it was not surprising that photography has come to a valid
oweringthe third period of its history. Atget had anticipated the cultural neces-
sity contemporary workers needed to address a photographic editing of society.
Evans not only laid out an agenda for himself but also for his cohort.3
So successfully did these young people introduce Atget to an American audience
that just a year after the Weyhe show the New York Times art critic Edwin Alden
Jewell could off-handedly (and erroneously) refer to several exhibitions of Atgets
work in recent years. In doing so they put forward a model of contemporary pho-
tography that excluded Stieglitzs inuence. In Evanss case it was also a sketch of
its history, in which Stieglitz played no part except implicitly an invidious one as
leader of the Photo-Secessions art photographers. Their efforts soon hit home,
impelling Stieglitz to mount a counter-offensive.4
Early in Jewell warmly reviewed Stieglitzs retrospective exhibition at An
Disestablishing Stieglitz
21
American Place, his own gallery, and on the following Sunday an unsigned reprise
included one sentence not in the original review: The work is uniformly beautiful,
22 deeply considered and doubly remarkable because Mr. Stieglitz sticks to straight
photography, thus carrying on the great tradition of the Frenchman Atget and
others. Stieglitz immediately red off a protest to assert his preeminence. He had
not heard of Atget until , he said, forty-three years after beginning to photo-
graph, and because he had been acclaimed in England as early as his achieve-
ment long preceded Atgets. My being of the Atget tradition is rather misleading,
Stieglitz sighed. But so much else is misleading that I fear one more error more or
less makes no difference. In the same number of the Times a member of Stieglitzs
circle, Herbert J. Seligmann, weighed in more feverishly, apotheosizing Stieglitz
as if his life and work had come under heavy attack. The linkage of Stieglitz and
Atget was imbecile, he wrote. Not only did Stieglitz come rst but he also had
formulated and solved problems Atget never imagined. His photographs, moreover,
occupied the category not of picture-making but of spiritual fact, presumably
not true of Atgets. The counterattacks erceness bemused Jewell. He had meant,
he said, only to invoke the great tradition of straight photography, not to suggest
discipleship or inuence.5
Stieglitzs egotism is not news, and neither was his pride in his artistic achieve-
ment and early efforts for photography misplaced. Nevertheless, the monumentality
of his presence, together with his reluctance to identify promising new workers and
uninterest in campaigning for artistic photography, made him an impediment to its
vitality as a cultural enterprise. Not much could happen without his imprimatur, and
because he had determindedly withheld that for so many years, little did. Moreover,
his reign as American photographys arbiter had been uncommonly long. A challenge
to it was perhaps inevitable as a new generation came of age that had not experienced
his heroic efforts to raise photographys stature so many years before. The effort
to inscribe Atget as the progenitor of a more vital tradition was a rst step toward
mounting such a challenge. As yet, however, the countervailing art world that these
young people were half-consciously beginning to form was an incipient and mostly
New York one, its members relatively obscure and its reach limited.
Exemplars in American Photography

Lincoln Kirstein belonged to a wealthy Boston family, his father a partner in Filenes
department store. While still a Harvard undergraduate he spearheaded two initia-
tives to bring artful photography to a new public, as the editor of Hound and Horn,
a quarterly magazine of the arts, and a founding member of the Harvard Society for
Contemporary Art. The magazine published articles about photography and port-
folios by young workers, and the society proposed to exhibit to the public works
of living contemporary art whose qualities are still frankly debatative. To further
that aim it sponsored the nations most ambitious photography exhibition in the
twenty years since the Photo-Secession show in Buffalo in .6
Hound and Horn wobbled for two years after its beginning in , hamstrung by
its subtitle, A Harvard Miscellany. Limiting contributors to the university meant,
for instance, featuring in the same issue R. P. Blackmurs magisterial essay on T. S.
Eliot alongside illustrated accounts of Harvard football games. With its nal
number, however, it shed the subtitle and announced its pages open to all contribu-
tors. In that issue artistic photographs rst appeared, two strong images by Ralph
Steiner: a study of metal shower hoses and a picture of a wicker chair casting its
shadow that would become his signature shot. The magazine became a welcome
new venue for photographers when so few others existed, and they also beneted
from a halo effect radiated by distinguished literary contributions. In Steiners case
it was Katherine Anne Porters Flowering Judas and poems by Stanley Kunitz
and William Carlos Williams.
Subsequent numbers included portfolios of Abbotts views of New Yorktheir
rst publicationand Charles Sheelers River Rouge studies. Evanss work appeared
most often, in four numbers, illustrating his versatility as an architectural, portrait,
and street photographer. Kirstein declined an opportunity to reproduce Atgets
work because he wanted to feature only Americans; nevertheless, an allegiance to an
Atget-like documentary vision would have been apparent in the pictures by Abbott,
Evans, and Steiner.7
The three young photographers would centrally participate in the new and con-
solidating art world. Charles Flato made a single but inuential contribution with
an essay on Brady that signaled the rediscovery of a native master to put alongside
Atget. Kirstein would subsequently borrow from Flatos piece for a national radio
address and his essay accompanying Evanss American Photographs exhibition,
extending its reach considerably. Flatos arguments for Bradys signicance closely
resembled those Abbott and Evans had made for Atget. Brady had a documentary
imagination, Flato said, his genius no less objective than his lens. His photo-
graphs neither generalized nor allegorized their subjects: the world of people, as
opposed to types, and of material things in their complete reality was his element.
Contemporary photographers needed to study his work because his pictures were
exemplars in American photography that revealed the enormous possibilities of
simplicity and directness. Flatos piece honored Brady not for his antiquarian inter-
est but for relevance to the problems of contemporary practice. Just as he eschewed
things of a pure photographic and artistic naturea tradition for which Stieglitz
bore the standardso present-day workers, Flato urged, ought to emulate Bradys
delity to a principle of documentary integrity.8
23
Not long after Flatos piece Hound and Horn ceased publication as Kirsteins
interests turned elsewhere. The little magazine never attracted a popular audience,
24 but the one it did reach mattered for artful photography. The high quality of its
literary contributors assured a sophisticated readership of just the sort that would
provide a core of enthusiasts for the new directions photography was taking; being
interleaved with distinguished writers connoted photographers equality as citizens
in the republic of the arts. And, not least, with the textual features by Evans and
Flato Hound and Horn revealed a usable past previously obscure.
At about the same time the magazine began to solicit photographs Kirstein also
helped found the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. As a member of its execu-
tive committee, he was the most energetic and inuential force in the loose afliation
of about two hundred Harvard professors and students and local art enthusiasts.
In his nal two undergraduate years, from to , the society sponsored fre-
quent exhibitions on the top oor of the Harvard Coop, drawing an average of ve
hundred visitors a week. Its inaugural show surveyed contemporary American art
with canvases by Edward Hopper, Georgia OKeeffe, and Thomas Hart Benton;
drawings by Charles Burcheld and Charles Demuth; sculpture by Gaston Lachaize
and Aleksandr Archipenko; and a solitary Stieglitz photograph. Subsequently, it
featured the contemporary arts of Mexico, Germany, and England; a Maurice Pren-
dergast show and another of American folk painting; an exposition of Buckminster
Fullers Dymaxian House; and, late in , the modern photography exhibition.
The exhibitions goal, said the catalog, was to prove that the mechanism of the
photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work . . . equal in importance
to original efforts in painting and sculpture. Analogous with the context provided by
Hound and Horns literary contributors, the proposition was self-evident in the distin-
guished roster of exhibitors photography joined, but it needed reiteration because as
yet it had so tenuous a purchase in public opinion. This was the battle Stieglitz had
fought so many years before, although with uneven results judging from the rm-
ness with which Boston reviewers rejected the catalogs premise. One pronounced it
an absurdity, an insurmountable barrier existing between handmade objects and
those dependent upon a mechanism for accomplishment. Another scoffed at the
notion that photography required imagination equal to the other visual arts. Not a
single exhibit, this doubter said, approximates the greater freedom and aesthetic
quality of painted or sculpted work at its best. In light of the shows depth and
quality, such categorical refusals of photographys artistic potential underscored
its low standing at the outset of the thirties. It also highlighted the need for more
aggressive leadership to advertise photographys achievements and educate viewers
to appreciate it, exactly what Kirstein and his associates had in mind.9
Virtually all the leading Americans exhibited in Cambridge, most with ten images
(Paul Strand had eight), including their strongest recent work. Only Stieglitz
showed a pre-war print (Hand of Man from ) along with his OKeeffe
portraits and studies of natural forms made near his Lake George summer home.
Sheelers views of Chartres Cathedral and the Ford River Rouge plant illustrated
photographys genius for isolating cultural symbols and distilling their contrasting
essences, while Strand exhibited meticulous close-ups of organic and mechanical
forms and one Gasp Peninsula view that anticipated his turn toward interpret-
ing the particularities of folkish communities. Doris Ulmann specialized in simi-
lar subject matter, Appalachian life, and her atmospheric studies were unique in
being neither crisp nor sharply focused. Edward Steichen was represented by Carl
Sandburgs fulsome illustrated biography published the previous year. Edward
Weston, who had just determined to print only on glossy paper, showed portraits
and close-ups of vegetables.
Among the younger generation, Abbott exhibited portraits, too, including of Atget
and two of James Joyce. The previous year Steiner had been the rst photographer
invited to the Yaddo artists colony, and pictures from his residency included his
American Baroque wicker chair and studies of Ford automobiles that Evans later
said inuenced him. Excluding an informal show in a Cape Cod barn a few months
earlier, Evans made his exhibition debut, with urban and Coney Island scenes. Anton
Bruehl, although identied in the catalog as extensively engaged in advertising
work, showed noncommercial pictures of ballet dancers, industrial artifacts, and a
nude. Fortune magazine loaned industrial shots by Margaret Bourke-White, Arthur
Gerlach, and William Rittase; portraits of well-known men by Pirie MacDonald;
and Sherril Schells studies of skyscrapers.
The Fortune pictures rebuked the principle that artistic and commissioned pho-
tographs occupied entirely separate realms and that the latter ought never to be
permitted to transgress the semisacred boundaries around the former. The catalog
forthrightly justied the democratic mingling of artistic and commercial work and
also refused to draw an invidious distinction between original prints and reproduc-
tions. Such magazines as Vanity Fair, Vogue, Fortune, and the advertisements of
the New Yorker and Harpers Bazaar . . . afford an everchanging gallery of camera
masterpieces, it averred.10
Magazine reproductions were actually on view in Cambridge to fortify the Euro-
pean contingent and justify the exhibitions title: International Photography. Appear-
ing in this format were Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, and George
Hoyningen-Huen. Beaton was British, and Huen a White Russian who lived in
Paris. Both photographed fashion for Vogue, as had the American expatriate Man
Ray. Only Moholy-Nagy from the Bauhaus and Man Ray (but perhaps not in these
magazine reproductionswhat composed them is now unknown) represented the
formal and technical experimentation of European photography. The weak inter-
national contingent perhaps reected the difculty of obtaining prints, but in fact
25
it forecast the subsequent near-invisibility of European experimentalism in most
American exhibitions and publications.11
26 Another non-American exhibitor was the Italian emigr Tina Modotti, with pic-
tures from Mexico, a still life, studies of hands, and village scenes. She had been
Westons student there in the mid-twenties and had just been exiled for alleged
involvement in an assassination plot against the Mexican president; the catalog
described her as very active in Communist agitation. Although her photographs
have been rediscovered, they virtually disappeared from view following this show-
ing and a single New York gallery exhibition a year later.
The most prominent non-American was Atget, as in Stuttgart the only nonliv-
ing exhibitor. This fact may have suggested that he was a master uniquely worthy
of emulation, but if so the catalog muted that implication. Photographys nest
achievements, it said, had been created during its earliest years, when daguerreo-
typists and Nadar made portraits of extraordinary depth and richness, and in the
present time by hundreds of excellent photographers with similar aims of sim-
plication and visual truth. The interim, when photography tried to copy painting,
had been a waste space. This barren period had ended after the war, when the
necessity for simple clarity in documentary form opened the eyes of the camera to
the approach for which it was originally intended. The catalogs endorsement of
documentary form along with Atgets unique inclusion intimated that the pres-
ent time did not entirely lack conict between those like Stieglitz, who primarily
saw photography as self-expression, and others like Atgets admirers, who were at
least as interested in its representational and archival possibilities. But the catalog
(almost certainly written by Kirstein) mufed these implications by proclaiming a
harmonic contemporary renaissance.
Nevertheless, the exhibits put forward a much more variegated view of pho-
tography than Stieglitz had permitted. Unlike the Buffalo Photo-Secession show,
it did not center on a distinctive school and was richly eclectic. It opened a space
for newcomers such as Abbott, Bourke-White, Evans, and Steiner to get their work
before an audience and in this sense eroded Stieglitzs standing as the mediums pre-
eminent arbiter and impresario. Its erasure of the distinction between personal and
commissioned workers widened artful photographys compass, and the line would
continue to blur. Most exhibitors would become highly visible in the thirties. Fif-
teen would show at MoMAs omnibus exhibition and only a half-dozen would
not. Nor is that surprising. The curator of the MoMA show, Beaumont Newhall,
was an art history student at Harvard in , and the Cambridge shows inclusive
eclecticism also established a pattern for the later one, even to inclusion of purely
instrumental images such as x-rays and astronomical and aerial photographs.12
For Kirstein, leadership of the Harvard Society had even more palpable conse-
quences. It brought him to the attention of Nelson Rockefeller, inuential at MoMA,
and gave him entre there, setting the stage for his orchestration of the museums
rst venture into photography in , an exhibition of photomurals, and of its
rst one-person shows as well, of Evans in and . His association with the
museum also led to a national radio address on photographys history that
diminished more pointedly Stieglitzs signicance than had been the case in the
Cambridge catalog. Along with his editorship of Hound and Horn, the Cambridge
exhibition made the youthful Kirstein a key participant in the art world that pho-
tography was beginning to create.
Reinventing Photographys History

By afliating with MoMA Kirstein implicitly distanced himself from Stieglitz
who was not circumspect in venting contempt for the new museumand from the
conception of photography he represented. That became apparent in Kirsteins
review of several New York exhibitions for Arts Weekly, a short-lived venture
that aspired to be a Time for the arts. After measured praise for two showsboth
of international photography, one at the Brooklyn Museum and the other at Levys
new galleryhe turned to Westons really impressive exhibition at the Delphic
Studios. Weston, he said, was perhaps more genuinely creative than any of the
other photographers then being seen in New York, a barbed judgment inasmuch as
after making it Kirstein took up Stieglitzs fty-year retrospective at An American
Place. If his pictures could be dissociated from his explanations, Kirstein said, they
were still attractive. It was faint praise after the Weston encomium and dismissive
of Stieglitzs authority to pronounce on art, whether his own or, by implication, that
of any other. Even before getting to Stieglitzs retrospective Kirstein had voiced his
conviction that the photograph is primarily a document and named Hill, Nadar,
and Atget as its inspirational geniuses, thus rmly aligning himself with Abbotts
and Evanss revision of photographys history.13
Following the MoMA photomurals exhibition and Evanss rst one-person
show there the next year Kirstein began to be absorbed in dance, and his involve-
ment with photography waned. Early in , though, several months before he
and George Balanchine formed their rst ballet company, he made a coast-to-coast
broadcast about American photography over the NBC network, part of an ongo-
ing series that winter of radio lectures on American arts. His MoMA connections
led to the assignmentthe museum had been designated to prepare broadcasts on
postCivil War artand also reected the prominence he had attained as spokes-
person for a reinvigorated photography. After the lethargy of the twenties, that it
was included at all testied to its revived state. As Alan Trachtenberg has observed,
Kirsteins address was the rst serious effort to treat American photography as a
27
distinct subject. Even in its brevity (about , words) it was also the rst methodi-
cal formulation of the mediums history in the United States.14
28 Perhaps remembering the patronizing reviews of the Cambridge exhibition, he
began by asking whether photography was an art or merely the scientic process it
had begun as. It achieved artistic stature, he observed, when American photogra-
phers learned to exploit the cameras unparalleled capacity for objective clarity,
and the rst to do so was Brady, whose austere and intense pictures had the
esthetic overtone of naked, almost airless, factual truth. After Brady, however,
decadence had set in as his successors turned out attering portraits or, worse, imi-
tations of painting. Photo-Secessionists at the turn of the century reacted against
these misapplications but did not entirely break with them because they, too, favored
sentimental subjects and pseudo-artistic atmospheric effects.15
This account of Photo-Secession made it less decisive than admirers of Stieg-
litz maintained; even more striking is how Kirstein positioned him within it. He
gave equal credit to Steichen for its successes, and while Camera Work elevate[d]
photography in America to its proper estate Gertrude Ksebier as one of the
founders of Camera Work actually received more air time than Stieglitz. He was
a brilliant photographer who was also the dean of American photographers,
Kirstein acknowledged, but essentially as an aside. The effect was to pay perfunc-
tory homage but at the same time diminish Stieglitzs standing as the commanding
gure in twentieth-century American photography.
As contemporary art photographers exploiting all the possibilities of lens and
tripod with conscious choice Kirstein named Abbott, Evans, Sheeler, Steichen,
Steiner, and Weston. Despite a laudatory allusion earlier in the talk to Strands pic-
tures in the nal number of Camera Work, he was a notable exclusion from Kirst-
eins enumeration. So, of course, was Stieglitz, perhaps on the grounds that his age
meant that his best work was behind him (although neither Steichen, fty-six, nor
Sheeler, fty-two, were youngsters). The upshot was to intimate that Stieglitzs and
Strands emphasis on personal expressiveness was pass, superceded by the rein-
statement of Bradys ideal of objective immediacy. None of the photographers
Kirstein named was a protg of Stieglitz (Steichen had gone his own way years
earlier), and most were at odds with what he represented.
Much was limited or faulty in Kirsteins talk. Like Flato he made Brady too
exclusively the maker of photographs that appeared over his name, and he failed
to acknowledge that contemporaries like A. S. Southworth and J. J. Hawes worked
in a spirit like Bradys. Kirstein uncritically accepted the mythone initiated by
Photo-Secession and perpetuated by Abbott and Evansthat photography had
been artistically fallow in the latter nineteenth century. His treatment of the Photo-
Secession underestimated Stieglitzs role and too summarily conated his work with
that of other members. And although Kirstein included Weston among the leading
contemporaries he ignored Group f. and its important exhibition just two years
earlier in San Francisco. Some of these limitations reected the uncertain state of
knowledge about American photography, a lack that would be addressed shortly
when its history would nally be formulated. Others, however, resulted from the
polemical purposes Kirstein intended his talk to serve, those that Abbott, Levy, and
Evans had rst advanced.
In this sense the broadcast culminated a collaborative effort to rejuvenate Ameri-
can photography by proposing an alternative to the practice Stieglitz represented
and perhaps as much by challenging the perception that his authority as its arbiter
was unimpeachable. The discovery rst of Atget, then of Brady, as contemporary
photographys true progenitors refashioned the mediums history to make Photo-
Secession no longer its central event and not even an entirely salutary one. Although
obeisance would continue to be paid to Stieglitzs eminence, that Kirstein in
could appear before a national radio audience as photographys spokespersonand
condently designate as its most important contemporary adepts those who lacked
Stieglitzs imprimatur and opposed the inuence he had exercisedindicated just
how successful the effort to disestablish his authority had been.
29
3
Group f.64
and the Problem
of California Photography
You Were Really Insulated on the West Coast
California in the early thirties seemed more remote than later in the century or
even by the end of the decade after scheduled airline service bridged the con-
tinent and radio networks routinely broadcast live programming between the
coasts. One emblem of the distance, physical and psychological, between East
and West was the four days and three nights necessary to span it by train. For
many eastern observers that made far-off California almost another country. In
an essay written toward the end of the depression Edmund Wilson emphasized
the states strange spell of unreality, which he believed made human expe-
rience there hollow. Californias climate encouraged this, Wilson thought,
its empty sun alternating with incessant rains, the days revolving with
unblurred uniformity. Add to this the remoteness from the East, where all the
wires of our western civilization are buzzing and crossing, Wilson added, and the
reasons for Californias cultural torpor were unmistakable.1 Although Californians,
famously boastful about their state, would hardly have agreed with that characteriza-
tion, many ruefully acknowledged their remoteness from important developments
in the nations cultural life.
California ranked second among states in size and sixth in population, but aside
from universities its cultural institutions remained feeble compared with those in
the East. Its artists expressed energy and talent in writing, painting, and music, but
they lacked authoritative organizational structures that could promote Californias
culture as competitive with the Easts. That was especially true for the visual arts.
None of the states museums even faintly rivaled those in eastern and midwestern
cities. San Franciscos de Young Memorial and Palace of the Legion of Honor were
barely a decade old, and Los Angeless museum was only slightly more so and as
much given over to natural history as art. The de Young, which would sponsor a
key series of photography exhibitions in and , had a particularly shabby
reputation. It was a laughing stock and the most disgraceful museum in the
world according to a leading arts magazine.2
Nor was California an essential, or apparently even a coveted, stop for photog-
raphy exhibitions originating in the East. Western photographers thus had little
opportunity to see work by their eastern colleagues. Until he met Alfred Stieglitz
in , Ansel Adams had never seen his photographs, even in reproduction. A
few in MoMAs ambitious program of touring shows made it to a single California
venuephotomurals in and the history of photography to San Francisco,
and Walker Evanss American Photographs in Los Angeles in but others
bypassed the state. One young photographer remembered a pervasive atmosphere of
cultural provincialism: In those days you were really insulated on the West Coast.
You didnt have contact with many people.3
Two then-unknown West Coast photographers had chance encounters in
with Paul Strand in New Mexico, and their excited responses to those brushes hinted
at their feelings of cultural insularity. On vacation in Taos, Dorothea Lange was
fascinated by an intense, purposeful man who went by her place each morning and
evening. Learning that he was Strand, she was awestruck. Never on home ground
had she encountered a photographer who radiated such passionate intensity. I
didnt until then really know about photographers who went off for themselves,
she later confessed. Adamss encounter was more intimate and his meeting more
consequential, an epiphany in fact. Although some of his prints had appeared in
portfolios, Adams at age twenty-eight remained uncertain whether his future lay
in photography or music. He then met Strand, who showed him some negatives
and exuded the passionate intensity that Lange had observed from greater distance.
Group f.64 and California Photography
31
The easterners effect was electric. Adams wrote to his wife that Strands example
instantaneously inspired him to make photography his lifes work. In the last two
32 weeks, he reported, something has clicked inside me and I have an entirely new
perspective on many things concerning my work. I cant write it outI just will
have to do it. At the time, Adams had known Weston for two years without the
older but local photographer inducing such a galvanic reaction.4
Meeting Strand emboldened Adams to begin thinking about an organization of
California photographers that would nourish the kind of zeal Strand represented.
Adams, ambitious and energetic as well as talented, recognized that to overcome
their marginalization western photographers needed to invent means to make their
work more widely visible. Others were independently thinking along the same lines.
Willard Van Dyke and Preston Holder, friends from their student days at Berkeley,
had also begun to bruit about the idea of an organization that would, as Van Dyke
put it, force the Eastern establishment to acknowledge our existence.5
Van Dykes mentor was Weston, whose photographs had been, for him, a revela-
tion of the mediums potential. Uniquely among western photographers, Weston
already enjoyed a national reputation that was conrmed by his rst New York show
in . But he, too, was incensed by the arrogance of artistic authority emanating
from the East. Early in he inveighed against an unnamed friend of Stieglitz
who had pronounced on the theatricality of his photographs and dismissed them
for lacking Stieglitzs dignity. This judgment, Weston thought, derived from the
easterners characteristic misapprehension of Western values originating in the
fact that everything in the West is on a grander scale, more intense, vital, dramatic
than in the East. Forms are here which never occur in the East,in fruits, owers,
vegetables, in mountains, rocks, trees, and easterners devalued them because the
nature they know is soft and almost too sweet. His condemnation of eastern
enervation spilled over into resentment of easterners cultural presumptions, which
made art a competition and them no more than bawling hucksters, promulgating
self-interested and arbitrary hierarchies of value.6
Weston was still fuming a week later, only by then what irritated him was less
the easterners perceptual inadequacies than their cultural hegemony, specically
Stieglitzs arrogation of authority to pronounce on what was and was not good
photography. But why not a more catholic viewpoint, admitting the value,the
necessity, of many ways of seeing? Weston asked, and he could not resist quoting,
with evident relish, Kirsteins review of his and Stieglitzs recent exhibitions that
denominated his work the more genuinely creative.7
Four months after this outburst Weston, Adams, and Van Dyke would be the
principal organizers of Group f.. In conating a declaration of western unique-
ness with resentment of eastern cultural authority Westons tirade hints at the
most pressing reasons for its founding. Members hoped forthrightly to assert the
distinctiveness of California modes of seeing, not only in clarity of technique but
also in terms of a characteristic western subject matter. They also sought to erect a
platform from which their authority to assert esthetic judgment could successfully
vie with eastern ones. United in a collaborative enterprise, they hoped to counter
their feelings of provincial isolation and afrm the national importance of western
photographic practice.
These were not the reasons they gave in . Their proclaimed purposes for
founding Group f. centered more narrowly on formal procedureon making
crisp, purely photographic images that were not beholden to conventions in paint-
ing or the graphic artsand on anathematizing the pictorialists, whose impression-
ist, anecdotal, and often allegorical photographs constituted the standard fare of
salons in California as elsewhere. Nor was this proclamation disingenuous. The
pictorialists were well ensconced in California, sponsoring frequent exhibitions and
dominating its photographic press. Group f.s emphasis on formal purism not
only distinguished it from the pictorialists but also aligned its members with the
straight esthetic prevailing elsewhere. In fact, though, they revealed their insularity
by implying purisms novelty, betraying their unawareness of its pervasiveness. Years
later Adams sheepishly confessed their ignorance: What we lacked in historical
knowledge, he said, we made up for by our enthusiasm. Group f.s mission to
dislodge the pictorialists notwithstanding, the emphatic capitals of its manifestos
summary phrase indicated its most ambitious aim: to become an acknowledged
Forum of Modern Photography.8
Evangelizing Pure Photography

Group f. came into being one evening in August during a gathering at Van
Dykes Oakland studio, an occasion to honor Weston. Spurred by bootleg wine and
spirited conversation, Van Dyke proposed an organization to provide mutual sup-
port, encourage new talent, and propagandize for purist photography. Five attend-
ees seconded himAdams, Weston, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, and
Sonia Noskowiakand they later invited Henry Swift to join. No one kept minutes
of this initial meeting nor of any others, so it is uncertain how often they met (not
frequently) or even who came up with the distinctive name alluding to the cameras
smallest aperture opening. Van Dyke, Adams, and even Preston Holder, not a mem-
ber, are given credit in different accounts. At this rst meeting they resolved to rent
a space in San Francisco and present exhibitions.9
Subsequently they amended this determination as a more attractive opportunity
presented itself. The director of the San Francisco museums, Lloyd Rollins, was
warmly sympathetic to photography from a commitment to it but perhaps also
33
because of his institutions poor endowment in the traditional arts. The de Young
had already sponsored nine photography exhibitions in and , including
34 one-person shows by four of Group f.s founding membersVan Dyke, Weston,
Adams, and Cunninghamas well as by Brett Weston, Edward Westons son, who
would also exhibit with it. No other museum featured photography so often. Roll-
ins thus already had warm relations with the groups most important members, and
they sympathized with his fear that its proposed gallery would compete with the
museum. Besides, one of the groups objectives was, according to Adams, to give
photography museum dignity. Rollinss proposal to set aside several rooms for a
Group f. exhibition during s nal weeks furthered that goal admirably. But
by championing photography Rollins put himself at odds with the museums trust-
ees, who resented the space given to it. Not long after the show he was sacked.10
That a majority of members so recently had exhibited at the de Young raises
several points at variance with the legends clustering around Group f.. First, its
show would not be a new departure but rather an intensication of an agenda already
underway, to promote pure photographys ne art status and herald the esthetic rep-
resented by its members. It would proclaim not so much a revolution in California
photography as condense an ongoing evolution. Second, the de Youngs sponsor-
ship of so many exhibitions of modernist photography suggests that the pictorialists
dominance of the states photographic culture was an exaggeration, perhaps even
something of a straw man. And, third, the one-person exhibitions indicated that
several Group f. members had already established regional visibility (and Weston
and to a lesser extent Cunningham and Adams wider recognition). The group shows
impetus then was not so much an effort to bring newcomers to local attention as to
advertise a distinctive California brand of photographic practice. One-person exhi-
bitions could not so effectively serve this purpose as a collective one.
Eighty images composed the groups exhibition. There were ten by Adams; nine by
the other six members; and four each by Holder, Consuela Kanaga, Alma Lavenson,
and Brett Weston, nonmembers but invited to show with it. Prints were on sale for
$, except for Edward Westons at $. There was no catalog, only a title checklist,
but a statement of principles greeted visitors; whether Adams or Van Dyke drafted
it is uncertain and matters little because it articulated precepts agreed to by all. Nor
is it possible to be certain what pictures composed the exhibition or how they were
displayed, although educated conjecture provides a basis for identifying most of
them and the checklist implies they were grouped by individual photographer.
The word manifesto threw down the gauntlet to the pictorialists, who were
denounced as aping a mode of pseudo-Impressionist painting itself long an anach-
ronism and who thus betrayed the cameras genius for rendering clearness and
denition. By contrast, the groups pure photography scrupulously acknowl-
edged the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium. Manifestos
require a denable enemy against which to hone their ideological edge, and the fusty
pictorialists provided a vulnerable one. The sortie also proved effective because the
pictorialists counterattacked and entered into a lively controversy that provided
just the publicity that Group f. sought. The manifestos erceness likely also
stemmed from the converts fervor to repudiate past error because Weston, Cun-
ningham, Adams, and Edwards all had earlier pictorialist phases.
While excommunicating the pictorialists from photographys fellowship the mani-
festo also insisted that Group f. intended no depreciation of work dissimilar to
their own and would include other modernist workers in subsequent shows. Group
f.s chief object, it announced, was to sponsor frequent shows of the best
contemporary photography of the West. Although the de Young exhibition trav-
eled, subsequent ones never materialized, perhaps because after Rollinss dismissal
the group no longer had a museum advocate and because the attention of its three
most important members shifted elsewhere. Adams in early met Stieglitz and
afterward bent much of his energy to cultivating this connection; Van Dyke became
increasingly absorbed in social documentary; and Weston, whose commitment never
matched theirs, gently but rmly withdrew because he resisted becoming the leader
of a cult.
Not addressed in the manifesto was the question of what a western photographer
ought to depict, an unsurprising omission in light of its condemnation of the pic-
torialists, equally from distaste for their pictures anecdotal qualities as their pref-
erence for soft focus and manipulated prints. A photographs literalism, moreover,
encourages most viewers to concentrate on its subject rather than the photographers
artistic decisions, so the manifesto, like virtually all such assertions of photographys
artistry, stressed the creators afatus and organizing capacities and remained silent
about what was shown. But that omission has led later observers to conclude that
Group f. was entirely absorbed by formal questions and not loosely bound as
well by their commitment to a distinctive subject matter. Although the manifestos
charged phrase the best contemporary photography of the West may have two
meaningsthat is, pictures by workers who live in the West or ones that focus on
western motifsthose meanings are not mutually exclusive, and both were ratied
by the exhibition.
A New Art in a New Land

The exhibits uniformly exemplied Group f.s principles. Therese Thau Heyman
has summarized their ensemble effect: Seen together, the images established a var-
ied but singular point of view. For the most part, objects were seen closely, framed
by the sky or similarly neutral backgrounds. Nothing was moving, and there was
35
great attention to the nely detailed surface textures of the subjects. There was little
in the photographs to suggest either the modern industrial world or the troubles of
36 the times.11 Opening just days after the election and as the nation sank deeper
into economic and social despair, the exhibition seemed to proclaim an enduring
realm lifted above the uncertainties outside the galleries, one in which the formal
disciplines of art mattered most.
Political engagement did not gure in Group f.s agenda, although later differ-
ences about photographys social responsibilities would contribute to its disband-
ment. Its ideological ambitions were circumscribed by photographys art world, to
establish purisms preeminence in California, which called forth the manifestos
formalist emphasis, and to launch a western brand of photography that would
command respectful attention elsewhere. This latter aim, unarticulated but deeply
felt, required demonstrating that California provided the group with a distinctive,
fertile, and perhaps even superior terrain for making photographic art.
If this goal remained undeclared at the end of , within a year it received
rhapsodic expression at Adamss rst New York show at the Delphic Studios. Out
here, he enthused on a wall label, on the edge of the Pacic, [art] is burning with
a fresh and revealing amea bright light eating into the old darkness. Our paint-
ers, sculptors, poets, and photographers reect the qualities of a joyous relation
with a young and vigorous civilization and rely more on the dynamic actualities of
the present than the somber relics of past cultures. Here the land is so beautiful
it cannot be denied. Photography nds an admirable environment in the West. It
is a new art in a new land.12 Addressing an eastern audience encouraged Adams
to stress Californias unique richness as a photographic site and deemphasize the
manifestos formalist emphasis.
Many of the de Young exhibits exemplied Adamss characterization of the
West as an uncommonly congenial setting for photographic art. Although perhaps
half could have been made elsewhere, the others palpably evoked the special ter-
rain, ora, and culture of California. None, to be sure, employed the conventional
signiers of the states renowned splendor and colorful history, with the possible
exception of an Adams landscape of the (pre-bridge) Golden Gate. They depicted
no orange groves, redwoods, or Sierra peaks, no missions, cable cars, or busy water-
fronts. Such views would have seemed impossibly hackneyed and in any case would
have comported poorly with Group f.s formal priorities.
Instead, exhibitors narrowed their gaze to the distinctive or unique natural phe-
nomena that epitomized Californias fabled lushness and variety. Most photographed
indigenous plants, closely seen so that they lled the frame. Cunningham showed
three studies of succulents, two of water hyacinths and one of an agave (century
plant). Noskowiak and Lavenson depicted lilies, California being known for its
numerous rare species of the lily family according to the Works Progress Admin-
istrations California: A Guide to the Golden State. Exotic blossoms gured promi-
nently, with Noskowiaks of a palm, Van Dykes of a yucca, and Swifts of a cactus.
Swifts, Noskowiaks, and Brett Westons studies of the corrugated surfaces of
cacti evoked Californias deserts as Edward Westons and Noskowiaks still lifes of
kelp did the Pacic littoral. Edward Weston and Swift photographed cypresses on
Point Lobos. Even Adamss close-up pinecone had a California aspect, given the
eucalyptus leaves in which it nestled. The eucalyptus, said the WPA guide, was an
Australian transplant but had become so ubiquitous as to seem like a native.13
That Group f. photographed locally hardly qualies as news, but that they
were so assiduous in ferreting out subjects especially redolent of Californias dis-
tinctiveness is more revealing, echoing Adamss conviction that the West provided
an admirable environment for photographic art. As did Weston, they believed
its characteristic forms were natural manifestations of Western vitality insuf-
ciently acknowledged elsewhere. Weston recalled being anxious before his rst New
York show that because easterners did not know our Western kelp they would
misperceive his pictures. And not only kelp might be inscrutable to eastern eyes.
I recall now laying aside one cypress, he went on, saying to myself, I will not
include this, no one would believe it true!14 No such forebodings aficted Group
f.s exhibitors because the local audience would be westerners. Even more, their
images of exotic ora would be surrounded by others similarly proclaiming West-
ern vitality.
Adams showed most of the half-dozen landscapes, none in his later monumental-
izing style except of the Golden Gate, with its low horizon and spiraling cumulus
clouds. Three featured Sierra locales. One was of a small stand of cottonwood trunks
before a rock face; another was of the cascading Nevada Falls; and a third, especially
rich in tonal and textural contrast, showed a Yosemite lake partially covered with
a skim of ice, a crevassed granite cliff rising at its edge. Van Dykes Death Valley
depicted a contrasting California locale, as did his Eroded Sand, massive dunes
probably shot at Oceano. The small selection of landscapes reminded viewers of the
extraordinary variety to be found among Californias many prepossessing natural
sites, as shots made in, say, the nearby Sacramento Valley would not have.
Within the special context these representations of Californias distinctiveness
created, others that had more muted allusions also resonated geographically. Edward
Westons photograph of an eroded rocks pocked surface was denoted as from Point
Lobos, one of the few nonlandscape shots specifying a location. Even one of his
vegetable still lifes, a cross-section of a globe artichoke, faintly carried this implica-
tion, highlighting an exotic product of California agriculture. Of the ten portraits,
only two were of public persons, both of whom had strong California associa-
tions. Warner Oland, photographed by Cunningham, was an expatriate Swedish
actor who the previous year had rst played his signature Hollywood role, Charlie
37
Chan. Oland was not in role for the portrait, but Cunninghams treatment implied
it nonetheless, its chiaroscuro emphasizing his swarthiness, swept-back black hair,
38 and narrowed, pouchy eyes. Gottardo Piazzoni, a San Francisco landscape painter,
was a member of the well-known Bohemian Club and executed the murals in the
citys public library. Adams depicted him in his atelier, the exhibitions only envi-
ronmental portrait, recalling the states ne arts traditions.
Adams had characterized the West conventionally as a young and vigorous civi-
lization more present- than past-minded, but Californias modernity remained
mostly invisible in the show. The few pictures of industrial sitesby Adams, Van
Dyke, Holder, and Lavensontreated them as formal problems abstracted from
any cultural or social context. In fact, several photographs exemplied the obverse
of Adamss formulation, invoking not Californias youth but its antiquity or at
least its historical tradition. Bare, weathered wood and bleached bones attracted
Group f.s attention because they presented exquisite textural surfaces but their
overtones of Californias pioneer past also would be palpable to viewers. Edwardss
Pioneer Wagon most explicitly connoted thisa low-angled, heroicizing shot of
a wooden-spoked wheel, drivers seat, and brake leverbut so did other images.
Both Van Dyke and Holder depicted gnarled, rough-hewn and primitive fenceposts
supporting barbed wire, plausible relics from an earlier pastoral stage in the states
development. Adamss Boards and Thistles, San Francisco is a superb example
of rhythmic composition and the cameras capacity to bring out textural variety,
but its weathered, broken, and unpainted barn planks also carried an unmistakable
aura of a prior era in the citys history. Even though Edwardss Desert Skull is
now lost, its title alone connoted Californias pioneer past. So did Van Dykes three
shots of whitened animal bone fragments against a darkened sky, simultaneously
abstractions and conventional symbols of the perils of settlement that once faced
emigrants from the East. Also abstractly treated was Eroded Plank from Barley
Sifter, Edward Westons close-up view of its incised grooves, the title of which
called attention to the implements primitive technology and marked it as a remnant
of a bygone era. If easterners patronized the West for its newness and rawnessfor
its unselective atmosphere in the condescending formulation of Clement Green-
bergsuch sentiments might be neutralized by these weathered objects redolent
of a rich and usable past.15
Adams believed that all artistic photographs express delicate propaganda of
some sort. Little was delicate in Group f.s manifesto. It proclaimed boldly the
formal principles its members hoped to inscribe in contemporary photographic
practice, and their photographs amply illustrated those purist precepts. Text and
images demarcated the chasm between Group f.s esthetic and that of the picto-
rialists, but the group also kept its more distant target rmly in view: to establish
the parity of western photography with that of the East. The manifesto supported
that goal by proclaiming the modernity of their formal priorities, while the exhibits
delicate propaganda proclaimed Californias unique advantages as a site for artistic
photography. Characterizing the groups reputation much later, Imogen Cunning-
ham emphasized its paradoxical success in becoming simultaneously American and
western. F/ has always been considered reective of American work in pho-
tography, she said. It is not only American, its Western American. It isnt even
American, its Western.16
The Public Response to Fine Photography

The de Young exhibition continued to reverberate on the West Coast for three
years, and by that point Group f., always ad hoc at best, had ceased functioning.
Its aftermath included a traveling version of the original exhibition and variations
on it, two short-lived galleries in the Bay Area, and a urry of polemical sorties
against the pictorialists.
Immediately after closing in San Francisco the exhibition moved to the Denny-
Watrous Gallery in Carmel, then to San Diegos Fine Arts Gallery in Balboa Park
the next summer, to the Seattle and Portland Art Museums in the autumn, and
made a nal stop at the Mills College Gallery in early . In Portland, Group
f. shared space with local photographers and at Mills College with ve eastern-
ers, including Bourke-White and Sheeler. The entire exhibition came to Carmel,
but it is no longer certain what portion was displayed elsewhere. In Portland four
membersWeston, Van Dyke, Adams, and Noskowiakas well as Brett Weston
each showed twenty prints, and Edward Weston explicitly asked the museum not to
advertise a Group f. connection. Likewise, at Mills College only a rump contin-
gent of about half the original exhibitors showed, with Dorothea Lange included in
addition to the easterners. As late as the end of Van Dyke tried to stir further
interest, but his Camera Craft invitation to organizations to host an exhibition of
sixty prints apparently found no takers.17
Journalistic attention to these exhibitions, including the original one, was sparse
and banal, conrming Adamss judgment that in the early thirties no vocabulary for
discussing photography had yet emerged. They didnt know how to write about
photography then, you know, he observed. Just didnt know what to say. The
longest review appeared in Camera Craft, sympathetic to the pictorialists, and was
predictably patronizing. Although conceding that the photographs had something
to say in a way, the reviewer also denominated them as merely expressions of
showmanship and not real pictures. Viewers would come to appreciate them only
if allowed to see nothing else and forced to undergo a latter-day Soviet training.
Unacknowledged except in this oblique way was Group f.s aim of proclaiming
39
an esthetic revolution in West Coast photography. Neither did the scattered news-
paper notices pay any attention to the manifesto. One San Francisco reviewer irrel-
40 evantly stressed the photographs charm, and another in San Diego condemned the
Fine Arts Gallery for even showing them. To be sure, the public will like them,
she wrote, but is it not the part of the Gallery to raise, which it does in most cases,
instead of meet, the taste of the public?18
This reviewers comment hints at why Group f.s exhibition generated so lit-
tle public notice however momentous it has later come to seem. The fault was not
the newspapers preoccupation with the depression, as Therese Thau Heyman
has conjectured, but because photography had yet only the slimmest purchase on
being considered an art form, hardly (if at all) worthy of even cursory notice. The
biweekly Art Digest, then a leading national magazine of the visual arts, regularly
featured a comprehensive Great Calendar of U.S. and Canadian Exhibitions.
Although it included the de Youngs exhibitions of horses in art and of numismat-
ics, both concurrent with Group f.s, the photography show was not mentioned.
While the groups exhibition was up at the de Young Art Digest editorialized on
Rollinss distinguished performance as museum director, and a few months later it
condemned the injustice of his dismissal, but neither piece mentioned among his
accomplishments that he had championed photography.19
With Rollins gone the group revived its original plan for a gallery. Two such
places on each side of the Bay opened nearly simultaneously in mid-, the Ansel
Adams Gallery near Union Square and Brockhurst in Oakland, presided over
by Van Dyke and his one-time ance Mary Jeanette Edwards, the daughter of John
Paul Edwards. In featuring photography both enterprises reected the hopefulness
about its future that was beginning to stir, even in the face of the kind of neglect Art
Digests omissions represented. Public enthusiasm did not yet match the photogra-
phers, however, and both galleries were short-lived. As in the East, the expansion
of photographys audience would rest not so much with this traditional mode of
attracting it as with tapping photographys explosive popularity and exploiting its
duplicability.
With his gallery Adams wanted to experiment with the public response to ne
photography, an increased receptivity he sensed all around him. He especially
hoped to redress Californias isolation by bring[ing] things to San Francisco that
should have come many years ago, as he wrote to Strand, whom he was unsuc-
cessfully importuning to exhibit. He would show only the most important and
signicant phases of contemporary photography in San Francisco, Adams told
Stieglitz, whom he wanted to feature in his inaugural exhibition in the hope that
many people here who are unable to travel to New York will be offered the great
experience of seeing your work. Stieglitz resisted this attery and was indifferent
to Adamss disquiet about Californias provinciality. He would not lend his work,
he said, because he could provide only duplicates, not the prints he kept at
home even if I never show them. Even more decisive was Stieglitzs corrosive
view of the audience Adams hoped to attract. When Adams persisted, Stieglitz
replied with a screed against the banality of American audiences and the perdy
of establishments that tried to cultivate them. The art world was entirely sordid,
he said, and the American people had no conception, much less understanding, of
integrity of endeavor. Exhibitions such as Adams proposed were merely entertain-
ments, and he would not be party to them. Because he worked to sustain a Living
standard, shows at An American Place were not debased as they were elsewhere.
Dont you realize I hate the very idea of whats called Exhibition[?] he thundered.
Adams responded with more attery and a bit of indirect reproof. Stieglitzs great
battles on behalf of art may have made him too brittle and defensive, he suggested,
and forgetful of viewers who might be obscure people in obscure places but still
capable of genuine response. If such people could be reached, Adams was condent
that they would rally to Stieglitzs standard. But Stieglitz imagined photographys
audience as an elite group of cognoscenti, an attitude that could not be reconciled
with efforts such as Adamss to broaden the base of photographys audience.20
Rebuffed by Stieglitz, Adams opened instead with a new Group f. show that
included all seven members as well as Kanaga. Subsequently, there were shows by
Weston, Anton Bruehl, and Adams himself, as well as painting and sculpture. At
rst, optimism prevailed. Adams reported seven hundred visitors in the gallerys
rst eight days, and the always ebullient Van Dyke was condent that the Group f.
show would have far-reaching results. But Adams misjudged the gallerys economic
viability, and sales remained rare. He soon came to feel he was wasting his time and
within six months took a partner and withdrew from active participation.21
The Oakland gallery lasted a bit longer, through the summer of , when Van
Dyke moved to New York. Its birth announcement in Camera Craft said it would
emphasize West Coast photographers because the region provided a particularly
fertile eld for photographic work and some of the nations nest photogra-
phers resided there. Its inaugural exhibition, a Weston retrospective, was followed
by Adams, Noskowiak, Cunningham, and Van Dyke one-person shows; the First
Salon of Pure Photography juried by Adams, Weston, and Van Dyke; and nally
a one-person Lange exhibition. The later fame of its exhibitors notwithstanding,
Brockhurst was a modest affair of limited signicance. However useful it may
have been as a gathering place and exhibition space, like Adamss gallery it was too
short-lived and little-noticed to exercise much inuence, certainly beyond the Bay
Area. With their emphasis on California workers, though, the galleries did sustain a
sense of solidarity around the idea of geography as destiny that had been the inspi-
ration for Group f..22
In a series of polemical exchanges with the pictorialists provoked by Group f.s
41
conspicuous irruption on the West Coast photographic scene, the groups purist
esthetic took precedence over the notion of Californias superiority as a photographic
42 site. Nor was this formalist emphasis surprising. Camera Craft, the magazine in
which they took place, was the ofcial organ of the Pacic International Photogra-
phers Association, a pictorialist organization. In such a journal a formal emphasis
was inevitable, and in any case its primarily West Coast readership did not need to
be convinced of the regions virtues.
Adams assumed the role of chief polemicist and, strictly considered, spoke for
himself and not the group. He called his essay An Exposition of My Photographic
Technique and did not mention Group f.. Nevertheless, because his opening
statement pointedly discriminated his views from those of the pictorialists in terms
similar to the groups manifesto no reader could fail to grasp his reiteration of its
principles: delity to purely photographic methods uncorrupted by borrowings
from other visual arts and respect for the cameras capacity to render microscopic
detail, its dominant characteristic. From these propositions Adams moved on to
recommend equipment and outline darkroom procedures and exhibition strategies
before turning to the mostly technical requirements of various genres.23
As a polemic, Adamss Exposition was restrained, drawing the line between
pictorialist and purist rmly but without notable combativeness. However informa-
tive, his sober discussions of lters, lighting, and focal lengths were unlikely to send
anyone to the barricades. As betting an emissary in an enemys camp, he adopted a
stance of informed competence overlaid by sweet reasonableness. As a challenge to
the pictorialists the overall effect was bland. Writing the piece had helped him clarify
his thinking, he concluded, and then he limply added, Perhaps every photographer
must seek his own understanding from within himself. Photography is a powerful
medium of art, andboth as art and a craftit commands profound respect.24
If Adams was anodyne perhaps being rst in the eld made him so. William
Mortensen, who weighed in on behalf of the pictorialists a few months later, was
not. He had been a set designer and then a still photographer for Cecil B. DeMille,
after which he opened a highly successful photography school in Laguna Beach,
where he taught the precepts of pictorialism to hundreds, eventually thousands, of
students. His Venus and Vulcan: An Essay on Creative Pictorialism was longer
than Adams essay and considerably more disputatious. Although he outlined picto-
rialist assumptions and procedures as Adams had purist ones, Mortensen returned
obsessively to the esthetic and moral deciencies of Group f.. Their work showed
deplorable taste, it was sterile and unfertile and also uniformly hard and brittle,
their ideal . . . of complete literal rendering a very primitive one, and they were
not purists but puritans who sternly excommunicated nonbelievers and disapproved
of the more pleasing and graceful things in life. Their photographs were merely
excellent nger exercises in technique played ostentatiously. Most of all they
were not art, nor were their makers artists because the nal concern of art is not
with facts, but with ideas and emotions. Slyly, Mortensen conceded that certain
unnamed German meta-realists had recently transcended mere technique to
reveal beauty otherwise invisible to the human eye. Their accomplishments were
sometimes credited to the F. school, but that attribution was erroneous because
meta-realists represent[ed] a different and more signicant departure.25
Mortensens biliousness provoked rejoinders from Adams and Van Dyke, both
now explicitly speaking for Group f.. While reiterating that the pictorialists were
derivative and neglected photographys unique properties, Adams struck a new note
that indicated the more informed perspective he had developed in the year or so
since the de Young exhibition. Group f. partakes of a contemporary tendency
. . . we reect rather than motivate, he said, thus making it less a local crusade than
part of a national movement. As for the German meta-realists, Adams said their
work shared supercial similarities with Group f.s and other straight photog-
raphers like Strand, but it was technically unimpressive and shallow, unworthy of
comparison with the nest photography in America East or West.26
Adamss retort hints at one of several reasons why the group shortly withered.
No longer did they feel the same isolation as in , nor were they as ignorant
of ongoing developments elsewhere. In Adams traveled east, where he met
Stieglitz and rst saw his work, visited Julien Levys gallery, and arranged for his
New York debut. The trip educated him about current developments and made him
recognize that photography had begun to experience a renaissance. This palpable
burgeoning of photographys art worldand the priority of straight photography
in itencouraged Group f. to see itself as central and not peripheral. In such
an enlarged setting the pictorialists were irrelevancies, a picayunish adversary, and
broader esthetic commitments could supplant local loyalties.
Other commitments also tended to splinter the groups unanimity, as Van Dykes
riposte to Mortensen indirectly indicated. He disputed Mortensens assertion
that Group f.s pictures were mere records lacking in artistic subjectivity. They
expressed, he said, the photographers perceptive experiences and thus embod-
ied their emotional responses. But if some of their early work had seemed mere
pattern making, in his view the period of technical tour de force is over and
photographs now demanded to be interpreted in the light of our time and our
conditions. Without quite saying so what Van Dyke had in mind was the photo-
document that Adams had briey, almost as an afterthought, touched upon in his
Camera Craft essay.27
Adams had alluded to social documentary as one of the most important phases
of photography, but privately he was more conicted. About the time of Van
Dykes rejoinder he told Stieglitz that half my friends here have gone frantic Red
and the other half have gone frantic NRA, which left the artist in a no-mans land.
43
For his part he refused to produce what he called propaganda. He was, if anything,
more aggrieved a few months later after a violent San Francisco longshoremans
44 strike that led to a general strike and the bitter gubernatorial campaign of , pit-
ting Upton Sinclairs End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement against a fusion
candidate supported by Republicans and regular Democrats. Rehearsing to Weston
the indictments made against him, Adams remarked that he was considered dead,
through, nished, a social liability, one who will be liquidated when the great day
comes. Just who made these charges he did not say, but he specically dissociated
himself from the direction Van Dyke had taken. His emphasis on social themes,
Adams thought, made him more a sociologist than a photographer.28
Adams was not utterly antipathetic to documentary, and he often praised Langes
work. In his thorough revision of his Camera Craft essay in , published as Mak-
ing a Photograph, the only photographers work he included as illustration besides his
own was Langes White Angel Bread Line, which he categorized as signicant
genre, the adverb socially apparently being too loaded for him. But that brand
of photography was not his mtier, and because it was not, and Van Dyke embraced
it, the consensual basis for Group f. was disrupted, especially inasmuch as they
had been its most energetic promoters.
Langes relationship to Group f. was ambiguous. Initially she was hurt by not
being included, a snub that became a source of resentment as well. Her then-hus-
band, Maynard Dixon, asked a friend to photograph his bare backside, which he
intended to send to the group as a comment on her exclusion. Because her work at
the time was fuzzy-wuzzy, Adams later said, they never considered asking her to
join. She did not share their passion for formal questions, nor did the documentary
photographs she had begun to make resemble theirs. But in Lange exhibited
with them at the Mills College Gallery and had a one-person show at Brock-
hurst. In that year as well, Van Dyke published the rst important appreciation of
her work, and Adams hailed her as a leading adept of the photo-document in his
Camera Craft essay.29
Edwards formalized this quasi-honorary membership in a Camera Craft
piece which announced that Lange, William Simpson, and Peter Stackpole had
joined. The article, however, turned out to be Group f.s epitaph because the
group soon ceased to function, even informally. Appended statements by Van Dyke
and Adams made the internal strains starkly apparent. Adams stressed the groups
transitional character and proposed as the next step a more thorough and inclusive
aesthetic expression. What he had in mind was not along the humanistic lines of
Langes work (or Stackpoles either, with his documentary studies of the construc-
tion of the Bay Bridge). For Adams, a basic aesthetic motivation was sufcient in
all forms of art, and honoring it would make any photograph socially signicant.
Van Dykes statement was a credo. I believe that art must be identied with con-
temporary life, he wrote. I believe that photography can be a powerful instrument
for the dissemination of ideas, social or personal. I believe the photo-document is
the most logical use of the medium. Adamss and Van Dykes views were not logi-
cally incompatible, but in their contrasting emphases they hardly provided a solid
basis for the groups continuation. The differing ambitions, agendas, and talents
of its members had already started a process of dissolution, if such a word applies
to an organization so ad hoc, and the differing priorities represented by Adams and
Van Dyke only accelerated the process.30
Adams felt that in its brief life Group f. became an institution, performing
important service in the re-establishment of the pure photographic medium as
a form of Art.31 Certainly, they made themselves a presence on the West Coast
art scene. If they did not convert the pictorialists or dislodge their hegemony over
Camera Craft they forcefully put forward an alternative that in the long run far
eclipsed their adversaries. Less programmatically, Group f. succeeded in dimin-
ishing the isolation they felt as western photographers by establishing collegiality
and through a concerted demonstration of the excellence of California as a site for
photography and the acumen of those who exploited it. They aspired to be more
than a local phenomenon, to make themselves a more visible presence in the revi-
talized art world that was coalescing in the thirties, and eventually they achieved
that goal as well.
The California Group

At rst, Group f. drove only a thin wedge into the Eastern establishment Van
Dyke hoped would acknowledge them. No eastern institution expressed interest in
an exhibition. Some members wanted to nd a New York venue, but Weston, the
groups most distinguished member, had veto power and discouraged that idea. After
the exhibitions Carmel showing he privately told Van Dyke that some of its exhibits
were quite unimportant and a New York show inadvisable. Van Dyke persisted
with the idea of a show outside New York, but Weston remained unenthusiastic. He
was, he said, fed up on exhibiting. Van Dykes efforts came to naught.32
Neither did the U.S. Camera annuals even so much as mention Group f. in
their surveys of contemporary photography. Pictures by Cunningham and Brett
Weston appeared in the rst four numbers, Edward Weston in three, and Van Dyke
two, but except for Van Dykes telegraphic notation in the annuals technical
appendixAperture F:they appeared without allusion to the group.
The rst substantive eastern notice came in Newhalls catalog for MoMAs
history of photography exhibition, a few sentences that characterized the group in
terms of its straight proclivities, which he said resembled those of Abbott and Evans.
45
Adams and Weston had six exhibits in the show, a sign of Newhalls high opinion
because among modernists only Strand had more. Brett Weston showed four prints,
46 and Cunningham three. When the next year Newhall transformed the catalog into
a book, reproductions of Adamss and Edward Westons work were among its two
dozen or so plates by modernists. Both individuals also featured, along with Brett
Weston but not Cunningham, in its biographical appendix, but with no mention of
Group f..
Van Dykes article in Scribners Magazine in provided the largest publicity.
It summarized the groups genesis, goals, and achievements as well as its success in
carrying on the great tradition of photography represented by Brady, Atget, and
Stieglitz. Because those individuals had not gured in Group f.s origins (except
perhaps Stieglitz as embodying the eastern establishment), Van Dykes revision-
ary enumeration indicated two subsequent developments. Artful photography had
begun to acquire a legitimating history that gave priority to straight photography
and made these forerunners its past masters. And this historys dissemination had
enabled California photographers to view themselves as participants in a distin-
guished esthetic movement, abating the keen sense of isolation they had felt at the
decades beginning. Appearing in a national magazine, Van Dykes essay served
the Californians ambition to make their work visible outside their region. More
generally, its publication reected how broadly diffused public interest in artful
photography had become.33
To serve this enlarged audience MoMAs traveling exhibitions brought photogra-
phy to viewers outside the usual metropolitan centers. The California Group was one
such show, twenty-ve pictures by the two Westons, Adams, Cunningham, Lange,
and Cedric Wright. Publicity material that Newhall composed in made them
all outstanding members of [Group f.] formed by Edward Westons follow-
ers in . This information was unreliable on several counts. Wright (a Berke-
ley amateur and Adamss long-time friend) had not been a member, nor had Brett
Weston; Langes membership was titular; and the group had ceased to function ve
years earlier. None except perhaps Brett Weston, moreover, would have dened
themselves as following Weston. So determined was Newhall to make exhibitors a
distinctive school that he tted them to a Procrustean bed. They all, he said, placed
their entire emphasis not upon subject but upon their own particular approach to
subject, which involved previsualization, large negatives, and contact prints. The
formulation was inapplicable to Lange and misleading about the others. By con-
stituting the exhibitors practice as entirely formalist, Newhall begged the ques-
tion implicit in the traveling shows title of how a distinctive western environment
shaped their work.34
Of the original Group f. exhibitors only Adams and Weston by the end of the
decade had rm national reputations. Both had intensied their scrutiny of the
California scene by then, Adams with landscapes of some of its most extraordi-
nary sites and Weston in his project for an epic series of photographs of the West.
Westons renown preceded the de Young show, and while Adamss did not, he was
such an astute manager of his career that he would have launched himself even
without Group f., thanks to his connections with Stieglitz and MoMA. Pictures
by Cunningham, Kanaga, and Brett Weston did receive national exposure, but spot-
tily. It would take forty years for Cunningham to be acknowledged as a major tal-
ent, and Brett Weston labored in his fathers shadow until later. Van Dyke gave up
still photography in the mid-thirties, as did Swift and Holder, although Van Dyke
went on to a distinguished career in lmmaking. Edwards and Noskowiak worked
in obscurity.35
Writing in to David McAlpin, Adams summarized Group f.s achieve-
ment in the formal terms that continue to dominate assessments of it. Collectively,
he said, we dened the meaning of technical clarity; our inuence spread all over
the country. We did not intend thisit just happened.36 Such a claim of inuence
is impossible to measure, but Adamss statement seems exaggerated. The groups
advocacy of purism was a reiterative force, not an originating one, in straight pho-
tographys hegemony, as Adams had acknowledged in his rejoinder to Mortensens
screed seven years earlier. More originally, the group legitimated the idea of a dis-
tinctive brand of western photography that had a geographical as well as a formal
basis, and it labored to encourage national recognition of its importance. That by
the end of the thirties the California Group could be employed as a comprehen-
sible denitional category indicated how successfully the westerners had managed
to ingratiate themselves into photographys art world.
47
4
An Eastern
Beachhead
My Stars Must Have Changed
Even as other venues were being developed to afford photography oppor-
tunities for reaching new audiences, galleries and museums continued to be
important to revitalizing its art world for three reasons. First, they provided
opportunities to recruit adherents among the professionals who ran them and
also from their arts-minded audiences. Second, they stimulated the discursive
activities of historicizing, explanation, and evaluation and thus served an edu-
cative mission. Third, and perhaps most important, because photography was
still regarded as a parvenu it required cultural legitimation, and that could be
most visibly won in spaces consecrated to Art.
Edward Westons rst New York show illustrates the ripple effect that an
art institutions exhibition could have. Although his pictures had found an
admiring audience, mostly in the West, he believed a New York exhibition
essential if he were to be acknowledged as an artist of national stature and
hoped that Alfred Stieglitz would sponsor the show. But when in his emissary
broached this possibility Stieglitz rmly rejected it and pronounced Westons pho-
tographs not a part of today, leaving Weston crestfallen and angry. Thus he was
elated in July when the painter Jos Clemente Orozco introduced him to Alma
Reed, director of the Delphic Studios gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street, and she
offered him a show that very autumn. He felt he had nally turned an important
corner. Sittings, sales, fresh contacts, future possibilities, everything points to suc-
cess in more than one way. My stars must have changed! he conded to his diary.
Just a few weeks before he had been musing on the morale boost a larger audience
would provide. He felt certain that the wider distribution of my work,knowing
that it was being seen by hundreds or thousands, instead of the handful who come
in here [his Carmel studio], would have a ne, strengthening effect upon me. The
Delphic Studios show, he exulted, would be my most important exhibit.1
The show, fty prints mostly of Westons recent still lifes of shells, rocks, kelp,
bones, and vegetables and also including portraits, was an artistic but not a com-
mercial success. Reed reported that attendees marveled at his pictures but only ve
had been sold, which Weston ascribed to the depression. He remained condent,
however, that the foundation is being laid for a future I believe sure to come. In
part his optimism stemmed from the warm responses of colleagues. Ralph Steiner
called the exhibition magnicent, as did the painter Walt Kuhn. Edward Stei-
chen bought one of the rock pictures and told Reed that New York ought to be
ashamed if not every print were sold. Charles Sheeler included himself among the
many who will thank you for having shown your photographs in New York. Slow
sales paled in the glow of such collegial praise from that fraction of the art world
whose approbation is a necessary if not usually sufcient indication of audience
response.2
An immediate consequence was his inclusion in the Harvard Societys exhibition
a month later. Someone, probably Lincoln Kirstein, saw the show and asked Reed
to have Weston ship ten prints to Cambridge. Kirsteins subsequent letter report-
ing that they were among the most admired pleased Weston enormously and made
him certain he was on the way to more than local recognition.3
The New York Times dispatched Ruth Green Harris to review the Delphic Stu-
dios opening. No one at the paper specialized in photography, and although Harris
was sympathetic she was also muddled. Weston rendered his subjects more hand-
somely than many artists working in a more direct medium, she wrote, although
in fact no medium could be more direct than photography. She thought his peppers
resembled human torsos, apparently unaware that he categorically denied any such
allegorical intentions. But her formulation about hisand all photographers
working methods exercised him even more. Photography always remains an art
of selection and taste, she generalized, making greater demands on the object
An Eastern Beachhead
49
beautifully composed in light and shadow than on the creative mind of the artist.
She thus discouragingly raised the old but not yet exhausted question of whether
50 photography was an art or a mechanical process.4
If this review was disappointing a more substantial and thoughtful essay that
appeared a few weeks later in the Sunday Times Magazine exhilarated him. Only
infrequently were artists noticed outside the newspapers cultural pages, and for a
photographer such attention was almost unheard of. The show had drawn several
hundred attendees, but hundreds of thousands would see the Times piece, which
featured four reproductions and a sympathetic account of how to look at them. Its
author, Frances D. McMullen, denominated Weston a stern realist, although
she also found analogical forms in his still lifes. But she emphasized that his cam-
era served as only a tool of his creative afatus. Like all modernists, she said, he
sought to discover signicant form (a shibboleth phrase at the time and coined by
Clive Bell), but unlike painters who searched for it within themselves he discovered
abundant exemplications of the quality they grope for in the palpable world. His
exhibition made it patently clear that a personal viewpoint can be recorded by pho-
tography without manual interference. New York may not have seen his pictures
previously, but they were known in Europe, she wrote, where he has been hailed
as an exponent of the New Worlds own peculiar brand of newness. This perhaps
overstated their European fame, but McMullen thus made Weston both a native
genius and one whose stature had been ratied by European authority.5
When she heard of McMullens piece Reed wrote to Weston that it would be the
most valuable publicity I know of, and after it appeared she crowed that it brought
scores of new visitors to the gallery. Even had she been otherwise disinclined, such
exposure would have encouraged her to offer him another exhibition, slow sales
or not. When she did two years later, another Times reviewer, perhaps confused by
the rst shows extraordinary publicity, misstated that it was his annual esta.6
Another periodical, Theatre Arts Monthly, likewise reproduced four photographs
from the show. To justify them in a magazine otherwise dedicated to theatrical mat-
ters, it hailed Westons mastery of dramatic form, greater it said than any modern
painters, and his discovery of drama in the commonplace. While Weston regretted
the reprinted egg slicer as one of his worst pictures, his pepper he thought among
his best.7
So did the photographer and distinguished teacher Henry Holmes Smith. Asked
in what led him to photography, he recalled a moment nearly fty years earlier.
Seeing, he said, the Theatre Arts Monthly portfolio, which must have been con-
nected with some exhibition he had in New York, was an epiphany. It included
four pictures, he accurately recalled, one was of the dry-bone jaw of some animal,
the other was The Egg Slicer. I cant remember the third one, but the fourth was
the famous Pepper. I think that photograph meant more than any other picture I
saw and the rst chance I had I bought one. I still have it.8
Weston was already a mature artist, and his New York debut was a signal occa-
sion. Nevertheless, few gallery shows inspire articles in the Times Magazine, nor
do reproductions often induce the seismic jolt Smith experienced. These epiphe-
nomena of his Delphic Studios show reveal the dynamic an exhibition can set in
motionhow it bolsters an artists self-condence, engages new viewers, and rip-
ples out to an enlarged audience through reviews and articles, reproductions, and
further exhibition possibilities. In this particular case the exhibition beneted not
only Weston but also artful photography itself because it came at a moment when
the medium was just beginning to emerge from a period of general eclipse.
Galleries
A sign of reinvigoration was that for a few years early in the thirties photography
established a modest beachhead on the New York gallery scene, with the Delphic
Studios and Julien Levys new gallery emphasizing it and a scattering of others hold-
ing occasional exhibitions. Stieglitz also continued to exhibit his and Paul Strands
work at An American Place. But the promise these activities held out proved to
be false, and by mid-decade they became considerably rarer. After eleven shows
between Westons in and Ansel Adamss New York debut in the Delphic
Studios would sponsor only one more over the rest of the decade. Levy cut back
about the same time, and photography became the exception rather than the rule,
some years without a single show.
The reasons were largely but not entirely economic. The galleries period of vigor
coincided with the depressions worst years, and like all businesses they struggled
to nd a clientele able to buy. What could be asked for photographs, moreover, was
considerably less than for the artwork that galleries usually favored, which meant
smaller commissions. At Levys rst show in a Weston print cost $, much
more typical than the $, price tag on a Stieglitz. Unlike Stieglitz, who inti-
mated that his prints were unique or nearly so, Weston considered duplicability
one of photographys essential characteristics and struck multiple prints, making
them less valuable from an economic standpoint. A photographers ability to cre-
ate a larger body of work than a painter also militated against the cash value of any
individual image. These constitutive properties of photography made it less eco-
nomically viable than objects of greater scarcity, and that would remain the case
until the advent of a passion for vintage prints many years later. Even as late as
Steichen on MoMAs behalf paid Berenice Abbott just $ apiece for Eugne
51
Atgets prints. Finally, it may have been that buyers in such uncertain times wanted
to stake their money on blue-chip certainties, which photography in almost its initial
52 public offering was not. Levy said that he soon discovered he could not sell enough
photographs to make his gallery viable, but he continued to show them more and
more as a gesture, more and more as propaganda, until I got completely discour-
aged and said, Well, let it propagandize for itself from here on. I cant afford it any
more. Not until many years after World War II would New York again see a full-
time gallery devoted to photography.9
But a zzle in the galleries after a brief effervescence did not signify that interest
in photography had slackened. In fact, it was expanding, but the conguration its
art world was assuming differed from those of the established arts. The gatekeep-
ing authority that gallery owners usually enjoyed became more widely diffused with
the creation of new conduits to mediate between artists and audiences, and those
emerged at about the same time that galleries were faltering. Unlike urban galleries,
the new venues reached a nonmetropolitan audience as well, making photographys
public a national one.
The timing was probably fortuitous. Had the galleries prospered, the newer out-
lets would likely have coexisted with them. But it is tempting nonetheless to see
their serial histories as expressive of two features of thirties photography. First,
pressure had intensied behind the idea of photography as a key cultural and
artistic practice denied its rightful standing; when one channel for expressing this
was balked photography sought another. Second, a more judicious sense began to
emerge of how photographys art world might need to differ from those of other
visual arts in ways that reected the mediums particular qualities and potential
national audience.
Nevertheless, galleries did help keep a ame alight that had been kindled by the
discovery of Atget and Mathew Brady and through the efforts of Kirstein. As one
journalist put it, their shows bear witness to the growing importance of photogra-
phy as a ne art. Reeds Delphic Studios was on the ground rst. After the splash
of the Weston show, a half-dozen others followed in , most of commercial
workers and none with equal public impact, and then the number diminished over
the next two years. Among them were Lszl Moholy-Nagys and Adamss initial
New York exhibitions and Westons second show.
Reeds interest in photography was mostly opportunistic; her deepest passion was
for Mexican art. She had studied archeology at Berkeley and then in joined
an expedition to excavate Mayan ruins. In the Yucatn she and the states governor
became engaged, but twelve days before their wedding rebel forces in the civil war
captured and executed him. In spite of that traumatic experience Reed lived much
of her later life in Mexico and wrote several books about its culture. Although her
interest in photography turned out to be short-lived, in she resolved to make
the Delphic Studios a center for what she sensed to be an expanding interest in a
medium that lacked a New York focal point.10
She thus felt threatened when Levy, who had the same ambition, opened his
gallery toward the end of . Reed went on the offensive to keep Weston in the
fold. His work, she wrote to him, had become rmly identied with her gallery
and brought in many visitors asking to see his prints. In any case, Levy, whatever
publicity he was sending out, had positively no concentration on photography
and too inated an idea of the importance of his gallery. Reeds plans uctu-
ated erratically. At one point she told Weston that she hoped to show only him and
Orozco, with perhaps an occasional special exhibition of others. Then a month
later she said that the gallery would hold its place as a photographic center by
featuring him along with one or two distinguished European shows each season.
Neither scheme materialized. As an impresario Reed lost out to Levy, whose vic-
tory proved Pyrrhic. She lacked either the eye or the contacts to attract top-rate
talent, Weston, Moholy-Nagy, and Adams notwithstanding. Even more important,
chronic undercapitalization meant that she could not pay exhibitors what she owed
them. When she proposed a exhibition Weston replied sardonically that he
could not afford the luxury of a New York show this year.11
Levy hoped to emulate An American Place and initially turned to Stieglitz for
advice. His inaugural show, Retrospective of American Photography, said one
reviewer, had been assembled with the cooperation of Alfred Stieglitz. It fea-
tured a few daguerreotypes and Bradys; a generous representation of Photo-Seces-
sionists; and current work by Sheeler, Steiner, Strand, Weston, and the Califor-
nia pictorialist Annie Brigman. Although it attempted the rst historical survey
of American achievements, anticipating by three years Kirsteins radio address, it
failed to develop a coherent outline of them. The sharp cleavages between the early
photographers documentary delity and the Photo-Secessions impressionism, or
Westons glossy prints and Brigmans soft ones, were mufed by the catalogs bland
declaration that photography as an art evinced a multiplicity of direction.12
Levys gallery promised to be a center for photographic activity, said Art News,
to clarify problems both for the artist and the public, and despite the catalogs waf-
ing the show did encourage public airing of one of photographys problems
historiographic poverty. Recommending it as probably the rst really successful
attempt to survey American photographic history, the Timess Edwin Alden Jew-
ell hinted at what yet remained to be done. In Creative Art Walter Knowlton drew
more specic conclusions. The exhibition, he said, revealed the start, the decadence
and the renaissance of photography as art. Brady established a model disregarded
by his successors, who descended into the mystical murk of imitating paintings
chiaroscuroincluding early Steichen, Gertrude Ksebier, Clarence White, and
even some of Stieglitz as well as Strand when he became picturesque. Photog-
53
raphy experienced a rebirth only with Sheelers conception of it as a new plastic
art. This tribute to Sheeler was unwittingly ironic because he had that same year
54 mostly abandoned photography, but the general line of development Knowlton
sketched would become canonical. Such journalistic theorizing implied the need
for a more rigorous, comprehensive history and by doing so created the atmosphere
that made one possible.13
Five more photography exhibitions followed during the season and six
the next. Then the number dropped off to three the next two seasons and one or
none after . Among them were Abbotts rst of her New York pictures and an
odd pairing of young American artistsGeorge Platt Lyness studies of Greek
statues and the human gure with Walker Evanss documentary-style photographs
that revealed him, in one reviewers judgment, as a sort of New York Atget. Abbott,
Lynes, and Evans, along with fteen others, appeared in an exhibit entitled New
York by New York Photographers, one of whom was also Stieglitz, whose early
Spring Showers, New York had been ripped from an issue of Camera Work. A
historical perspective likewise characterized a portrait show with D. O. Hill, Brady,
and Nadar, the Photo-Secessionists, and contemporaries such as Abbott, Man Ray,
Lee Miller, and Steiner.14
The portrait shows cosmopolitanism was unusual. Usually Levy segregated Euro-
peans as another stream entirely from their American counterparts. In his European
Photography show following the American one he included Moholy-Nagy, Herbert
Bayer, Brassa (Gyula Halsz), Andr Kertsz, and the expatriates Man Ray, Lee
Miller, and Florence Henri, much of their work experimental. Attendees readily
distinguished between it and native practice. American photographers, like Ameri-
can painters, said one, are wont to employ a minimum of distortion, arrange-
ment, and subjective expression generally, leaving in large measure to the Eastern
Hemisphere such tricks of the conjurer as negative-printing, photomontage, pho-
togamy, double-exposure, solarization, symbolic abstraction and unconventional
camera angles. Subsequent Man Ray and Miller shows of solarized portraits and
abstractions also highlighted such conjuring, as did one of Surrealism that included
photographs, mostly by Europeans.15
Levy signaled his disenchantment with straight photographys American domi-
nance when he gave Henri Cartier-Bresson his rst American one-person exhibi-
tion to launch his third season of , and he did so with a calculated act of
provocation. Under a pseudonym he composed a manifesto assailing the Great
Ss of American photographyStieglitz, Strand, Sheeler, and Steichenfor their
antiseptic images. He then sent the document to his mailing list and passed it out to
attendees. If their dedication to elegant composition and modulated tonality made
them antiseptic, Cartier-Bressons pictures were septic or anti-graphic in their
raw spontaneity and his indifference to print quality. Levy meant to advertise that
he had thrown [the Ss] overand the practice they epitomizedin favor of the
new thing represented by Cartier-Bresson. The new thing was not precisely the
European experimentalism he had previously shownit more anticipated postwar
street photographybut in championing it he disassociated his gallery from the
contemporary direction of American photography. By this time he had discovered
that photography could not support him, and the manifesto supplied an esthetic
justication for abandoning it, attacking the core principles of potential exhibitors
and putting his thumb in the eyes of the audience who admired those photogra-
phers. The number of photography shows then dropped off precipitously.16
Such attention to European photography was uncommon and became more so
as the thirties wore on. Experimental work remained barely visible to American
audiences except in the special case of fashion workers, including Man Ray and
others who adopted surrealistic motifs but exploited them in straight photographs.
Had Levy continued to emphasize photography, European experimentalism might
have exercised more inuence in the United Statesand possibly the Delphic Stu-
dios would have contributed as well, following up on its Moholy-Nagy show and
Reeds unrealized plan to show more continental work. As it happened, though,
it had minimal domestic impact, and the failure of the galleries to sustain them-
selves made it more likely that American photography would develop along strictly
national lines.17
Museums
A scattering of museums took up photography at about the same time as the gal-
leries, although with the exception of MoMA not the leading East Coast institu-
tions. None matched the ambitious roster of shows at the de Young Museum in
San Francisco, but Hartfords Wadsworth Atheneum, Buffalos Albright Art Gallery,
and the Brooklyn Museum all held omnibus exhibitions in and , and the
Cleveland Museum had a narrower one in . MoMA displayed photographs for
the rst time in and sponsored its rst one-person show in . Those events
reected the revived interest in photography, but with the exception of MoMA
they did not presage the leading museums becoming central participants in its art
world, at least not until later in the century. Photographys as yet uncertain purchase
on artistic legitimacy made it beneath the surveillance of most such institutions.
Moreover, photographys audience was more polyglot and less concentrated than
the one museums ordinarily served, and other, noninstitutional means for reaching
it proved more effective. Like the galleries, museums thus were a subsidiary stream,
contributing to the project of enlarging photographys visibility and conferring
prestige on it but not its central current.18
55
The Hartford and Buffalo shows resembled the Harvard Societys International
Photography exhibition, the former its traveling version shorn of the ten Stieg-
56 litzes and two of the Strands, which needed to be returned to lenders, and the latter
because Buffalos director, Gordon Washburn, had been Kirsteins and Levys class-
mate at Harvard and borrowed exhibits from them. Buffalos exhibition thus sec-
onded the roster of leading American contemporaries proposed in Cambridge and
HartfordAbbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Bruehl, Evans, Doris Ulmann,
Sheeler, Steichen, Steiner, and Westonand likewise mixed personal and commis-
sioned images. It also better lived up to its title, Modern Photography at Home and
Abroad, than had the Cambridge show thanks to Levys loan of historical prints by
Nadar and Hill and contemporary ones by Bayer, Kertsz, Man Ray, and Moholy-
Nagy. Like the two earlier exhibitions it featured ten Atget pictures. A hint of how
assimilated to domestic practice Atgets example had become was that the catalog
listed him as an American.19
Washburn had hoped to include Stieglitzs work in Buffalo but could not nd a
lender, and Stieglitz (as well as Strand) maintained a rm policy of not lending to
temporary exhibitions on the grounds that these disserved both artists and public;
museums ought to purchase photographs and display them in their permanent col-
lections, as they did paintings. That may have been a high-minded principle, but its
effect was to make Stieglitzs work less visible as photographys art world reinvented
itself. His absence at Hartford and Buffalo, in light of the historical exemplars and
diversity of contemporary talents represented, conveyed the impression that neither
photographys rich history nor present vitality had anything to do with him.
The Brooklyn exhibition entitled International Photographers coincided with
Levys omnibus European show and Stieglitzs retrospective at An American Place.
An energetic New Yorker could thus view pictures by most of the leading contem-
porary workers, although except for Stieglitzs no historical ones. With exhibits,
about the same number as Cambridge, Hartford, and Buffalo, the Brooklyn show
featured many of the same workers and a few new Americans, including Imogen
Cunningham and Luke Swank. So popular was it that the museum extended its
run an additional month.
Brooklyns melding of Americans and Europeans, with a preponderance of the
former, provided another opportunity to contrast domestic and continental prac-
tices. A Times reviewer found the comparison entirely to the Americans advan-
tage, many of whom, she asserted, were superior to all the Europeans. Man Rays
Handkerchief drew her special contempt, and she advised readers wanting to
experience the excesses of the monumental style to look it up. She maintained
that the show, at least its American exhibits, conrmed photographys attainment
of ne art stature, but her enthusiasm outran her knowledge. After a detour when
it foolishly tried to imitate painting, she said, Clarence White initiated the purely
aesthetic aim in photography, although perhaps others did too. Even for those
skeptical of Stieglitzs centrality that was going too far.20
Katherine Grant Sterns more considered piece in Parnassus came to a similar
conclusion about intercontinental differences. American photographers, she said,
with their inevitable renement and care for nuance surpassed the necromancy of
the Central European sorcerers, who experimented with processes, tended toward
abstraction, and aimed at psychological expressiveness. A dominating reverence
for external fact characterized the distinctive American school, and in no other
realm of creative art were Americans so much in the forefront. German theories of
the new objectivity and Soviet economic and ethical ones had all been anticipated
by American practice, she insisted, which without the Americans resorting to aes-
thetic theories or manifestoes had then been shamelessly borrowed and theoreti-
cally gussied up by the Europeans. Sterns airy derogation of European theorizing
and celebration of no-nonsense American practicality neatly tted a paradigm long
favored in the United States that contrasted continental abstruseness with native
pragmatism. It was a point of view that perhaps had special appeal during the thir-
ties, when practical realities loomed so large. Sternes warm embrace of American
exceptionalism hints at why transatlantic inuence exercised so little inuence in
photographys art world after its brief early bloom in galleries and museums.21
A Still More Photographic Future

Continental inuences, though, were readily apparent in MoMAs rst photography
exhibition of montage photomurals, some abstract and others surrealist and evinc-
ing little reverence for the putative American delity to unembellished fact. Alfred
Barr had wanted from MoMAs founding to show photography, but the trustees,
unconvinced that it was sufciently artistic, vetoed it. Several of the museums
younger afliates, of whom Kirstein and Nelson Rockefeller were particularly active,
composed an Advisory Committee that trustees established to siphon off youthful
enthusiasm. The committee agitated for photography, in successfully propos-
ing a mural exhibition that would include both painters and photographers. This
development secretly pleased Barr because, as he accurately predicted, it would be
the wedge to open the museum to more photography.22
Kirstein was designated to direct the show and enlisted Levy to solicit photogra-
phers for it. This division of responsibility led to bad feeling because Levy recruited
exhibitors with Kirsteins promise that the outstanding exhibit would be installed
in Rockefeller Center and receive a cash prize. Only after extending this offer did
Levy discover that Kirsteineager for the prestige Steichens name would con-
ferhad secured his participation by promising him the prize. Levy felt betrayed
57
and humiliated by the apologies he then had to make, although he found consolation
in the exhibitions considerable boost to the cause of photography as an art.23
58 Twelve photographic and thirty-ve painted murals composed the show, with
Steichens eight-by-ten-foot view of the new George Washington Bridge installed
in the museums foyer, an impeccably straight photograph but one in which an
ingenious perspectival strategy allowed no single focal point to dominate. Steichen
and Sheeler were the oldest exhibitors; most of the others were in their twenties or
thirties. Nine were veterans of the earlier Cambridge, Buffalo, and Brooklyn shows,
although except for Abbott, Sheeler, and Steichen not the most hailed ones.24
So eager was Kirstein to insinuate photography into MoMA that he expediently
(and temporarily) abandoned his commitment to it as document in favor of extol-
ling experimentalism. Through superimposing, as well as through double-expo-
sure and negative printing, he informed a newspaper reporter, many interesting
possibilities will be demonstrated, made possible by the greater sophistication of
photographers. Exhibits measured twelve by seven feet, and all except Steichens
employed montage, triptychs being the most conventional (Sheelers Industry
and William Rittases Steel). The rest ranged from double and negative printing
(as in Arthur Gerlachs Energy, which employed cogs, wheels, magnetos, and
other mechanical objects to form an abstraction) to surrealist assemblages such as
Lyness American Landscape, , which superimposed machines and bosky
landscapes onto human gures gesturing toward a mysterious box, the Empire State
Building looming in the distant background. Abbott combined several of her New
York scenes (a construction site, a cigar store Indian, and the back of the Statue of
Liberty), overlaying them with a pattern of dark girders. Asked to name her favorite
photograph some years later she declined to answer but did confess this gigantic
montage was her least favorite.25
Whatever publicity for photography the show elicitedit was widely reviewed
although the years worst-attendedit did not foreshadow a tilt toward European-
style experimentalism and remained an anomaly in the thirties. It did, however,
forecast MoMAs ambition to be an institutional presence in photographys art
world. The inuential critic Henry McBride sensed this immediately. He abhorred
the painted murals, a complete disaster, but admired the photographic ones and
predicted that MoMA had a still more photographic future before it.26
In fact, just about everyone disliked the painted murals, including those by such
gifted artists as Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, Georgia OKeeffe, and Ben Shahn,
and with most of the reviewers this displeasure redounded to the photomurals
credit. Even Barr lamented that they were illustrations of how not to paint a mural
and judged the photomurals certainly more successful as a group. MoMA thus
decided to circulate only a portion of the show, about half of the painted murals
but most photographic ones. That version, costing $, subsequently appeared at
museums in Ann Arbor, Milwaukee, Worcester, Hagerstown, and San Francisco, the
rst of MoMAs traveling exhibitions that would bring photography to a national
audience hungry for it.27
As McBride predicted, the exhibition was the camels nose. The next year MoMA
sponsored its rst one-person photography show, although under somewhat covert
premises. It featured thirty-nine of Evanss pictures of nineteenth-century archi-
tecture, among his rst made with a view camera and heralding his mature style.
Straightforwardly composed and crisply focused they were straight photographs
par excellence. Kirstein again was the motive force behind the exhibition and in
every sense its patron. He enlisted Evans to illustrate a never-to-be-nished project
on American Victorianism, accompanied him as he worked, and then donated the
photographs to the museum, vigorously lobbying the advisory committee to rec-
ommend an exhibition. When that succeeded, Kirstein wrote the MoMA Bulletin
piece that glossed them.
His entrepreneurial enthusiasm notwithstanding, it was a curious show to appear
under MoMAs banner because it centered on buildings in the high Victorian style,
an ornate esthetic MoMA saw as its mission to overcome. That anomaly, along with
the fact that the museum had not before featured a single photographers work, cre-
ated indecision over whether it was an architecture or a photography exhibition.
Publicity materials spoke of the photographs as an important document in the
history of a seldom studied phase of American architecture, laying stress on their
content. But Kirsteins Bulletin piece, reviving after the brief apostasy of the pho-
tomural exhibition his belief that photographys greatest service is documentary,
emphasized Evans style, which revealed his moral virtues of patience, surgical
accuracy and self-effacement.28 The clash between these two ways of promoting
the exhibition reected a residual institutional uneasiness about featuring photogra-
phy, and the pictures uniform subject matter permitted a certain degree of equivo-
cation. In all but the publicity, nonetheless, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nine-
teenth-Century Houses was MoMAs rst one-person photography show, although
not advertising it as such probably accounted for why it was barely reviewed.
The photomurals tentatively introduced photography at MoMA and the Evans
show ambiguously built on that beginning, but and passed without any
further photographic activity aside from a job of work Kirstein arranged for Evans,
to photograph seventy-ve African objects, the pictures to be circulated among black
colleges in the South. With Kirsteins attention turning more to dance no one in
the museum was actively promoting photographys cause.
In late , however, the job of museum librarian became vacant, and Barr, dis-
regarding the executive directors preference for another candidate with stronger
librarianship credentials, hired Beaumont Newhall, who had just failed his doctoral
examinations at Harvard University. He had worked at the Philadelphia and Met-
59
ropolitan museums before returning to Harvard, where Barr met him. Both had
taken Paul Sachss museum course, but especially attractive to Barr was Newhalls
60 interest in photography. He had published his rst essay on the topic that previous
autumn, discussing its relationship to painting in the nineteenth century.
Against the trustees skepticism Barr continued to believe that photography
belonged at MoMA. He obtained, within a few months of Newhalls hiring, a
$, gift from David McAlpin and with it succeeded in wearing down the trustees
and persuading them to support a major photography exhibition, which he desig-
nated Newhall to prepare. By the middle of the thirties photography was ourish-
ing creatively. Although an increasingly large audience appreciated it, it still lacked
a coherent history, and without that its stature as a major art form would always
remain in doubt. Barr charged Newhall to formulate such a history.29
5
Edward Steichen
and Celebrity Photography
The Finest Camera Artist in the World
In Edward Steichen had been the Cond Nast magazines chief pho-
tographer for six years, but he was increasingly dissatised with Vanity Fairs
presentation of his portraits, its most prominent monthly feature. The mag-
azines design, he felt, was old-fashioned, stodgy, and incongruous with his
style. A dull-gray mat often edged with a black border framed his pictures,
giving them a heavy, vaguely Victorian look at odds with their sleek modern-
ism. Dense captions in small type exacerbated the impression of ponderous-
ness. This treatment violated more than esthetic congruity. As celebrities, his
sitters depended on being perceived as modern, up to date, and style-setting.
A format that seemed to embalm them egregiously violated those aims.
Late in Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha, Cond Nasts new art director,
redesigned Vanity Fair to give it a more contemporary look. He scrapped
the mats and borders and replaced the dense captions with abbreviated, less
distracting ones, often boxed on the facing page. Bold headlines and lavish white
space accented Steichens dramatic blacks and whites, and terser, less obvious cap-
62 tions connoted greater condence in the photographs inherent expressiveness.
These changes instantly gave Steichens pictures a streamlined air and made them
more conspicuous, their fresh, live appearance delighting Steichen.1
By then he had made hundreds of Vanity Fair portraits, some of them among
his strongest although diminished by being shown so poorly. Agha wanted to high-
light their artistry, and his effort paralleled other initiatives around this time to
more boldly bring forward leading photographers pictures. Nor was his interven-
tion merely fortuitous; Agha commanded an uncommon expertise in photography.
When the Hartford museum wanted an expert lecturer to open its visiting Harvard
Society exhibition a consultant suggested only two individuals as qualied, Agha
and Steichen.2
Vanity Fair boasted that there is no department of life which [Steichen] has
failed to illumine by these brilliant portraits, and most of the personalities of the
world have posed for him. The magazine exaggerated. Most sitters were Americans,
and the majority were entertainers but with enough writers, sports stars, and other
public gures to keep the claim from being preposterous. Following Aghas make-
over it published some three hundred of them, four or ve monthly until Vanity
Fair merged with Vogue in . These celebrity portraits made Steichen the most
admired and widely seen American photographer; none had enjoyed a larger audi-
ence. Cumulatively the celebrity portraits composed an American pantheon, one
that also revealed how little the depression had undermined the nations romance
with consumer culture.3
Steichen was fty in , with a distinguished career already behind him. As
Alfred Stieglitzs most important colleague in the Photo-Secession he had contrib-
uted to Camera Work; co-founded the gallery; and served as its Paris talent
scout who arranged for Czanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Rodin to be exhibited in
New York. After World War I, in which he commanded the U.S. Army Air Force
Photographic Section, he determined to concentrate on photography and abandon
the easel painting he had formerly alternated with it. He then undertook a series of
experiments to enlarge his mastery, one of which soon became legendary. Making
some one thousand images of a teacup and saucer against a black background he
labored to discover how most subtly to render tonalities and to get the maximum
amount of realism. Another legend of these years, more melodramatic and less
credible than the thousand teacups, had him lighting a bonre of his canvasses to
symbolize his irrevocable commitment to photography. His gardener had dashed
off a quick copy of one of them, Steichen said, and it surpassed the original. It was
the one thing needed to nally convince me that so far as I was concerned paint-
ing was the bunk.4
Steichen became Cond Nasts chief photographer after coming across a Vanity
Fair piece designating him the greatest living portrait photographer but report-
ing that he had abandoned photography for painting. He immediately looked up its
editor to set him straight and came away with a job offer. Soon he became the mag-
azines most important contributor. By it would drop the qualier portrait
and hail him as the most distinguished of living photographers, with variations
on this panegyric following at regular intervals. A subscription solicitation
proclaimed him the greatest of living photographers, a editorial maintained
that he was acknowledged to be the nest camera artist in the world, and a
prole boasted that he had elevated the camera to a position in the art world held
by the brush, the violin, and the penan instrument of the artist quite on a par
with these. Readers added to the huzzahs. A Nashville subscriber testied that one
word, Steichen, explained his loyalty to Vanity Fair. My collection of Steichen
pictures is a permanent source of inspiration for me, he exclaimed.5
Vanity Fairs encomiums were hardly disinterested but in fact others reiterated
them. A Colliers piece asserted that he was generally conceded by our best photog-
raphers to be Americas best photographer, and like other such proles it retailed
the legendary stories of the teacup and bonre. The repetition of these typifying
anecdotes suggests how rmly lodged his fame had becomeand not only in pho-
tographic circles. Paramount Pictures made a lm about Steichen, shown in news-
reel theaters and to camera clubs, and when he retired from Cond Nast in
Time underscored his preeminence with an analogy: If Chrysler would stop mak-
ing automobiles or MGM movies, those events would be no less momentous than
Steichens loss to photography.6
Not everyone in photographys art world agreed. Steichens commercial work
appalled Stieglitz as a betrayal of the artistic standard they had collaborated in
erecting. Westons rst publisher, Merle Armitage, disputed Vanity Fairs claims
for Steichens genius with a comparison of the two photographers, which he said
revealed Steichens pictures to be articial, posed, unnaturally lighted, and unwill-
ing to let the main subject stand alone without tricky backgrounds, shadows, etc.
Another dissenter was Walker Evans, who condemned Steichens spiritual empti-
ness, magnied, Evans claimed, by technical slickness.7
Even Stieglitz, though, conceded that Steichen was a force and chided
MoMA for representing his work too skimpily in the exhibition inaugurat-
ing its photography department. By then, perhaps, Steichens retirement and the
rise of so many younger photographers made him a less dominant gure than he
had once seemed to be. But in the rst half of the thirties his photographs were
everywherein the Cond Nast magazines most generously and also in all the
omnibus exhibitions. Reecting his preeminent standing was the pride of place
MoMA gave to his shot of the George Washington Bridge in its photomu-
Steichen and Celebrity Photography
63
ral exhibition. For a signicant fraction of photographys art world, and for the
general public as well, his Vanity Fair portraits represented the mediums nest
64 contemporary achievement.8
The Things People Talk about at Parties

Aghas transformation of how Steichens photographs reached viewers is a reminder
of the collaboration any display of art requires. Besides Agha, other inuential par-
ticipants included Vanity Fairs publisher Cond Nast and its editor, Frank Crown-
inshield. Nast grew rich publishing magazines catering to the afuent. After a stint
as the advertising director of Colliers he bought Vogue in and Vanity Fair in
. With both magazines he wanted to bring together advertisers selling luxury
goods with consumers rich enough to buy them. The way to do that, he averred,
was to bait the editorial pages in such a way as to lift out of all the millions of
Americans just the hundred thousand cultivated persons who can buy these qual-
ity goods. Vanity Fairs bait was a genre of culture a notch above the middlebrow
but not disturbingly avant-garde. The magazine aimed to be tasteful, sophisticated,
and contemporary without unsettling readers or making uncomfortable demands on
them. If its editorial contents could without vulgarity also celebrate the pleasures
of consumerism, that was welcome as well. Contributions from certiably esteemed
artists also assured its audience of their cultivation and good taste. Complementing
the advertisements of luxury goods, its cultural features strove to make readers feel
they belonged to a select, discriminating elite.9
Steichen tted Vanity Fairs requirements perfectly. He was a gifted portraitist
his early studies of J. P. Morgan and Rodin were already classicsand the magazine
specialized in well-known personalities. His crisp, legible style comported well with
its breezy modernism. Unlike many artists, he admired business and forthrightly
asserted that the nest art was always commercial. And his former association with
the Photo-Secession meant that he brought with him a longstanding reputation as
a distinguished artist.10
Nast made the decision to hire Steichenand pay him the largest salary of any
photographer everand in this basic sense determined the work he undertook.
More important, the kind of magazine Nast imagined, and the audience he hypoth-
esized for it, established the boundaries within which Steichen made his portraits.
They needed to honor Vanity Fairs underlying goal, bringing together those who
sold luxury goods with those who bought them. He could not adopt the satiric tone
of, say, Lisette Model, whose well-off French men and women look drugged, or
porcine, or conniving. He needed to atter sitters and where possible make their use
of luxury goods enticing. His sitters would come only from a narrow spectrum of
the well known and usually well-to-do; impoverished Americans, or even ordinary
ones, found no welcome in Vanity Fairs pages. Nothing indicates that Steichen
chafed at these conditions, but Nasts presuppositions nonetheless shaped his pho-
tographs in distinctive ways.
Even his visual style was conditioned, if not prescribed by, Vanity Fairs require-
ments. Making pictures for reproduction, he said, limited a photographers auton-
omy: He never fully completes his photograph but must visualize what the engraver
and printer are going to be able to do with the print. To the experienced illustrator
the image he sees on the nder or ground glass is but a key to the nal translation
on the printed page. He could not exploit the full scale of tonal variation, and
strong contrasts of light and dark were preferable because they reproduced better.
Meticulous articial lighting could enhance them, but that technical need made
work outside of the studio problematic.11
Crowninshield enjoyed a reputation for great cultivation and charm. Helen Law-
renson, who worked with him, said he epitomized everyones idea of a polished
Edwardian gentleman of wit and urbane elegance, indifferent to politics, a bit
snobbish, and well connected. His wide acquaintance among people in the arts
served the magazine well because he was reputed to be able to persuade whomever
he wanted to appear in it. Vanity Fair, Crowninshield believed, ought to center on
the things people talk about at partiesthe arts, sports, humor, and so forth, an
analogy suggesting a preoccupation with personalities rather than ideas.12
Steichens portraits, whose sitters he said were chosen for their newsworthiness,
served Crowninshields aims admirably. They reproduced likenesses of people well
known for their well-knownness, celebrities likely to be topics of cocktail party
conversation. And they did so with extraordinary artistic brio. Vanity Fair readers
got an arresting portrait and a striking example of photographic art as well. But
Steichen did not select his sitters, Crowninshield did, the editors friendships in
the performing arts being a boon to those choices. This form of collaboration also
affected the portraits. Crowninshields professed liking for an immense number
of things which society, money, and position bring in their train meant that those
chosen to sit for Steichen exemplied the material values Crowninshield so admired.
Moreover, Steichen had not met some of the sitters and knew little or nothing
about a few, although he democratically claimed they were all interesting. These
circumstances meant that his portraits rarely attempted complexity in delineating
sitters claims to fame, much less essayed a psychological approach to personality.
Instead, he fastened on their already well-established public personas, counting on
his visual facility to make distinctive his portraits of these much-photographed
individuals.13
65
Conventions
66 Month after month Steichens portraits unmistakably bore his signature, but they
rarely seemed repetitious in spite of infrequent deviation from conventions he had
pioneered. These included a medium-distance camera placement, with most or all
of a sitters body in the frame; legible but not razor-sharp focus; dramatic lighting;
a at picture space, the shallow background often patterned with vertical bars of
alternating light and shadow; and eschewal of symbolic props and deployment of
nonconnotative objectsa chair, sofa, table, or vaseto add visual dynamism.
To achieve variety within these conventions he rang a remarkable number of
changes in how sitters addressed the camera with their bodies, faces, and eyes. Some
stood, others sat, and yet others perched on a chair or sofa arm. They faced the
camera, or turned at a quarter or three-quarter angle to it, or posed in prole.
Some looked directly into the lens but just as often away from it, casting their eyes
demurely or seductively downward, or hopefully or ebulliently upward, or yearningly
or determinedly toward the distance beyond the frames edges. Facial expressions
also differed considerably. Sitters smiled brightly or irtatiously or sardonically or
innocently; some looked somber and thoughtful, others mugged for the camera. The
combinative possibilities among these variations were almost innite, and Steichen
exploited them masterfully.
Dramatic lighting was a Steichen trademark and added variety as well. Key lights
could be employed variously, especially with a female sitter. They might create a
nimbus around her prole, as with the screen actress and former Ziegfeld Girl Peggy
Shannon, giving her an air of ingenuousness consonant with the information that
she hailed from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and owned a dog named Sparkles. Or they
could suggest languid sultriness, as in the portrait of Evelyn Laye, then appearing
in a Noel Coward musical. She lounges in an armchair, her head leaning lightly
against its back, the key light accentuating her graceful neck and the lustrous pearls
encircling it while, in shadow, her narrowed and lowered eyes gaze seductively into
the cameras lens.14
Key lighting need not be attering, although Steichen usually made it be, but he
used it to make the gossip columnist Walter Winchell appear sinister and menac-
ing.15 His restless prowling momentarily interrupted, Winchell hunches on a stool,
lighting a cigarette. His brow is furrowed, and he looks into the lens, unabashed
and knowing. Steichens lighting creates an expressionistic shadow on the wall
behind, a distended grotesque because it resembles nothing human but combines
two shadows seamlessly, the hunch of Winchells shoulders and his jutting lower leg.
Like Steichen, Winchell trafcked in celebrities but in a vulgar, scurrilous manner,
a contrast to the magazines sophisticated stylishness. Thus his portrait measured
the distance between lowbrow journalism and the kaleidoscopic review of mod-
ern life Vanity Fair proclaimed itself to be. With the captions helpWinchell
was the best informed man on everybody elses business, the toast of the curious
and naveit also discriminated between his audience and the magazines. The
former was credulous, like the mindless horde Nathanael West would soon por-
tray, whereas the latter displayed superior renement, even in the act of receiving
Steichens esthetically expressive if corrosive portrait.
Such unattering portraits were rare. They had to be to induce celebrities to sit for
him. Just as Agha, Nast, and Crowninshield were Steichens collaborators, so were
his sitters, especially the many who had long experience before the camera and ideas
about how they photographed best. That Steichen remained the dominant partner
was apparent in the portraits stylistic consistency. If it goes too far to say that he
made his subjects virtually interchangeable, as Jonathan Green has argued, his
skill in posing and lighting gave them a similar air of expensive and modish contem-
poraniety that harmonized with Vanity Fairs emphasis on purveying sophistication
and with Nasts and Crowninshields celebrations of material luxury.16
The Departments of Life

About percent of Steichens portraits depict show business personalities from
the stage, nightclubs, what remained of vaudeville, and, increasingly, the movies.
The remainder include sports gures, musicians, and writers (each about per-
cent); journalists ( percent); and political leaders ( percent). There was also a
handful less easily classied, from Sing Sings warden to the aviatrix Amelia Ear-
hart. Lacunae are immediately apparent in the comprehensive departments of
life of which Vanity Fair boasted. Aside from two portraits of Matisse (one from
Steichens Photo-Secession days), no visual artists sat for him. Nor did he photo-
graph dancers except for Martha Graham and some snapshots of Balanchines
students. There was only one business leaderThomas W. Lamont, senior partner
of the J. P. Morgan Company. Whether because depression audiences were imag-
ined to be antipathetic or because they were insufciently photogenic is not clear.
Members of the professions were likewise barely represented. Vanity Fair tilted
toward the arts, particularly the theatrical arts, and those departments provided
most of Steichens sitters.
Thus most portraits evoked leisure activitiesplays, movies, concerts, read-
ing, and spectator sports. Even allowing for Vanity Fairs afuent readership, the
predominance reinforces the Lynds observation in Middletown in Transition that
leisures greater importance in the twenties continued unabated in the thirties. The
two decades differed in a number of ways, but signicant cultural continuities also
persisted that generalizations about hard times tend to obscure. Leisures ongoing
67
importance, in turn, bolstered another trend of the twenties that continued to our-
ish in the thirties, an ambition to acquire consumer goods that economic collapse,
68 political ferment, and social unrest failed much to dampen. Many leisure activities
required a purchase, whether golf clubs, a radio, an automobile, a movie ticket, an
evening gown, or a camera. Although for some citizens the depression made such
expenditures difcult or impossible, many had at least modest discretionary income
for them, and advertising ogged an omnipresent image of consumptions pleasures.
According to Roland Marchand, advertisers relished depicting the rich and fash-
ionable and had no qualms about aunting the image of the opulent, exclusive,
and clearly dened elite class before their audience. A similar conception underlay
Steichens portraits, especially his glamorous depictions of show business person-
alities, an elite group of a special kind and the thirties most visible representatives
of the consuming ideal. They embodied a particularly luxurious intensication of
consumer culture and thus served Vanity Fairs ambition to make sumptuous com-
modities attractive to its audience.17
Occasionally Steichen recreated in his studio a scene from a Broadway show,
but more often he posed actors, especially female leads, out of costume. Physically
unprepossessing females, however, appeared in role, like the comedienne Bea Lil-
lie or the singer Ethel Merman. Those whose looks allowed for glamorous treat-
ment, however, usually received it. Diana Wynard, a comely English actress, posed
in long, white gloves and an elegant, owing dress, a ower at its waist. Steichen
directed her to perch on an armchairs edge, a touch of informality to counterpoint
her formal attire and British reserve and bring her psychologically nearer to view-
ers. Strategic key lighting outlines her handsome prole, given further emphasis
by his trademark background of alternating vertical black and gray bars. Dorothy
Stickneys portrait hinted at her vulnerability as well as her physical attractiveness.
She sits on the oor against an angled upright, one hand lightly cupping her cheek
and giving her a pensive air as she gazes away from the camera and out of the frame.
Two key lights provide accents, on her hair, a frequent and attering strategy, and
on her hip, subtly underlining her sexual appeal.18
About the time of Stickneys portrait Steichen told a Colliers writer that the
reason he made more photographs of women than men was simple. Its merely
that you would rather look at women than men, he said. Even a bad portrait of
a good-looking woman attracts us. But we arent interested in photographs of men.
Therefore we think chiey of women when photography is our topic. His pro-
nouns dene the photographer and audience as male, united by mutual pleasure
in voyeuristic gazing at comely females. But women read Vanity Fair, too. It was
not a mens magazine, as the new Esquire advertised itself, nor was it directed to
women like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. Its editorial contents could not be coded
as directed to one sex or the other. Steichens unselfconsciousness about audience
may reect nothing more than the largely unchallenged sexism of the time and the
fact that the magazines top editorial gures were male and liked photographs of
attractive women. Perhaps, however, the notion of the controlling male gaze only
partially accounts for Steichens glamorous treatment of female celebrities. Women
must have viewed them with interest, too, for what they revealed about carriage,
style, fashion, and allureguideposts in a consumer culture.19
Broadway theater was just one of the metropolitan pleasures evoked by Steichens
portraits. Nightclubs with oor shows and orchestras for dancing ourished in the
thirties, before and after Prohibition. Celebrating these chic gathering places, he
photographed Rosita and Ramon tangoing, their specialty act at the Casanova Club;
Veloz and Yolanda, also dancers, at the St. Regis Hotel Roof Club; and seven cho-
rines from Club Hollywood, dressed in form-revealing getups supposed to resemble
those of various national and ethnic groups such as American Indians or Hawai-
ians.20 Unlike the theater portraits, these bore no relation to the arts except in
the most attenuated way. Rather, they conjured up the pleasures of urban night life
available to those who had sufcient means and leisure to enjoy them.
Although the line between stage and screen personalities became blurred after the
advent of sound lmsHollywood raided Broadway, desperate for actors who could
deliver lines convincinglySteichens portraits of movie personalities increased
during the thirties at the expense of those from the theater. In more than
thirty stage actors sat for him, twice the number from the movies. The next year
movie people slightly predominated, and in the relative proportions of
were more than reversed when he photographed nine stage actors and thirty from
Hollywood. Movie stars then continued to hold sway.
Nightclub performers had only modest fame whereas stage actors would be known
to the Northeasts theater-goers. Only screen stars, however, commanded a national
audience, magnifying their importance as exemplars of consumptions pleasures.
Hollywood, a key consumer industry, employed extensive advertising and public-
ity campaigns to sell its products, and numerous movies portrayed a glittering con-
sumerist world of sleek automobiles, swank nightclubs, elegantly decorated abodes,
and stylishly attired actors. Its efcient publicity machine, moreover, indefatigably
made public the private luxury of the stars personal lives. Such lmic and publicity
representations of these glittering individuals intertextually reinforced the glamor-
ous treatment Steichen gave them, and his portraits in turn helped ratify the stars
standing as the thirties preeminent representatives of conspicuous consumption.
Movie stars almost never appeared in costume. They dressed in elegant, well-cut
clothing redolent of evenings spent in opulent surroundings. Leslie Howard wears
a dinner suit, white tie, and top hat, his cigarette and roguish grin giving him an
aura of urbane insouciance. The solid black ottoman on which she sits sideways
emphasizes Joan Bennetts backless white gown, a key light on the wall behind cre-
69
ating a luminous aureole around her head. As did many female stars, she faces away
from the camera to look winsomely over her shoulder at it. One of Joan Crawfords
70 portraits (she appeared in three) depicts her in a drawing room, a tall vase of lilies
and the corner of a painting suggesting its sumptuousness and her elbow-length
black gloves and beaded, off-the-shoulder white dress absorbing and reecting the
warm light.21 Although these portraits imply no anecdote beyond suggesting that
their subjects are about to enjoy a soigne dinner party or night on the town, each
conveys an unmistakable air of stylish, and expensive, sophistication that would be
apparent even with anonymous models. But their faces were universally recognizable
as those of people of wealth and appetite for luxury, exemplars in their own lives,
as in their ctional ones, of the rich pleasures afforded by a consumer culture.
Most of Hollywoods elite appeared before Steichens camera, their portraits
embodying the same polished air as those of Howard, Bennett, and Crawford. Gary
Cooper, Clark Gable, Frederic March, and Ronald Colman sat for him, as did
to name only the best knownGreta Garbo (four times), Marlene Dietrich (ve),
Norma Shearer, Loretta Young, Mary Astor, Katharine Hepburn, Merle Oberon,
Myrna Loy, Fay Wray, Dolores Del Rio, and Margaret Sullavan. Their portraits
depict extraordinarily handsome people who are uncommonly well turned out and
seem just about to embark on pleasurable, exciting activities. Making these implica-
tions more intense are the photographs rich surfaces, with their simple yet dynamic
composition, striking contrasts of light and shadow, and clean, modern look.
Although Steichen preferred the control his studio permitted, because of Vanity
Fairs omnivorous appetite for celebrity pictures he occasionally traveled to the West
Coast to supplement those made in New York. These California portraits tend to
be more casual in two ways. Steichen usually worked outdoors in natural light there,
making the pictures less controlled and contrasty than those from his studio. In these
settings he depicted more literally the stars leisure activities, signied by what his
subjects were wearing. Thus a cheerful Miriam Hopkins lies sunning on a beach
towel, attired in coordinated knit shorts and yoke-neck top, and Evelyn Brett in
slacks, striped jersey, and rakish beret, relaxes in a canvas deck chair. Bretts slightly
windblown coiffure, easy smile, informal pose, and jaunty outt imply the grace-
ful pleasures of southern California. Such pleasures are made even more palpable
by a group of lm people sunning or clustering under beach umbrellas at Lilyan
Tashmans Malibu beach house. This high-angled shot depicts the private luxury
that stars enjoyed. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joan Crawford, Kay Francis, and Clifton
Webb occupy the well-appointed and private beachfront patio with the Pacics
rollers as background. Appearing in January , it must have stimulated viewers
in wintry latitudes to envy the sunny diversions movie stars enjoyed.22
Grand operas prestige would seem to demand a more dignied treatment than
Steichen gave to movie actors and to some extent that was the case. In nine portraits
of divas, four of the women appear in costume, as does the sole male singer.23 But
four of the other ve pictures resemble movie star depictions in their emphasis on
glamorous chic, perhaps because they are of Lily Pons and Grace Moore, both of
whom combined an operatic career with Hollywood lms. The fth is of Kirstin
Flagstad, the Norwegian Valkyrie, who as it turned out would also make lms
but not until later; her portrait is less overtly glamorous than Ponss or Moores.
In one Pons wears a slinky black evening dress that emphasizes her bare shoulders
and the white fur boa at her hips; in another, again with a fur, her pose displays
her evening dresss low, latticed back; and in a third she reclines on a couch in an
elaborate dcollet gown, her head thrown back in a delighted laugh. Moore is simi-
larily stylish in a low-backed dress shown to good advantage by her three-quarters
pose and made similarly alluring by careful lighting of her blond hair and along
her prole.24 These photographs especially underscored Vanity Fairs priorities. A
gloss of high culture lent tone to the magazine, but representation of the modish
stylishness of up-scale consumer goods was coveted at least as much. If the arts
could be deployed to serve expensive elegance, so much the better.
Vanity Fair thus aspired to be a champion of the elite arts as well as a staunch
publicist for luxury consumer goods. Indeed, those goals often went hand in hand,
as in the Pons and Moore portraits. Cultural featuresessays by highbrows like
Walter Lippmann and Stuart Chase and color reproductions of paintings by Matisse,
Renoir, and Picasso (and for that matter photographs by Steichen)sanctied
other contents, editorial and advertising, giving the assemblage an imprimatur of
cultivated discernment and discrimination. A halo effect deriving from the pres-
tige of its most respected contributors diffused a generalized aura of tastefulness
throughout the magazine.
A parallel conation of the intellectually estimable with the sensuously appeal-
ing also characterized Steichens ensemble of portraits. Photographs of illustrious
artistic gures, although far fewer than of entertainers, strategically diversied his
Vanity Fair portfolio, at the least distinguishing his portraits from those by Holly-
wood studio photographers whose glamour shots no one considered art. The halo
effect functioned here as well. Entertainers had celebrity but only modest prestige,
whereas artists cultural status was high but their public fame more limited. Appear-
ing in Vanity Fair in the same format and photographed with similar artfulness,
highbrow sitters and show business celebrities seemed to occupy the same universe,
one in which being photographed by Steichen became the badge of cultural stand-
ing and erasing the usual brow distinctions among sitters.
Steichen nevertheless employed somewhat different visual strategies with artists
and intellectuals than with entertainers. Contrasting tonalities are less obviouskey
lighting more subdued and background patterns more subtleand the envelope of
pictorial space that frames less-exalted individuals is often narrowed or eliminated.
71
The sitters domination of pictorial space signies their extraordinary presence and
implies the authority their accomplishments demand. The more subtle lighting,
72 mostly used to model their faces, likewise suggests that they require no extraordi-
nary presentation. An inherentbecause apparently unembellisheddignity is their
keynote. His portraits of Thomas Mann, Walter Lippmann, H. G. Wells, Walter
Damrosch, and Fritz Kreisler are all in this mode as is that of Pearl Buck, the only
woman to receive such treatment.25
Less often such eminent subjects are standing within an envelope of space. But
these pictures, too, employ minimal artice. A key light emphasizes W. B. Yeatss
tousled gray hair as he gazes contemplatively out of the frame, but otherwise his
likeness is direct and simple, Yeats quintessentially the poet but without any hint of
affectation or temperament. Photographing Eugene ONeill was an electric experi-
ence, Steichen said, because of the great esteem in which he held the playwrights
work. As with Yeats, the compositions simplicity emphasizes ONeills inherent
authority and self-possession. He poses erectly but comfortably before a neutral
background, his arms crossed and head slightly turned away from the camera,
entirely composed, handsome, self-contained, and dignied.26
These portraits rank among Steichens strongest whereas those of political gures
are considerably less successful. As a chronicler of smart urbanity Vanity Fair ordi-
narily paid scant attention to politics. Crowninshield had no interest in it and char-
acteristically skipped the newspapers front page. But as the depression worsened
and the sense of crisis became more acute, and then later as the New Deal seemed to
be reshaping American life, even Vanity Fair could not avoid politics, a sign of how
profoundly such questions gripped the nation. In the two years between mid-
and mid- political gures appeared regularly in Steichens gallery of notable
Americans only to disappear again in the New Deals second year. Shortly before
the election he photographed Eugene P. Meyer, chair of Hoovers Reconstruc-
tion Finance Corporation; Bernard Baruch, the perennial advisor to presidents; and
Norman Thomas, the socialist presidential candidate. Once the New Deal was in
place, the president, cabinet members Cordell Hull and James Farley, Agricultural
Adjustment Administration director George Peek, the brain truster Raymond
Moley, and two key Democratic senators, Carter Glass and Pat Harrison, all sat for
him. These portraits most notable characteristic is their ordinariness. They lack
Steichens usual dynamic composition and dramatic use of contrast; nor do they
illustrate his legendary capacity to inspire sitters to project their personalities. In
every way they are less visually compelling than those of the celebrities featured
alongside them. Apparently Steichen himself believed them inferior, at least later:
only one (of Meyer) is reprinted in his autobiography.27
Several explanations for their inferiority suggest themselves. Steichen made most
of them in Washington, diminishing his ability to control variables. Neither could
he command much time with these tightly scheduled sitters. Too, politicians in the
days before picture magazines and television were less practiced in projecting their
personalities for the camera, unlike actors, for whom that was their mtier. But the
most compelling explanation for his failure to vivify them is that politics interested
him little more than it did the magazine. He had grown up in a family of socialists
but discarded his early commitment by the time of the world war. A vague liberalism
replaced it, but politics was not among his passionscertainly not in his portrait
work. His forte was depicting vital physicality, style, and modish elegance, none of
which typically characterized political gures as they did entertainers. Even Presi-
dent Roosevelt, the eras most photogenic politician, appears unextraordinary in
his portrait.28 He is seated at his desk, turned slightly toward the camera and
with a document in front of him. It is a stiff and hackneyed pose that resembles
scores of other standard public relations photographs of men of affairs.
Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

The Americans Steichen photographed enjoyed conspicuous success, their names
and faces already familiar to his audience. His portraits memorialized their national
standing as extraordinary persons of outstanding achievement and thus afrmed
the belief in individualism that the depression had not much weakened as a cen-
tral American value. His remarkable visual facility, moreover, his skill in inventing
almost endless variations on portraitures basic conventions, also proposed his sitters
unique distinctiveness. In that sense his portraits afrmed abiding condence in the
notion that success in America remained open to those with talent to seize it.
But emphasizing consumerism and individualism, and Steichens skill in celebrat-
ing them, may obscure another feature of the portraits cultural signicance. Vanity
Fairs readers saw fty or so every year, and in the aggregate they provided a tax-
onomy of those attributes he and the magazine believed mattered most in American
society. They put forward a view of the supposedly biological determinants of indi-
vidual destiny that, like the rest of the magazine, not only did not disturb readers
preconceptions but also reinforced them. For all its proclaimed dedication to the arts,
Vanity Fair regarded them as no more than amusing bagatelles and in this context
their inherent potential for reorienting an audiences perception became irrelevant.
Nowhere was that more apparent than in the social conventionality embedded in
Steichens ensemble of portraits.
Of the percent of Steichens sitters from the entertainment industry, three in
four are female performers. Among the remaining percent the proportions of
men and women change greatly. The only female among eight journalists is Doro-
thy Thompson, pictured with her husband, Sinclair Lewis. Ruth Bryan Owen is
73
the sole woman in political life. The daughter of William Jennings Bryan, a former
member of Congress, and Roosevelts appointee as ambassador to Denmark, she was
74 the rst woman to hold ambassadorial rank. Three of the fteen writers (Dorothy
Parker, Pearl Buck, and Colette) are women, but none of the six concert soloists is.
Only in opera, the art closest to popular theater, do women predominate; nine of
twelve are female, and two of the men are Metropolitan Opera administrators.29
Steichen depicted women in four of his sixteen portraits of sporting champions,
a tennis player (Helen Jacobs), two swimmers (Olive Hatch and Eleanor Holm), and
a group of Olympic divers. While sportsmen usually appear in street clothingthe
prizeghters Max Baer, Jack Dempsey, and James J. Braddock all nattily attired in
suits and necktiesfemale athletes are dressed to signify their sport. Swimmers and
divers wear swimwear, and Steichens treatment emphasizes glamour over prow-
ess. Hatch languishes against the corner of a pool, the camera looking down on her
toothy smile, lively eyes, and the drops of water beading her torso. Holm is simi-
larly sexualized in full body prole on a pool ladder and smiling brightly over her
shoulder, more a bathing beauty than an Olympic backstroke medalist.30
Except for a shot of the cast of The Green Pastures and another of the actor playing
God in that all-black production, the only African American in Steichens gallery is
Paul Robeson, featured twice. Both portray him in role, an exception to Steichens
usual procedure with actors. The rst commemorates a production entitled Black
Boy in which he played a prizeghter; Steichen depicted him in a boxers crouch
but incongruously grinning. His second appearance was occasioned by his title per-
formance in ONeills The Emperor Jones. This famous, frequently reprinted image
has more unsettling implications than the earlier one. Steichen moved in much
closer than usual so that the actors head and upper body ll the frame. Robeson
bunches his ornate gold-braided coat close to his neck and glowers menacingly over
his shoulder at the camera. Although Steichens portraits almost always appeared
discretely, a second, smaller photograph accompanied this one. Robeson is again in
costume but now seen full-length, smiling broadly and looking up and away from
the camera. Because this smaller image is much inferior and a second picture an
anomaly, it was unmistakably intended to neutralize the threatening hostility of the
larger one.31
The larger Emperor Jones picture notwithstanding, race and ethnicity nonplussed
Steichen. In two portraits of the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong he
juxtaposes her face with a large chrysanthemum to highlight her exoticism. He
ordinarily shunned such symbolic props presumably because they were predictable
and corny, and his resort to the chrysanthemum indicates a rare creative atfooted-
ness. A few years later he photographed her yet again, this time in color, when she
appeared in an elaborate oriental getup and again with symbolic props.32
A number of Jews sat for Steichen, including Walter Lippmann, George Ger-
shwin, and Robert Moses, but assimilation made their ethnicity irrelevant. Shortly
after Hitler came to power, however, Steichen photographed Dr. Stephen S. Wise,
an American rabbi and crusader against Nazi anti-Semitism. It was one of his
least successful portraits, a at, gray image without the expressive tonal contrasts
and sure-handed spatial organization that characterized his best work. He seemed
uncertain of how to dramatize Dr. Wise and his efforts effectively.33
As an ensemble Steichens portraits imply a homogeneous culture in which eth-
nic and racial differences are merely token ones. A Robeson or Wong might remind
viewers that all Americans are not of European ancestry, but they make up only a
tiny minority of his sitters. In portraying them, moreover, he tended to invoke reas-
suring stereotypesthe delicately exotic Asian or the smilingly carefree African
Americanthat would not disturb dominant cultural presuppositions. When a por-
trait did challenge such a stereotype, as did his superb shot of Robeson, someone
decided to temper it with a counter-image, another reminder of the collaboration
required in photographys display. Steichen made the portraits, which reveal his
perceptions as well as the sitters self-presentation, but Vanity Fairs editors then
supplied the context for them. Thus a boldface French word, Orientale, that pref-
aced the caption in Wongs rst appearance signaled that she represented something
strange, exotic, and foreign despite her life-long American citizenship.
Women achieved considerably more visibility than minorities in Steichens cul-
tural taxonomy but overwhelmingly as performers. They had earned some acclaim
as imaginative writers, but literature remained primarily a male activity. A handful
of female athletes were of interest if they lent themselves to glamorous treatment.
Most noteworthy journalists were men, and so were nearly all political gures. Only
their anomalousness made the unprecedented appointment of a female ambassa-
dor or the daring achievements of an Amelia Earhart noteworthy. Steichen pho-
tographed Earhart twice in the early thirties. The portraits gave her a certain eln
quality in their emphasis on her tousled hair and snub nose, but they portrayed her
without cuteness or condescension, as someone of substantial achievement who
happened to be female. But male achievement remained the standard, as the cap-
tion to her second appearance indicated. She was, it said, a Lady Lindbergh.34
Carl Van Vechten and Celebrity Photography

In Carl Van Vechtens novel Spider Boy the protagonists celebrity is authen-
ticated by having sat for a portrait by Steichen. A few years later, smitten by the
new Leica mm camera and inspired by the burst of photographic activity in the
thirties, Van Vechten gave up ction in favor of making photographs. He experi-
mented with street and architectural photography but realized that portraits inter-
75
ested him most. Drawing on his friendships in the arts he proceeded to photograph
some of the same people as Steichen, among them Katharine Cornell, Paul Robe-
76 son, Tallulah Bankhead, Eugene ONeill, Thomas Mann, George M. Cohan, and
Anna May Wong.
Van Vechten did not think of himself as a professional and had no need to. He
had recently inherited a million dollar trust fund and, like his friend Stieglitz, he
believed that remaining an amateur preserved his artistic integrity. Public exhibi-
tion of his work was limited. A selection appeared at the Leica exhibition in
alongside pictures by George Platt Lynes, Man Ray, and Steichen. The next year he
served as a juror for the Leica show, with twelve of his portraits shown in a special
display. He also occasionally published in magazines, as with his portrait of Geor-
gia OKeeffe in Life in .
Van Vechten had begun his career as a cultural journalist, eventually for maga-
zines like Seven Arts, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair, reviewing the performing arts
and writing enthusiastic essays about new developments in them and in literature,
on such topics as the music of Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie, Vaslav Nijinskys
revolution in dance, and the modernity of the recently rediscovered novels of Her-
man Melville. He also had a special interest in African American drama and jazz. In
the twenties he turned to ction with several gossipy popular novels, semiautobio-
graphical works in which his acquaintances from New Yorks artistic world made
thinly veiled appearances, people like Mabel Dodge Luhan, Theodore Dreiser, and
Stieglitz. One of these novels, Nigger Heaven, conrmed Van Vechtens standing
as the white liaison with the Harlem Renaissance then underway.35
Like Steichen, Van Vechten usually worked in his studio, where he kept an array
of costumes and props. But unlike Steichen he did not use a view camera, nor did
he have the impressive battery of lights and other technical supports that a pro-
fessionals studio would. He preferred the Leica for its ease of use, and the small
camera also allowed greater spontaneity although its negatives permitted less clar-
ity and detail than a view cameras.
Shortly after purchasing his Leica in Van Vechten photographed Paul Robe-
son, with whom he had been friendly for some time. The portrait, a torso shot with
Robeson against a mottled drapery background and looking directly into the lens,
is weak, compositionally bland and muddy, which is unsurprising inasmuch as Van
Vechten was a rank newcomer. He posed Robeson bare-chested, thereby emphasiz-
ing his robust physicality and endowing the portrait with a faint air of primitivism.
Nor was this treatment all that surprising. Van Vechten and other Negrophiles
hailed African Americans putative naturalness as among their most attractive
characteristics. For all their greater visual and technical brio, Steichens portraits
of Robeson connoted the primitive as well by depicting him in prizeghters trunks
and then as ONeills Emperor Jones, suggesting that contemporary cultural atti-
tudes made a less stereotyped portrayal of African Americans unlikely, although,
one of his Emperor Jones pictures broke with those conventions.36
Van Vechten and Steichen adopted similar approaches in their portraits of ONeill
and Thomas Mann. Both shot ONeill in one-quarter prole, meditatively look-
ing out of the frame. The playwrights handsome angularity, graying temples, and
aura of passionate intensity made him, as Steichen said, an ideal sitter. The similar-
ity of pose makes the greater crispness, clarity, and nish of Steichens treatment
all the more apparent. His technical superiority is even more evident in the Mann
portraits. Van Vechten made his outdoors, and with Mann in one-quarter prole
the sun hoods his eyes and casts a disguring shadow of his nose across his lower
face. Even so, the lighting is at and uninteresting. Steichen portrayed Mann in full
prole, and his careful lighting models his face and emphasizes his dignied, noble
bearing. For this shot Steichen eliminated his trademark patterned background;
Manns cultural standing demanded a less stylized treatment than pictures of show
business celebrities. The portraits of ONeill and Mann reveal Steichen as distinctly
the more adroit photographer, his technique surer than Van Vechtens and his grasp
of visual dynamics more acute.37
But technique and visual style are not all of photography, which is bound more
tightly to subject matter than the other visual arts. Although the camera has been
used for abstractions, it overwhelmingly nds its subjects in the tangible world of
people, places, and things. This literalism makes a photographers cultural imagi-
nation especially important, his or her capacity for revealing a fresh perspective on
an individuals signicance, the distinctive characteristics of an environment, or
the symbolic overtones of an object or event.
A comparison of Van Vechtens and Steichens portraits of Anna May Wong and
Tallulah Bankhead illuminates the cultural conventionality of Steichens Vanity Fair
portraits. Steichens uncommon use of symbolic props with Wong indicated his
discomture with race, but the spotlighted white chrysanthemum is not the only
unusual feature in his rst portrait of her. Wongs head also seems disembodied.
Her head lies cheek down on a shiny surface that darkly reects her visage and the
chrysanthemum. The owers luminousness emphasizes her tawniness and straight
black hair, thus serving as a double reminder of her race. The viewers spatial orien-
tation is further disturbed by Steichens asymmetrical division of the background.
A vertical black bar occupies the left one-third, and a longer bar is on the right,
light gray at its top and becoming darker toward the bottom. But the reections
of Wongs head and the ower interject an ambiguous horizontality as well so the
usual perception of what is vertical and horizontal is unstable. Her eyes are closed,
moreover, a detail that because her head seems disembodied introduces an unsettling
77
ambiguity. The uncertainty, with the equivocal perspective and doubling of face
and ower, gives the image a plangent mysteriousnesseven inscrutabilitythat
78 was contrary to Steichens usual meticulous legibility.
All photographs encourage a voyeuristic response, but this one does more than
most because Wongs eyes do not look back at a viewer and its visual structure is so
ingeniously disorienting. Possibly Wongs portrait might be seen as an irruption of
Surrealism into Steichens usually denotative portraiture, but it seems more plau-
sible to think of it as a photograph in which he heightened the sense of the strange
and exotic to correspond to the popular stereotype of the mysterious Orient. Its
stylistic virtuosity thus conrmed the most commonplace cultural attitudes about
Wongs race.
Van Vechtens portrait of Wong, made the same year, was in its own way as unusual
although very different in tone. In it he evokes the cross-dressing androgyny that
seemed culturally appealing during the thirties, as in several of Marlene Dietrichs
roles in Joseph von Sternbergs lms, most famously The Blue Angel (), or in
the virginal Priscilla Lanes nightclub act in Raoul Walshs The Roaring Twenties
() in which she and a showgirl chorus, Jean and Her Baby Bandits, perform
in simulacra of mens formal wear. Wong is similarly cross-dressed in a silk top hat,
dark jacket, and white neck scarf. Her eye makeup, plucked brows, and tapered n-
gernails leave small doubt, though, that this portrait is of a female. Van Vechtens
camera is close to her face, so the top of her hat and most of her jacket are cut off.
She raises a brimming champagne glass toward her lips. Such a combination of
cross-dressing and champagne-sipping (Prohibition being still in force) was deter-
minedly risqu, and equally so is the way Wong looks provocatively at the viewer.
If Steichen exoticisized Wong, Van Vechten eroticisized her. But unlike Steichen,
and in contrast to the movies in which she played (she was in the year of this por-
trait the embodiment of oriental sensuality in von Sternbergs Shanghai Express),
Van Vechten gave no special emphasis to her race. Making photographs to satisfy
himself, he was freer to disregard cultural stereotypes, more able to give rein to his
cultural imagination, than a photographer working for a popular magazine would
be. Perhaps, too, his longstanding camaraderie with nonwhites made him less sus-
ceptible, if not immune, to racial stereotyping.38
In Steichen and Van Vechten photographed the stage and screen actress
Tallullah Bankhead. Steichens Vanity Fair portrait corroborated her public repu-
tation as an uninhibited southern belle whose private life was as amboyant as her
acting. Curled up in a fringed armchair and leaning her cheek lightly on her hand,
she gazes languidly into the camera, the coy irtatiousness of her pose made more
explicitly erotic by her attire, a strapless, gleaming evening gown that shimmers in
Steichens careful lighting.39
When Van Vechten photographed Bankhead he employed chiaroscuro to suggest
a different woman than Steichens star treatment. He draped her torso in a black
cloth, leaving visible only her head and a glimpse of her shoulder, the drape merging
seamlessly with the equally black background and accented only by a mottled cloth
at the images left edge. Diffused light models her face, shadowing its right side and
emphasizing her plaintive expression and upraised, limpid eyes. Although it is pos-
sible to read her countenance in a number of waysas poignantly tender, or doleful,
or uncertain, perhaps even as quietly self-containednone is congruent with the
conventional view of Bankhead and her character, the one that Steichen ratied.40
All human beings have different faces for different moments, as true for portrait
sittings as other occasions. But for Bankhead sitting for Steichen was a professional
activity of career management; being photographed by Van Vechten was not. The
slinky metallic evening gown she wore for Steichen was her own, and she thus
collaborated with him in her own getup no less than in how she responded to his
direction. If his portrait was little more than an especially well-wrought version of
what an audience already believed about her, then she shared some responsibility
for that reaction.
Nevertheless, had he aspired to Steichen could have made portraits that chal-
lenged the Vanity Fair audiences conventional view of his sitters. His reputation
with the Cond Nast organization as the worlds greatest photographer would
have licensed it. Instead of attempting portraits that strove for psychological pen-
etration or cultural criticism, however, he settled for rening his extraordinary
technical adeptness and visual virtuosity and for abetting Vanity Fairs promotion
of consumerism. His portraits were a brilliant condensation of what urbane, well-
off Americans such as the magazines readers felt about some important aspects of
their societyits leisure pursuits, its arts, and even its politics. Their achievement
is more in the realm of craft than art, if art is understood as not solely an esthetic
discipline but an activity that has an analytical and critical relationship with the cul-
ture upon which it draws. Photography would uncommonly ourish as the decade
wore on, in part because of the impresario and pedagogical activities Steichen would
take on. As it did, other bodies of work came to the fore that more determinedly
than his expressed such a cultural ambition.
79
6
MoMAs
Big Top Show
To Demonstrate Photographic Documentation
In a talk Paul Strand lamented photographers ignorance of their his-
tory. He claimed only the back issues of Camera Work preserved it, and they
lay unconsulted in Alfred Stieglitzs archives. Photographers have no other
access to their tradition, to the experimental work of the past, he said. In
conating the Photo-Secession with photographys history Strand revealed
his own myopia, but his point was unexceptionable. Ten years later, though, a
more informed historical perspective had begun to take shape as such people
as Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Lincoln Kirstein sketched in a rough
outline of contemporary photographys antecedents. But a unied compre-
hensive history was still needed to legitimate photography as an artistic under-
taking and braid its past with its present vitality.1
The Museum of Modern Arts exhibition Photography, , which
was organized by Beaumont Newhall and opened in March , was Ameri-
can photographys most ambitious and consequential event. With exhibits, mostly
images but also equipment, it was a Big Top show in Alfred Barrs phrase and
commanded all of the museums four oors. Even though it drew thirty thousand
visitors in its month-long run this was considerably fewer than several contemporary
exhibitions elsewhere. Photographys art world did not yet revolve around muse-
ums. Although MoMAs imprimatur was welcome for giving the medium museum
dignity, the show conrmed rather than originated photographys enlarged stature
as an artistic and cultural practice. Its sponsorship by an institution of indisputable
standing, though, did have the immediate effect of intensifying the already strong
limelight on photography through the copious publicity the show stimulated, not
only in New York but also across the nation. Most important, Photography,
for the rst time formulated a comprehensive historyin its selections and
arrangement and discursively in its catalogthat with some additions and modi-
cations continues to hold sway several generations later.2
David McAlpin made the exhibition possible with a $, gift, although oddly
it was concealed from Newhall, who only learned of it forty years later. From the
outset Newhall knew what he wanted to emphasize. Writing to Paul Vanderbilt
shortly after Barr commissioned him to organize the show, he said that his goal
was to demonstrate photographic documentation, rather than emphasizing the art
boys. To reinforce this he would supplement the historical survey with a substan-
tial section of invited contemporary work. Putting the show together would give
him good opportunity to get started on a history, he told Vanderbilt, although
he imaginedinaccurately as it turned outthat he would not be able to say very
much in the catalog on the history. By documentation Newhall did not mean
what this term had come to denote, socially purposeful photography like that by
the Farm Security Administrations staff. Instead, it was synonymous with straight
photography or purism.3
Barr felt that because Newhall was young and little-known he needed a commit-
tee to advise him, and they agreed that Stieglitz should be its honorary chair. He,
however, emphatically refused the invitation. He would have nothing to do with
the exhibition, whether serving on the committee or lending pictures, nor would
he countenance MoMA borrowing his work. He relented only by consenting that
photogravures from Camera Work might be exhibited. I dont want any of my work
shown in the museum, Newhall quoted him in a letter to MoMAs president, A.
Conger Goodyear. I have done my work for photography. I seek no fame. Stieg-
litz later said that he had refused because the show would do more harm than good,
whatever its good intentions, and Newhalls plans for it were entirely contrary to
what he, Stieglitz, had dedicated his life to. Newhall was doing exactly what I felt
was a falsication of valuesprimarily because of ignorance. Behind this charac-
teristically wobbly formulation, Newhall thought, were Stieglitzs pique at MoMAs
MoMas Big Top Show
81
prestige and his uninterest in photographys history except for those photogra-
phers whose work he championed.4
82 The advisory committee, so far-ung it never met, included two photographers,
Edward Steichen and Lszl Moholy-Nagy; Eastman Kodaks research director;
the Royal Photographic Societys president and the editor of a French photography
journal; the documentary lmmaker and historian Paul Rotha; and Alexy Brodovich,
the art director of Harpers Bazaar. Most of what advice Newhall got came from
two nonmembers, Adams and Weston, and the committee was window-dressing.
It was Newhalls show.5
More circumscribed than its universal title intimated, most exhibits came from the
United States, Britain, and France, including all but a tiny number of its historical
ones. The contemporary section was more cosmopolitan but deceptively so because
all nine East Europeans representedfrom Poland, Hungary, and Rumanialived
in Paris, London, or New York as did ve of the ten Germans. It included no pho-
tographers from Russia, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Italy, or the Balkans, nor
from the Middle East, Africa, South America, or the Antipodes. A single Japanese
photographer, Yonosuke Natori, represented the world beyond the North Atlantic.
Politics accounted for several of the exiles and some of the omissions. Moholy-Nagy,
then living in London, was a refugee from the Nazis, as were Erwin Blumenfeld in
Paris and Martin Munkcsi in New York. When he went abroad to gather material
Newhall felt he should not visit Germany in the Olympic summer of , and
although he later regretted not including August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch,
he was then ignorant of their work. Because he did not solicit from the Soviet Union,
Alexander Rodchenko and the Constructivists were also unrepresented.
Distaste for totalitarian dictatorships may have inuenced Newhalls emphasis
on the Western democracies, but four other factors seem at least as important. The
rst was Eurocentricism, and West Eurocentricism at that, an entirely unexamined
attitude at the time, especially in art circles. Second, a theme of progress under-
pinned the show, technological advances stimulating richer artistic achievement.
Photography had been invented in France, and most of its technological improve-
ments were pioneered in the industrially advanced West, this emphasis thus anchor-
ing his attention there. The third factor was budgetary. Newhall had limited travel
support and believed a Paris visit essential and a London one desirable, these two
stops consuming his few weeks abroad. The fourth factor, though, was probably
most inuential. Photographic history in the mid-thirties was nearly a blank, and
what did exist centered on Western Europe, mostly in French and German. As he
later said, his European visit allowed him to touch original documents, but by
and large, it was the secondary sources that I followed, especially histories by J. M.
Eder and Georges Potonnie. Their inuence meant that Newhalls focus would
remain rmly centered on Western Europe and the United States.6
Framing a History
One-third of the exhibits traced photographys development to , and another
third centered on the postworld war era. The long interim was represented by
only about percent, echoing the characterization of these years as creatively fal-
low by such previous writers as Evans and Kirstein. Specialized formats and uses
made up the balance. Stereoscopic, color, and press photographs each had a small
section; scientic uses (x-ray, stroboscopic, and aerial) about percent; and movie
stills percent.
The earliest era Newhall organized by processdaguerreotype, calotype, paper
positive, collodian, and ambrotypethus emphasizing technological determinants
even though in some cases that meant separating a photographers pictures. But
it nevertheless established a roster of early masters that proved durable, including,
from France, Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, and Nadar; from England, D. O.
Hill and Robert Adamson, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Julia Margaret Cam-
eron; and from America, Albert S. Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes, Mathew Brady,
and Alexander Gardner. The exhibitions roominess permitted generous selections.
There were twenty-eight by Brady, for instance, including a carte-de-visite album,
portraits, and Civil War photographs. Only a handful of the exhibitors had been seen
in Americanot even this many Bradys since the nineteenth centuryand never
together on such a scale. Although it included a few moralizing, anecdotal works by
Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, who were English, their manipulated
pictures were meant to indicate a dead end, a betrayal of photographys true genius
for precise rendering and a contrast to the predominant documentary exhibits.
Likewise implying technologys inuence was Newhalls rubric for photographys
second period, to : Dry Plate Photography. Again, it foregrounded indi-
vidual achievements and the straight esthetic, as with its eight Edweard Muybridge
pictures, mostly of animal locomotion. It included an equal number of Stieglitzes,
seven Camera Work photogravures and, balking his wishes, The StreetFifth Ave-
nue, , loaned by the Albright and acquired by it after the exhibition. To
ten additional prints by Photo-Secessionists Newhall added thirteen Camera Work
photogravures. Although the movement Stieglitz led was well-represented, neither
he nor it dominated. Instead, Eugne Atget was the eras most visible exhibitor, his
work constituting about one-fourth of its total with, in addition to nineteen indi-
vidual images, twenty-three exhibits loaned by Abbott, including his scrapbooks
and an album. Newhall thus sustained earlier efforts to diminish the Photo-Seces-
sions signicance by advancing an alternative history that essentialized documen-
tary delity and erected a tradition that ran from Hill, Nadar, and Brady through
Muybridge and Atget, including Stieglitzs work but conceived as contributory and
not originative.7
MoMas Big Top Show
83
The contemporary section showed pictures by seventy-seven photographers,
three-quarters of them French or American. The number allotted to each inevitably
84 suggested a hierarchy. With thirteen Strand had twice as many as any other Ameri-
can. Supplementing Steichens six, though, were ve in the prewar section and three
in color, and it seems likely that Newhall wanted to suggest a rough equivalence.
Several veterans of earlier shows also had sixBerenice Abbott, Ansel Adams,
Anton Bruehl, Walker Evans, and Edward Weston. So did Thomas Bouchard (a
dance photographer) and Ira Martin, little seen since Julien Levys New York by
New Yorkers exhibition ve years earlier. Margaret Bourke-White exhibited ve
images, as did Paul Outerbridge in the color section, followed by a heterogeneous
group with four each, most known for magazine or government work: Louise Dahl-
Wolfe, George Platt Lynes, Remie Lohse, and Lusha Nelson (Cond Nast), William
Rittase (Fortune), and Charles Krutch (the TVA). Also in this group were Charles
Sheeler and Ralph Steinerperhaps because both by then had largely abandoned
photography for painting (Sheeler) or lmmaking (Steiner), although Strand had
turned to lmmaking, too, without diminishing his representationalong with Brett
Weston, still junior to his father. Americans represented by three or fewer images
included the fashion specialist Munkcsi, Imogen Cunningham from Group f.,
onetime Farm Security Administration (FSA) staff member Theodor Jung, and
the government photographer Peter Sekaer.8
Newhall likely had several reasons for giving Strand such prominence. He had
been notable since the teens whereas most of the others were younger, or, if not,
like Edward Weston unrecognized until later. Strand also provided a link with
Stieglitz and symbolically if not actually with early efforts to legitimize photog-
raphy as art, so a generous selection of his work might compensate for Stieglitzs
refusal to exhibit. Getting Strand to show at all was a coup, moreover, because he
usually refused to lend to exhibitions and had been seen only occasionally during
the thirties. Finally, Newhall was likely intimidated. Strand made clear his disap-
proval of such an eclectic assemblage. It ought to exhibit only Hill, Atget, Stieglitz,
and himself, he told Newhall, each with a oor to themselves. In the face of such
imperious self-assurance thirteen pictures must not have seemed excessive.9
While straight photography dominated, the contemporary section also included
a counterpoint of experimental work by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, with smaller
representations of Francis Bruguire, Lux Feininger, Florence Henri, and Christian
Schad, all Europeans or American expatriates. Among Man Rays seven exhibits
were several Rayographs, and among the thirteen by Moholy-Nagy ve Pho-
tograms, cameraless images that revealed the mediums potential for abstraction.
Both showed negative prints as well. As in the earlier Brooklyn and Levy shows
they highlighted contrasts between European and American modes, the former
playfully experimental and closer to developments in the other visual arts, the latter
laying more emphasis on clarity, delity to subject, and awless technical execution.
These differences underscored not only different formal priorities but also implied
unlike conceptions of audience, the Europeans working for an avant-garde while
the Americans aimed at a wider, more popular viewership.
Many years later Newhall maintained that the exhibition included amazingly,
every one of that generation who is today considered of major importance in the
eld. But this assertion was inaccurate because among those excluded were Lewis
Hine and Dorothea Lange, by any reckoning major talents, and a case could also be
made for Langes FSA colleagues Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn.
Hine would only be discovered by Abbott and others a little later, but Newhalls
neglect of the FSA photographers is more mystifying. He later acknowledged the
FSA as the really exciting thing at the time but claimed he had been unaware of
it. This explanation is suspect because, while he was preparing the show, Langes
Migrant Mother appeared in the U.S. Cameraas her White Angel Bread
Line had in the numberand a controversy over Rothsteins shot of a steers
skull erupted in the newspapers. Moreover, when Newhall reviewed Adamss Mak-
ing a Photograph it had been decisive in convincing him to emphasize straight pho-
tography; its only illustration not by Adams was White Angel Bread Line. In any
case the show did include two FSA photographers (without acknowledging their
employer). Evans had a prior afliation with MoMA, but the reason for Jungs
inclusion is mysterious. As the weakest of its staff he had soon been red, and how
Newhall came across his work is unknown.10
Newhalls indifference to the FSA project and neglect of Lange suggest two
conclusions. One is the thinness of his command of contemporary photography,
not surprising in that he was young (twenty-nine when the show opened) and an
autodidact in a subject with as yet little critical discourse. Second, the art-histori-
cal world in which he had trained at Harvard, and in which he worked at the Met-
ropolitan and Philadelphia museums, fetishized esthetic connoisseurship, and its
formalist orientation made it inattentive to pictures made with a social purpose.
This constellation of values did not forbid but did not encourage Newhall to notice
the FSA project. So rich had the activity in documentary become, though, that it
soon became inescapable and forced a broadening of his horizons. The next year
he would publish an appreciation of Hine and an essay on social documentary.11
Only skimpily represented was magazine work, notably Bourke-Whites industrial
studies, although several fashion specialists showed nonfashion pictures, including
Cecil Beaton, Dahl-Wolfe, Munkcsi, Lynes, and Steichen. Unlike the U.S. Camera
annuals and some previous exhibitions, MoMA mostly preserved the distinction
between artistic and commissioned photographs. For a museum wanting to afrm
the respectability of a still fragilely established art form it was an unsurprising line
to draw. But by including so many fashion specialistsvirtually all of them except
MoMas Big Top Show
85
Horst P. Horst, George Hoyningen-Huen, and Toni Frissellthe shows roster
acknowledged the arbitrariness of the distinction.12
86 As a whole, Photography, traced a rich history of achievement in which
masterpieces began to be made almost simultaneously with the cameras invention.
Its most immediate outcome was to make photography seem no longer an upstart by
providing it with a distinguished past. At the same time, it made its present continu-
ous with (but implicitly an advance over) its earliest years by virtue of the plentitude
of contemporary talent. A parallel technological history subtly reinforced this notion
of esthetic progress as increasingly sophisticated equipment enabled photographers
to depict more fully and intensively the world around them. Attendees could trace
this history through nearly two dozen apparatus exhibits, measuring the advance
from Bradys blackout tent for sensitizing plates at Antietam to the portable, com-
pact Leica that Admiral Richard Byrd carried in the Arctic. Conating technologi-
cal development and artistic achievement not only foregrounded photographys
dynamism but also its historys congruence with a deep-seated American faith in
the improving power of technology. At MoMA progress was photographys hall-
mark, and the depression had hardly if at all diminished Americans embrace of
this theory as the engine of history.13
Newhall regarded the exhibition as a crusade for pure photography, and that
emphasis rmly aligned it with the regnant American esthetic since the war. It
required disconrming the proposition that the Photo-Secession marked a fateful
turning point and inscribing instead such early workers as Brady and Nadar as the
discoverers of its true path, Atget as their avatar, and the leading Americans as their
lineal descendents. It required as well diminishing the signicance of European
experimentalism, which in its way represented as painterly an esthetic as the Photo-
Secession. Only three contemporary continental workersBrassa, Man Ray, and
Moholy-Nagyshowed as many as ve photographs, whereas twelve Americans
had that many or more. In the midst of so much straight work the experimental
images seemed aberrant, novelties aslant of the main line of development exempli-
ed by the Americans. If the historical sections implied the equivalence of European
and American traditions, moreover, the plurality of contemporary Americans sug-
gested that now, at least, they were rst among equals. All of these arguments had
been made in the preceding years by others. Thus, irrespective of the uniqueness of
sponsorship by a major museum, Photography, did not represent a new
departure so much as the triumphant culmination of an ongoing struggle to redene
photographys traditions and its achievement, a struggle that had taken impetus from
efforts to reinvent its art world, beginning a half-dozen or so years earlier. Those
endeavors laid the ideational foundation for Newhalls survey, and the energies they
released made the exhibition possible, if not inevitable, by creating a perception that
photography commanded the allegiance of an uncommonly appreciative audience
and had entered a new phase of extraordinary artistic vitality.14
Recomposing a History
Newhalls catalog codied the principles and judgments around which he had
organized the exhibition. It traced technological advances and the triumph of pure
photography in the work of several dozen of the mediums most gifted workers,
from anonymous daguerreotypists to Strand and Weston. With only two sections
entirely devoted to individuals, its heroes were Brady, whose Civil War photo-
graphs depicted an appalling reality, and Atget, who made his pictures with-
out reference to any other form of graphic art. Photographys nemesis was the
temptation to imitate painting. Those who did so misunderstood its principles
and properties, mistakenly disbelieving that straightforward, unmanipulated
prints were legitimate works of art. Nadars contemporary Adam Salomon, with
his Rembrandt lighting, was one such miscreant. Others were the Photo-Seces-
sionists, whose vision was guided by the example of painters and draftsmen, and
the European experimentalists, whose shadowgraphs seem as much in the tradi-
tion of painting as a diffuse pictorialist landscape. Newhall hailed contemporary
American practice as the triumphant culmination of nearly a centurys effort to
rene photographys essence.15
He averred that although the nest pictures were made by workers who had a keen
sense of the cameras special capabilities, how a photographer uses the medium is
usually determined by the age in which he lives. Despite this formulation the cata-
log remained almost entirely silent about how history and culture shape a body of
work. Newhalls method was intransigently formalist. His judgments were premised
on an artists dedication to seeing photographically and eschewing paintings conven-
tions. Photography has compositional elements peculiar to itself, he insisted, and
uses chiaroscuro and color values uniquely. Two basic types established models
for its subsequent development: One originated in the daguerreotype and stressed
detail, the other in the calotype and emphasized an artfully lighted mass. This for-
malist scheme, centering exclusively on structural and tonal characteristics, disre-
gards how extrinsic forces also inuence photographs. Newhall thus created a self-
referential history as abstracted from the larger world of affairs as developments
in the other visual arts. If such a formalism was not inescapableGiselle Freunds
La photographie en France au dix-neuvime sicle: Essai de sociologie et desthetique,
published the previous year, was included in the catalogs bibliography and had a
considerably more distinct cultural bentperhaps that was to be expected given
MoMas Big Top Show
87
Newhalls understanding of his task, to create an artistic history for a medium that
had only recently become aware it had one and to justify photographys claim to
88 equal representation in a ne arts museum.16
The catalogs three thousandcopy print run was soon exhausted, and it was
reissued the next year as Photography: A Short Critical History. A biographical
indexa paragraph or two on the most important exhibitors and a list of their
publicationsreplaced the exhibit inventory, and Newhall slightly altered some
chapter headings. Otherwise catalog and book were identical, with two notable
exceptions. He completely revised the Photo-Secession section and dedicated the
new publication to Stieglitz, with his Grape Leaves and House, Lake George
() as its frontispiece.
Stieglitz experienced second thoughts about his refusal to cooperate, perhaps
because he recognized that his authority could no longer be merely asserted and that
by the absence of all but his early pictures he was diminishing the perception of his
achievement. Lewis Mumford complained in a New Yorker review that the show
included no recent Stieglitzes and then served as go-between to carry Newhalls
message that he would like to dedicate the forthcoming book to Stieglitz. Georgia
OKeeffe got in touch and invited Newhall to visit the ailing Stieglitz, who blessed the
book by encouraging him to select whatever print he wished for the frontispiece.
That accomplished, Newhall rewrote the Photo-Secession section. The catalog
had said sharp things about the group, that they not only aped painting and were
unhealthily inuenced by the doctrine of art for arts sake but also that their arbi-
trary limitation on prints struck from a negative violated an inherent character-
istic of photography. After the Albright show, moreover, they had lost interest in
photography in favor of painting, as later numbers of Camera Work amply revealed.
The catalog included no discussion of specic Stiegitz photographs, and his col-
leagues came in for more attention than he did.17
The book versions emphasis, tone, and details differed entirely. The new section
was retitled Alfred Stieglitz, thus joining him to Brady and Atget as the mediums
geniuses, and the only living one. Most of the other Photo-Secessionists disappeared,
and discussion centered almost entirely on his standing as photographys command-
ing sagehis heroic ght for recognition of its artistic stature, his images lyrical
beauty as well as their archetypal power, and the nobility of his character. Even
Camera Works turn away from photography was logical and direct, for Stieglitz and
the group were alive to every type of revelation through pictures. Jettisoned were
the comments about art for arts sake and the impropriety of limiting prints.18
The story of these changes is amusing for its revelation of Stieglitzs appar-
ently unabashed inconsistency as well as of Newhalls fawning eagerness to reverse
direction as soon as Stieglitzs imprimatur had been secured. Newhalls irresolu-
tion may also indicate how tentatively he grasped photographys history. But his
revised estimate also aligned the book even more tightly with a formalist empha-
sis, for by apotheosizing Stieglitz it endorsed as well the practices he represented,
including specically the insignicance of subject matter and the centrality of the
photographers subjectivity, neither much emphasized in the catalog. To illustrate
these newly acquired principles the book quoted Stieglitzs statement about his
cloud photographs. They were meant to demonstrate, he said, my philosophy of
lifeto show that my photographs were not due to subject matter.19 Most reveal-
ing is the fact that Newhall, by the time he was revising, had learned about the FSA
and Hine yet felt no need to include them in the book.
Although the exhibition displayed the government-sponsored documentary pic-
tures of Abbott, Evans, Jung, Krutch, and Sekaer, it included them for the purity
of their esthetic rather than their cultural insight. Newhalls evaluative criteria left
little room for instrumental value, and documentary is always made for some addi-
tional purpose beyond inscribing the photographers consciousness. His formalism
and neglect of photographys social dimensions made his method a poor one for
understanding this practice. The show, catalog, and book coincided with a burst of
activity in documentary, and it was a liability that Newhalls formulation of critical
standards offered so little guidance about it. He would shortly attempt to include
it under the now gurative Big Top, but even then he had difculty letting go of
his commitment to connoisseurship and the overriding importance of individual
authorship, which made for an uneasy embrace. Others, though, had begun to take
up this task. What resulted was dialogue about photographys cultural work that
soon ourished and even entered mainstream discourse to a degree unmatched
since photographys earliest era.
A National Audience
The extraordinary attention elicited by the exhibition epitomized how lively public
interest in photography had become by . Even before it opened the Times and
Herald Tribune reprinted eleven exhibits in their Sunday editions, followed by news
stories and reviews. Other New York newspapers likewise previewed and reviewed it.
The Mirror encouraged a visit because you will see in that exhibition the birth of
what is today our greatest . Across the Hudson the New Brunswick Times
urged readers to attend, for in a way the exhibition is almost as epoch-making as
had been Daguerres announcement to the French Academy.
Most reviews were warmly appreciative. Time commended the shows contribu-
tion to the museums great series of loan exhibitions, and the New York Americans
Thomas Craven asserted that in genuine popular interest it was MoMAs best
ever. The catalog won comparable plaudits, an invaluable record said the Mon-
MoMas Big Top Show
89
treal Gazette, one of the best short critical histories . . . in any language accord-
ing to Mumford. He and Jerome Mellquist in the Brooklyn Eagle caviled slightly
90 about the exhibitions esthetic unselectivity, and Craven disapproved of the cata-
logindeed, all MoMA catalogswhich he deprecated as elaborate monographs
written by addled aesthetes in a language resembling medieval Latin. But such
reservations were minor notes even in those reviews. Besides Mumfords complaint
about too few Stieglitzes, only one reviewer, the New Masses Elizabeth Noble
(Elizabeth McCauslands pen name in the magazine), had a specic suggestion for
improvement. She regretted that so few FSA images were included. The single
hostile review was Henry McBrides in the New York Sun. By this date he atly
dismissed the idea that photography belonged in an art museum. Photographs were
machine products and photographers only machinists, and even if the vast mass
of photography that has descended upon us entranced a credulous public, it had
brought on this second edition of the dark ages that eclipsed paintings rightful
preeminence. His tirade seemed merely cranky. As Mumford said, the question of
whether photography was an art, still a lively one a few years before, had since been
entirely settled in the afrmative.
Nor was publicity conned to the metropolitan area. Life reprinted several exhibits,
and newspapers across the nation also ran reproductions and stories, often adapted
from the museums publicity materials. Such notices appeared in Birmingham, Jack-
sonville, and Miami, in Kalamazoo, Chicago, and Des Moines, in Boston, Syracuse
and Hartford, and in Tucson, Portland, and Seattle. The Santa Monica Outlook
boastfully headlined its feature Work of Santa Monica Artist Will Be Shown at
Exhibition of Photography in New York (the artist was Weston). These news sto-
ries contributed to the general sense that the exhibition was a signal event with a
cultural signicance more profound than the usual museum show. The reproduc-
tions made artful photography daily fare for the nations magazine and newspaper
readers.20
The lavish journalistic attention indicated how MoMAs imprimatur provided an
indisputable pedigree for an art form that, even if popular, had once seemed dubi-
ous. Its sponsorship advertised as well that the museum had enrolled as an institu-
tional member of photographys art world and could be counted upon to lend its
heft in the future. But the museums stature alone cannot account for the extraor-
dinary national coverage, greater than with other MoMA shows. Across the country
people had become absorbed by photography. The explosive number of amateurs
accounted for some of this interest, as did the sheer quantity of pictures to which
Americans were exposed in magazines like the four-month-old Life, a number so
large, as McBride disgustedly put it, that the term ocean seems perilously like
an understatement. Equally though, the wide publicity for the exhibition rested
on the foundation earlier enlistees in photographys art world had erected to sup-
port an enlarged arena for its activities, one that would encompass a broader, more
popular audience than artistic disciplines commonly enjoyed.
Photography, was up at MoMA for a month but continued to have a
half-life long after. Newhalls book, revised several times, extended it indenitely
as it became the standard history in English. Two camera publications brought it to
a likely different audience, mostly amateur enthusiasts. U.S. Camera reprised
its nineteenth-century sections, sixteen pages of exhibits with a preface by Newhall
and notes on the artists displayed (seventeen contemporary exhibitors appeared in
the annuals portfolio as well). Popular Photography featured a lengthy illustrated
piece tracing the amazing progress of photography that acknowledged its depen-
dence on Newhalls history.21
In addition, two versions of the exhibition traveled to more than twenty cities dur-
ing the next two years. The smaller one, costing $ for a two-week loan, included
exhibits and went to several department stores, including F. R. Lazurus in
Columbus and J. L. Hudson in Detroit, as well as to a number of college galleries
and artistic institutions like Uticas Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute and the New
Bauhaus in Chicago. These showings often involved ancillary activities to increase
their visibility. A commercial borrower would publicize the event in newspaper
advertising, sponsor a radio talk, and solicit local camera clubs, art museums, and
colleges, as did the Hutzler Brothers store in Baltimore. These methods and the
publics predisposition succeeded in attracting good audiences. More than ,
persons visited the exhibition at the B. Forman store in Rochester, and a J. Horne
Company executive in Pittsburgh reported that it had created considerable inter-
est among its clientele.
The larger version encompassed more than exhibits and cost borrowers $
for a months rental. Designed for museums, it traveled to ten of them, in Philadel-
phia, Boston, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, Andover,
Manchester, and Springeld, Massachusetts, drawing good crowds everywhere. The
curator of Andovers Addison Gallery reported that it had attracted an unusually
large number of visitors, as did the Springeld museums director, who added that
more men than usual attended and visitors do not stay a few minutes to examine
it, but hours. According to the Springeld News, it was the years most popular
exhibition.
The traveling versions also elicited enthusiastic journalistic attention. In Boston
all four leading newspapers ran lengthy features and several reproductions, and
similar attention was commonplace wherever the exhibit traveled. Contemporary
work now made up fully half of the exhibition, preponderantly by Americans, and
provided local commentators with the occasion to celebrate American preeminence.
To the Springeld Republicans reviewer, The contemporary product is seen to be
far ahead of its predecessors and the American product well to the fore, a sentiment
MoMas Big Top Show
91
echoed by a colleague at the Morning Union, who singled out Abbott and Bourke-
White for special distinction. Echoing the metropolitan reviewers except McBride,
92 the provincial reviewers applauded their museums for bringing photographys n-
est achievements to local audiences eager to see them and expressed certainty that
they belonged there. Although not quite a hundred years old, editorialized the
Rochester Democrat-Chronicle, photography has already achieved the status of an
independent art with its own fundamental basic standards, aesthetics, and termi-
nology.22
A few months after its article reprising Newhalls history, Popular Photography
began an ongoing series of cartoon strips depicting important events in it. Although
at rst Newhall felt this format demeaned his research, eventually it gratied him,
for he believed the cartoons were proof that the exhibition was not a scholarly
exercise, but had meaning to photographers. But his distinction was misleading
because he had been simultaneously an impresario, scholar, and popular educator,
and these roles were more intertwined than they usually are. For leading photogra-
phers, Photography, validated their artistic bona des and provided
an uncommonly prestigious opportunity to display their work to an inuential frac-
tion of photographys audience. For MoMAs attendees and the larger audience that
learned about Newhalls history from magazines, the traveling versions, and the
catalog or book, it served an educational purpose, carrying on the pedagogical mis-
sion that others had begun in less methodical ways. But perhaps its greatest service
was its most scholarly, its formulation of a history. Without a coherent, develop-
mental history photography would remain a minor art, like weaving or wood carv-
ing, because one denition of a major art form is that it has a history composed of
periods of rich growth and others of consolidation and perhaps stagnation. Such
a history claries who the mediums masters have been and what their work has
to say to the present. As nothing else could the exhibition conferred legitimacy, a
sense of purpose, and an atmosphere of dynamism on the ambitiously reinvigorated
artistic enterprise that thirties photography had become.23
7
Camera Periodicals
and the Popular Audience
An American Institution
Sensing in the rising tide of interest in photography, an energetic young
entrepreneur named Thomas J. Maloney composed a piece on its coming of
age that turned out to be the prospectus for a publication he would launch
two years later, the U.S. Camera annual. Photography had become the avatar
of Currier and Ives in supplying visual art to a broad spectrum of Americans,
he argued, and reproductions were the primary channel through which the
best photographers reached viewers. His notions were antithetical to those to
which artistic photography had traditionally subscribed, which on the model
of the other visual arts privileged ne prints displayed in rened metropoli-
tan settings for a select group of connoisseurs. Maloney imagined instead an
inclusive, interested, and alert national audience receiving pleasure and edi-
cation from the wide diffusion of photographys nest pictures.1
In the new annual Maloney aspired to gather the years best work in an
inexpensive format attractive to camera enthusiasts and also to the broader audience
that artful photographys newfound vigor had begun to create. To provide expert
94 sanction he enlisted an advisory committee, of which Steichen became the most
inuential member, so much so that soon Maloney dispensed with the committee
and relied solely on Steichen. And in order to keep the annuals price lowunder
three dollars, less than half what European predecessors sold forhe solicited
advertising from commercial specialists and photographic manufacturers and seg-
regated it at the back of the book.2
U.S. Cameras format varied little over the years: prefatory assessments of cur-
rent developments, an appendix of technical data, and the bulk of each volume a
portfolio of two hundred or so pictures with nearly all leading photographers regu-
larly featured. Images appeared most often full-page, on sturdy paper that crisply
reproduced them. After its rst two numbers textual features about leading artists
supplemented these basic components. With their oversized dimensionsabout
nine by twelve inchesand substantial heft the annuals were designed for readers
libraries as an ongoing record of photographic culture.3
From its outset U.S. Camera enjoyed commercial and critical success. Its inaugural
edition of fteen thousand sold out one month after publication. The print
run of twenty-ve thousand was also depleted within a month. Raised again in
to thirty-ve thousand, so successful did it continue to be that in it appeared in
two volumes. A reviewer of the rst number used exactly Maloneys words of two
years earlier to characterize it. It may truly be said, he wrote, that the publication
of this volume marks the coming of age of American Photography. Following the
second, another remarked that the publication was well on its way to becoming an
American institution. Reviewing a later edition, Ralph Steiner endorsed its avoid-
ance of the precious atmosphere of an art gallery, the reason, he said, why it would
interest a big audience rather than a few fellow photographers.4
The annuals success encouraged others to cultivate this big audience as well,
and photography magazines burgeoned during the mid-thirties, when a half-dozen
commenced publication. Supported by advertising and wooing newsstand buyers,
they strove to cultivate the widest possible readership from the ourishing ranks of
amateurs. According to one estimate, Americans bought two million new cameras
every year, and dedicated hobbyists, especially vigorous consumers, traded up their
cameras, added gadgets, built darkrooms, and purchased supplies and lm. The
commercial potential offered by this marketamong the brightest spots in thir-
ties consumer culturefueled the magazines as manufacturers and retailers sought
targeted outlets to advertise their wares.5
Most of the magazines emphasized how-to articles on camera technique. But
two broke with that formula by interleaving practical advice with proles of lead-
ing artists and other editorial features pertinent to artful photography, sometimes
written by photographers themselves. Popular Photography commenced monthly
publication in , and a spin-off of the annuals, U.S. Camera Magazines rst
issue appeared the next year, its initial number a quarterly, then a bimonthly until
mid- when it, too, became a monthly. Printed on pulp paper, Popular Photog-
raphy sold for fteen cents and targeted a mass market; by it had attained a
circulation of about ,. At fty cents the oversized U.S. Camera Magazine had
higher production values, with crisp reproductions on slick paper and occasionally
gravure inserts on textured stock. No less a perfectionist than Ansel Adams said
that it and the annual represent[ed] the best reproduction extant. U.S. Camera
Magazines readership in was about twenty-ve thousand.6
The annual and magazines differed in format but in complementary ways. U.S.
Cameras portfolios made it an ongoing survey of how broadly photographic excel-
lence was distributed. Usually, however, contributors showed only a single picture,
which prevented purchasers from developing a solid sense of the artists style, char-
acteristic approach, or cultural interests. The magazines abundantly supplied these
perspectives in textual features with plentiful examples of the leading photogra-
phers work. Together, camera periodicals thus revealed a photographic culture
that was multifariously vibrant and in which a cadre of acknowledged masters had
recently emerged.7
Besides providing new venues for artists the publications enlarged photographys
art world by inviting into it a broad popular audience. With their unapologetic com-
mercial ambience they operated independent of patronage by cultural elites. They
emerged just as gallery exhibition languished and addressed a large national viewer-
ship no metropolitan setting could match. Their launch made Beaumont Newhall
later remark that in the mid-thirties we were on the brink of a revolution as stag-
gering as any photography in its hundred years of existence had experienced. That
revolution was not esthetic but in the new audiences it commanded and the novel
channels through which it was disseminated.8
A Real American Native Art

As its title indicated, U.S. Cameras emphasis on domestic developments reinforced
the already well-established distinction between continental experimentation and
straight American work. In its inaugural number Dmitri Kessels multiple exposure
of buildings and clouds approximated European modes, but it was an anomaly; such
images continued to be rare, representing only an innitesimal number among the
, photographs in the prewar portfolios. In Popular Photography and U.S. Cam-
era Magazine they never appeared at all, even as an increasing number of European
migr photographers settled in the United States.9
Camera Periodicals
95
Consonant with U.S. Cameras ambition to be the mediums arbiter, synoptic
assessments of current developments by Steichen or Maloney prefaced each edi-
96 tion, supplemented by speculative essays locating photography within its larger
cultural and artistic contexts. Both regularly emphasized the superiority of Amer-
ican practice, as did M. F. Aghas introduction to the inaugural issue, which laid
out two theories to account for American preeminence. One theory rehearsed the
insalubrious atmosphere aficting the ne arts, repressed by Puritans, ignored by
materialists, and culturally insecure, so that artists slavishly aped every European
fad and in the end were derivative and irrelevant. But because it was considered
outside the ne arts bailiwick photography had escaped this contamination. Not
only was it lustily original but it also inuenced European artists, showing such
an amazing degree of visceral fortitude that you suspect it of being this elusive
thinga Real American Native Art. Aghas second theory complemented the
rst and asserted that the New Worlds cultural uniqueness inspired novel artistic
modes, photography ranking among the most original. It was the perfect means
of graphic expression for an artist who lives in the days of skyscrapers, engineers,
saxophones, and tap dancing, he wrote, these emblems of modernization and of
an exuberant popular culture more characteristic of America than elsewhere, so
that it boasted bigger and better photographers whose pictures were a monu-
ment to the American Supremacy in the eld of Modern Photography. With all
of his capitalized abstractions Agha had his tongue in his cheek, but only its tip.
Both theories were pretty good, he averred, as the annuals powerful, simple,
and exciting contents amply demonstrated.10
If his wry generalizations had an Olympian sweep, Elizabeth McCauslands intro-
duction to a later number was more earnest and particular, although her conclu-
sions resembled his. Her title, One Hundred Years of the American Standard of
Photography, asserted the distinctiveness of domestic practice and implied its pre-
eminence. Foremost among the criteria enshrined by a centurys experience were
realism, honesty, the thing itself, not the photographers subjective, introverted
emotion about the thing, these ideals demanding clear denition and brilliancy
and sharpness. By its faithfulness to this esthetic, she declared, photography has
conquered America.11
Both writers thus afrmed straight photography as the only plausible practice,
textually justifying the annuals exclusion of deviations from it. Their endorse-
ments and these omissions in turn reected a broader tendency in the thirties to
emphasize American uniqueness and to regard the national culture as almost entirely
divorced from transatlantic developments. Such insularity could also comfortably
ourish because the number of gifted photographers was so large, their work so
distinguished, and their pictures so omnipresent that the atmosphere of an Ameri-
can renaissance militated against heterodoxy. Had straight photography been less
vigorously expansive perhaps other practices might have taken greater hold.
Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fairs sometime editor, was unique among U.S.
Cameras contributorsand nearly so in thirties discoursewhen he urged a more
cosmopolitan perspective. He chided photographers for neglecting what modern
painters like Czanne, Matisse, and Picasso could teach, which would lead them
into more personal, original, and provocative elds of vision, and he predicted that
the world at large, fed up with precise representation . . . will so welcome an escape
from the throes of reality that the death of the matter-of-fact may . . . at last be at
hand. But so invisible were such provocative photographers that he was unable
to adduce any, instead citing as exemplars those whom straight photographers had
adopted as their forebears, especially Nadar, Brady, and Atget. Moreover, he incon-
sistently singled out for special commendation the Farm Security Administration
(FSA) group, whose work he had seen a few months before at the First International
Photographic Exposition. Their pictures of the nations romantic experiment in
resettlement, he thought, were the most interesting in the exhibition.12
Crowninshields ideas were muddled and his prediction dead wrong, but his
introduction at least did intimate minority dissatisfaction with the practice that
Agha wittily endorsed and McCausland more soberly seconded. But his illogic or
their approbation was, if not beside the point, only a portion of these pieces sig-
nicance. Equally important is that they were published at all, and under the names
of individuals whose credentials were sizable enough to lend authority to their pro-
nouncements, Agha and Crowninshield as leading magazinists and McCausland as
an art critic for several periodicals. In drawing such individuals into its orbit and
giving them scope to set out competing ideas about photographys destiny for a
popular audience, U.S. Camera annuals provided a discursive arena that is always
an essential site for any dynamic art world.13
Like the annual, the magazines also neglected foreign workers, and their contents
suggest another reason why they did. The vibrancy of domestic activity gave them
little incentive; they could easily ll issues with American achievements. Expert
reviews of new publications, for instance, kept readers up to date with current devel-
opments, as when Newhall evaluated Berenice Abbotts Changing New York and
the Sherwood AndersonFSA collaboration Home Town, Abbott reviewed Robert
Tafts technological and social history Photography and the American Scene: A Social
History, (), or Adams assessed Strands Mexican Photographs. First-
person accounts informed them about leading workers projects, as did Margaret
Bourke-Whites of her experiences making pictures of impoverished southerners
or Edward and Charis Westons narration of his Guggenheim Fellowship work.
Other pieces reported on popular exhibitions, U.S. Cameras show, the First
Camera Periodicals
97
International Photographic Exposition, and A Pageant of Photography. Newhall
reprised the nineteenth-century portion of MoMAs exhibition and contributed
98 other essays instructing readers in photographys history.14
The periodicals attention to these art world activities contrasted quantitatively
and qualitatively with the general presss desultory coverage. In opening a new chan-
nel of communication exclusively about photography they advertised its artistic and
cultural signicance, increasing the hum and buzz that its vitality in the thirties
already had stimulated. Equally important, they encouraged readers to consider
themselves legitimate participants in its art world, not least by assuming the valid-
ity of their multiple interests. In that sense the magazines editorial mix of tech-
nical advice and articles on leading photographers was not disjunctive but rather
hypothesized an audience eager to educate itself about their practical and artistic
interests.
Proles of leading photographers aiming to satisfy both goals were the camera
periodicals most distinctive feature. For artists, they created opportunities to show
their work to an audience of unparalleled size; for readers, they contextualized the
pictures with accounts of the artists ambitions and working methods. Only mini-
mally had such information appeared elsewhere. Although Newhalls book included
a few sentences about leading contemporaries, the proles brought more ample
perspectives, even to Newhalls readers, and enlarging the proles pedagogical
signicance was the nearly blank space they lled.
Prolees included workers in all main branches of artful photography. George
Platt Lynes, Paul Outerbridge, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and
Edward Weston were among the expressive photographers; the fashion workers were
Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, and Martin Munkcsi; and the documentarians
included Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Charles Krutch,
Dorothea Lange, Luke Swank, and the FSA group. Several were the subject of
more than one article. Photographers also wrote about their own work. Adams out-
lined his artistic precepts in several installments, Barbara Morgan wrote on dance
photography, and Ben Glaha, Eliot Elisofon, Russell Lee, and Peter Sekaer all dis-
cussed documentary. Steichen and Weston also contributed, the former with a piece
on his Paul Robeson portraits and the latter about his experiences photographing
trees. Numerous examples of the artists work illustrated these articles, and col-
lectively they constituted an ever-enlarging gallery of the thirties most distinctive
photographs that was conveniently and inexpensively available in every corner of
the nation.15
Popular Photographys prole of Abbott resembled most others in its roughly
equal attention to technical matters, biography, and her pictures. The bulkiness of
her sixty-pound x view camera made it difcult to manage, the prole reported,
and its slow shutter speed limited its exibility. Nevertheless, it served her goals
admirably because of its superiority in rendering denition and texture, qualities
that mattered more to her than the spontaneity a smaller camera would allow. Some
discussion of equipment nearly always gured in the proles, probably because the
magazines most conspicuous purpose was to promote purchases, but the accounts
always had an educational and critical purpose as well.
The biographical account told a story of Abbotts risk-taking and determination,
of a relentless pursuit of ambitions undeterred by setbacks. She had abandoned her
successful Parisian career as a portraitist because she felt an overpowering urge
to depict her own country but then underwent a six year single-handed struggle
to nd backing for her New York project. Works Progress Administration (WPA)
sponsorship nally rewarded her steadfastness, and with federal support she was
making one of the most important contributions photography has ever made to
American history. If these details were peculiar to Abbott the master narrative was
not. The circumstances of her triumph were akin to those many Americans liked to
believe inhered in the national character. The piece concluded with a chronicle of
her working procedures. Author and photographer sought out sites that revealed
distinctive features of New Yorks cultural life, where Abbott successfully contrived
to disarm her camera-shy subjects and then decided on a shooting location to
best express her perception of their signicance. Four pictures illustrated the pro-
letwo of Trinity Church taken earlier and two others made that day, derelicts on
a Coenties Slip pier and a Hester Street pushcart vendorso readers could assess
the success of her working methods.16
Like most of the proles, Abbotts was more journalistic than probing. It made
no effort to uncover how her photographs revealed Abbotts social views nor even
much to relate her shooting strategies to her projects larger aims. It was indifferent
to the novelty of WPA sponsorship of such an ambitious undertaking. The anecdotal
structure of all the proles militated against engaging complex questions about how
a photographers style, cultural ambitions, and patronage interacted. They aimed
to be factually informative and celebratory, to bring forward their subjects as out-
standing examples of contemporary achievement, and they usually succeeded in
achieving those limited ambitions. In this case text and illustrations together made
Abbotts project coherent and comprehensible to readers and in doing so performed
the useful service of educating some of the most curious and perhaps dedicated
members of photographys audience.17
A handful of pieces surpassed the journalistic standard represented by Abbotts
prole, as did McCauslands essay on Strand, which scanted biography and tech-
nical considerations in favor of formal and cultural analysis of his work in folk
communities between and . She detected a changing psychic clime
from the austerity of the earlier pictures, which implied a lament from history, an
Ossians ode for what is past to the warmer and friendlier tone of more recent
Camera Periodicals
99
ones. With his Mexican bultos seriesstudies of carved statues of the Holy Family
and the ApostlesStrand reached his greatest artistic maturity. McCausland dis-
100 covered in these pictures a probing commentary on the natural and especially the
social forces that oppressed Mexicos peasants. She was unable to bring her essay
to a satisfactory conclusion, however, because Strand had made no photographs for
four years and no longer even owned a camera, foreclosing her speculation about
where this latest work might lead. Nevertheless, her piece supplied a challenging
view of Strands work, and the half-dozen well-reproduced examples allowed read-
ers to test their perceptions against hers. Whether the camera magazines would
have published more such perceptive articles had there been a cadre of writers as
acute as McCausland is a moot point because few yet existed. Perhaps not, for fear
of going over the heads of readers, but the fact that a few essays like McCauslands
appeared in self-consciously popular periodicals indicates that editors were not
committed solely to journalistic accounts.18
Nevertheless, camera magazines were unapologetically commercial propositions
and not art magazines in the usual sense. Their dependence on advertising meant
that much of their editorial matterthe practical articles especially but more subtly
even their pieces on artful photographywere intertextually linked with it. In an
economic sense their entire contents coalesced to support a single goal, encouraging
readers to pursue actively their own photographic passions and thus increase the
demand for equipment and supplies. Even if that is true, however, such a formulation
takes too reductive a view of what the periodicals actually achieved, which was also
to create a unique arena for an ongoing display of the leading photographers work
and provide informative discussions of how it might be apprehended. They served
an educative function no less than did MoMAs catalogs. In that sense the fact that
their underpinnings were commercial is irrelevant other than that it allowed for a
considerably wider circulation of these perspectives than any nonprot institution
is usually able to achieve.
Documentary and Canon Formation

Camera periodicals helped expand artful photographys boundaries by giving spe-
cial attention to the contrasting genres of fashion and documentary. MoMAs exhi-
bition included several leading fashion workers but mostly their personal work,
whereas U.S. Cameras portfolios refused that distinction. Steichen was fashion
photographys leading adept, and his key advisory role made unsurprising that it
appeared so often, with most of the Vogue and Harpers Bazaar staff contribut-
ing. Besides Steichen himself, Horst P. Horst appeared in every issue, and Frissell
and Munkcsi in six of the seven prewar numbers; Dahl-Wolfe, Cecil Beaton, and
George Hoyningen-Huen also made multiple contributions. Man Ray showed
just once, probably because his fashion work frequently employed experimental
techniques. Readers could thus compare characteristics of each photographers
styleBeatons lush theatricality, Steichens chiaroscuro, Horsts statuesque poses,
and Munkscis and Frissells more naturalistic and apparently spontaneous shots,
many made outside the studio.
This unabashedly commercial work, a product of consumer culture, took on a
different aspect when it was detached from its original impetusas well as shorn
of captions providing product informationand brought forward as artful in its
own right, to be judged by the same standards as other genres for formal excellence,
technical nish, and inventiveness. That four fashion specialists published nudes
is particularly instructive. This was among the most ancient genres, but it was also
most proximate to their fashion work of depicting clothed womens bodies. Their
nudes proposed an equivalence between the two genres, implying that the photog-
raphers consummate skill in rendering the subjects distinguished the work and
whether a model was clothed was an irrelevancy.19
Just as fashion work was a newcomer in photographys art world so was documen-
taryor at least it seemed to be. Despite the rediscovery of Brady and lionization
of Atget, Hine still labored in obscurity, Jacob Riis was forgotten, and MoMAs
exhibition only modestly represented documentary photography. Beginning in
mid-decade, however, it suddenly appeared to be everywhere, whether by a dozen
or so government photographers, the Photo League, Bourke-White, or others. The
resurgence coincided with the birth of camera periodicals, and they became doc-
umentarys most energetic proponents, regularly publishing it and publicizing its
assumptions and procedures. They gave liberal attention to the FSA and other gov-
ernment-sponsored documentary photographers and also to workers unafliated
with federal agencies.
Steichens preface to U.S. Camera hinted at what would be the annuals
receptivity. He complained that although the quality of submissions was good the
number of outstanding photographs remained relatively small because the cam-
era must get still closer to the factual image of the passing moment. Two pictures
that year indicated what he had in mind, Langes Migrant Mother and Arthur
Rothsteins pregnant Sharecroppers Wife, among the earliest by the FSA in a
national periodical. Nineteen FSA pictures appeared among U.S. Cameras prewar
portfolios, with nearly as many by other federal photographers. The Photo Leagues
representation matched the FSAs, and several numbers reprinted shots by the unaf-
liated documentarians Horace Bristol and Luke Swank. After his rediscovery at
the end of the thirties Hine appeared, too, with studies of railway workers.20
Documentary by no means dominated, but its consistent presence gave it a strong
claim as an artful genre, an assumption not universally conceded. The portfolios
Camera Periodicals
101
also indicated how varied documentary could be while still remaining faithful to
Steichens criterion of depicting the factual image of the passing moment. Some
102 pictures portrayed social despair, as did Langes and Rothsteins and others such as
Bristols Lettuce WorkersStockton, a picker injured in a labor action, or the
Photo Leagues of Harlems poverty. Many others emphasized positive slices of
Americana, as did Post Wolcotts Vermont Snowscape and John Vachons study of
Omaha grain elevators that became his signature image, both from the FSA. Several
portfolios featured the awesome civil works projects that were New Deal showcases,
pictures that transcended being mere records of these engineering colossi by Glaha
of new western dams and Krutch of the TVA. Krutchs Generator Scroll Case,
Norris Dam, also seen in MoMAs exhibition, for instance, dramatized the
human labor these monumental undertakings required, adroitly employing light
and shadow to accent a sledgehammer-wielding worker inside a massive turbine.
But portfolios could only inferentially propose documentarys equal status with
other artful practices. Conrming it required textual exposition. Camera periodicals
thus often featured essays about documentary and proles of its leading adepts. For
U.S. Camera Magazine that advocacy had the avor of a crusade. In twenty prewar
issues it ran eighteen such pieces, including appreciations of important forerunners,
McCausland on Hine and Abbott on Atget; examinations of contemporaries includ-
ing Bourke-White, the FSA group, Glaha, and Krutch; and broader speculations
by the likes of Ansel Adams and James Thrall Soby. The intensive attention likely
reected Steichens partiality to it. In addition to being the annuals chief advisor
he also served on the magazines editorial board.
Steichens endorsement was strategic because his preeminence conferred unmis-
takable cachet on documentary. It is tempting to psychologize why he championed
it. With its unembellished representation and attention to ordinary Americansin
these ways exactly opposite his Cond Nast workhis embrace might be seen as
a way to discharge a sense of bad faith, especially in light of his youthful socialism.
He had also become bored by magazine assignments, and the passion he ascribed to
documentarians must have seemed enviable. Although these reasons may have been
behind his enthusiasm there is no evidence that they actually were. Documentarys
vigorous response to the culture of the thirties and the emergence of so many able
practitioners are at least as plausible explanations.
Although his inuence helped shape the U.S. Camera periodicals editorial agenda,
Steichens most palpable contribution to afrming documentarys stature was an
appreciation of the FSA project in the annual. His endorsement would have
carried special weight under any circumstances, but the lily was gilded with another
piece in the same number reprising his own long and distinguished career. Moreover,
his was the rst synoptic assessment of the three-year-old FSA project. He aimed
to erase any doubts that documentary deserved to be included in the republic of
photography and to install the FSA photographers as its most important adepts.
He entirely succeeded, not least in Washington. Roy Stryker, head of the FSAs
Historical Section, jubilantly reported to Lange that Steichens endorsement had
done no end of good here and that he was astounded . . . at the number of peo-
ple who have been impressed by this job, including especially his superiors in the
federal agency.21
The forty-one photographs Steichen chose to illustrate the piece portrayed an
impoverished and anguished America unrelieved by moments of pleasure or joy.
He jettisoned their titles, eliminating all particularities of their subjects identities
so that they became generalized representations of distress untethered to place or
circumstance. Captioning the pictures instead were anonymous viewers responses
solicited by the FSA at its Grand Central Palace exhibition. They ran a gamut
from warm approbationthe most vital photography in Americato outright
condemnationsubversive propagandawith a preponderance of the former.
The pathos of the pictures subjects made the negative comments seem emotionally
frozen, and those that attacked the New Dealjust another Roosevelt issue
seemed no more than querulously partisan. Although nominally acknowledging that
the photographs could elicit different esthetic and political responses the captions
did so in order to demonstrate that most viewers responded sympathetically and to
imply that those who did not were evincing some form of social pathology. They
raised the political basis of the FSA project only to dismiss it as an irrelevancy.
Steichens text emphasized what FSA documentary was not, neither impersonal
nor made by art for arts sake boys. To discover its affective power he invited
readers to scrutinize the faces of the downtrodden and discover the feeling of a
living experience they directly conveyed to viewers. The photographers genius
was thus of a special kind, of their indefatigable search for revealing subjects and
intuitive recognition of those with an important story to tell. In Steichens rendi-
tion the FSA photographs were artless and yet paradoxically artful, unmediated
slices of reality and also the most remarkable documents that were ever rendered
in pictures, the social passion of their makers infusing them with special resonance.
Because this shared commitment unied the photographers, any individuals pic-
tures mattered less than the entire ensemble. It was the job as a whole as it has
been produced by the photographers as a group that makes it such a unique and
outstanding achievement.
Some of his assertions were commonplaces at the time, notably that the pictures
and their subjects were identical and the photographers function was to bear wit-
ness, their cameras disinterested recorders of the realities they discovered. The fact
that the FSA was a governmental undertaking and had ideological commitments of
its own went unremarked. Most curiously, though, Steichen dissolved the differ-
ences among the photographers in style and approach to emphasize their pictures
Camera Periodicals
103
collective unity and common social purpose. This may have been no more than
his invocation of several notions with particular appeal to thirties liberalismthat
104 art should be socially purposeful and reveal passionate commitment and that col-
laborative enterprises could be more productive than individual onesbut a more
specically photographic agenda was also afoot.22
As Steichen was writing in the autumn of Evanss American Photographs
was up at MoMA, nearly half of it FSA work. If, as Steichen claimed, a com-
mon style united the photographers, Evanss pictures least matched it. They were
cool, classically composed, and often ironic; dispassionate if not impersonal aptly
describes them. Only occasionally did they emphasize the impoverishment that other
FSA photographers specialized in depicting. Hardly ever did his pictures imply a
story. Evans had no doubt, either, that he was creating artand for its own sake.
He was indifferent to the agencys social aims.
Evanss pictures thus comported poorly with the story Steichen had to tell. Five
accompanied the article, half as many as Lange and Lee and about the same num-
ber as Rothstein and Ben Shahn. Even that slim representation was Evanss only
appearance in the annuals, whereas the other important staff members all appeared
in its portfolios. Neither did his pictures appear in a subsequent U.S. Camera Maga-
zine FSA feature, nor was he proled. Evans left the FSA in , which perhaps
accounts for this invisibility, but the incongruity of his work with Steichens sum-
mation of the FSAs achievement, and Steichens veiled hostility to MoMAs eleva-
tion of him as the preeminent documentary photographer, seem equally plausible
explanations. With his emphasis on the FSA staff s shared goals and attening of
the distinctions among their styles Steichen rhetorically attempted to erase Evans
from the project and diminish the leading role that MoMAs show gave him. In this
light his animadversions against impersonality and art for arts sake boys are
less general propositions than sly shafts directed at Evans.23
No testimony directly supports this argument, but inferential evidence does. In
Hound and Horn Evans had scathingly denominated Steichen an operator and
condemned his work for its marriage of facile technical nish with spiritual empti-
ness. In when he made this judgment in a little magazine of limited circulation
he was as a y to Steichens elephant, but it must have stung anyway. In any case by
Evans was no longer a little-known newcomer. Steichen would have had to be
magnanimously forbearing to pass up an opportunity to even scores, especially when
doing so coincided with his preference for documentary that was passionately warm.
A dismissive judgment made two years later that Steichen endorsed, and may have
written, conrms this antipathy. It appeared in a slashing critique of MoMAs new
photography department, an editorial that represented the collective opinion of the
editorial board of U.S. Camera Magazine except for Adams, who had helped plan
the departments inaugural show. Reviewing MoMAs history with photography, it
waspishly remarked, Why Walker Evans was chosen to receive the rst one-man
show in the Museum can well remain a mystery.24
Popular Photography did not prole Evans either. His astringency was incompat-
ible with the camera periodicals stress on the FSAs passionate uncovering of social
distress. Except at MoMA his pictures were not much seen, not even in Survey
Graphic, the FSAs most faithful outlet. But just as MoMAs homage contrasted with
Evanss near invisibility in more popular venues, the nature of a publication that
did feature him suggested the audience that admired his work did not much overlap
with the camera periodicals. In New Directions , James Laughlins avant-garde
literary annual, four of Evanss shots of Alabama tenant families accompanied James
Agees account of their lives, a preview of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His pho-
tographs, an editorial note said, became widely known after his MoMA exhibition
two years earlier. Except for U.S. Camera Magazines dismissal this event merited
not even a mention in the camera periodicals. By the late thirties a ssure had begun
to open in photographys art world. On one side was its more broadly popular wing,
represented by camera periodicals, on the other was its hierophantic wing, with
MoMA its leading player. The commitments of these two formationsto photo-
graphic practices and styles, modes of display, and individual photographersdid
not consistently diverge and the line between them never became absolute, but a
slow drawing apart was nevertheless apparent. And the division was most obvious
in the case of Evans.25
Camera periodicals favored other documentarians instead, especially Lange, who
was excluded at MoMA in . Prefacing U.S. Camera Steichen remarked
on the absence of some former contributors. The one I miss most, he lamented,
is Dorothea Lange, one of the very few truly great photographers. Her pictures
had appeared in all the annuals preceding numbers, Popular Photography singled
out her migrant pictures as exemplary, and U.S. Camera Magazine enumerated her
outstanding qualities as technical knowledge, social understanding, [and] artistic
integrity. The most conspicuous testimonial was Pare Lorenzs appreciation in
U.S. Camera , with twenty-four illustrations. His prestige as director of the
much-honored documentary lms The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River lent
authority to his enthusiastic assessment, but his piece was ill-informed and banal
nonetheless. By his own confession he knew little about photographic technique,
but neither did he evince much acuity about Langes aims and practices. She was,
he said, more interested in people than in photography, and that spurious distinc-
tion led to the absurd claim that migrants trusted her because she is one of them.
Nor did he show much awareness of her photographs. Two of her best known mor-
dantly juxtaposed bedraggled migrants with billboards advertising the comforts of
Pullman travel, but Lorenz insisted that her pictures utterly lacked the left-wing,
self-conscious social irony that so often defeats the purpose of creative workmen
Camera Periodicals
105
with a point of view. Only in closing did he come near to what made Langes work
so compelling, although even then he oversimplied. Her one desire, he wrote,
106 was to photograph and record [people] as they are; not as they should be; not as
some doctrine insists they should be, and not as they might be in a better world.
As criticism Lorenzs essay was mediocre, but his apostrophe to Lange as the best
still photographer I know working in the factual eld epitomized the leading role
the camera periodicals assigned to her.26
The magazines eclecticism prevented their admiration for Lange from becoming
cultish, and other pieces emphasized the number of documentarians making inci-
sive records of national life and photographs of outstanding artistic merit. Abbotts
New York project was breaking ground in the new eld of documentary photog-
raphy, Bourke-Whites pictures vividly told the sharecroppers story to a camera-
conscious world, Krutchs TVA photographs constituted an artistic, accurate
picture of its extraordinary engineering projects, and Glahas musical training
esthetically inected the practical basis that underlay his studies of New Deal dam
construction. An appreciation of Morris Engels Photo League pictures included
a commendation from Strand, by implication conferring the imprimatur of one
of photographys acknowledged masters on documentary itself. As Steichen had,
Edwin Locke emphasized the FSA photographers collective achievement with an
analogy that would loudly reverberate in photographys art world. The chance
of becoming the Mathew Brady of the depression was open to each, according to
his talents, he said, and he left no doubt of his conviction that the photographers
achievement already made that comparison apt.27
More general essays complemented these pieces on specic bodies of work. Ansel
Adams offered friendly counsel to documentarys practitioners, whom he professed
to admire and envy. He advised greater attention to the elements of form, sub-
stance and textures to realize more fully documentarys twin goals of accurate por-
trayal and incorporation of the vital impact of individual expression. In offering
this advice he meant to counter Eliot Elisofons in an earlier issue of U.S. Camera
Magazine, which proposed that too much striving after expressiveness could mis-
represent the subject, as he believed some of Bourke-Whites pictures did. One
of a sharecroppers son behind a plow was made from a low camera angle, with
dramatic side-lighting and a ltered or dodged in sky, and this beautiful picto-
rial photograph, he believed, deected viewers attention from the plight of this
poor boy.28
Adamss and Elisofons differences highlighted a potential tension in documentary
between socially accurateor politically effectivereporting and formal inven-
tiveness. Behind this conundrum lay others, such as how the photographers sub-
jectivity inected not only what subjects they chose but also how they depicted
them, thus raising unsettling questions about the transparency of their representa-
tions. To illuminate the issue Elisofon adduced two FSA photographers who shot
the same decrepit farm, one of whom had respect for the photographic quality
of the medium (possibly Evans), the other primarily a painter and a very good
one (probably Shahn). The latter overexposed to make the sky at, and his grainy
depiction gave the farm a dreary aspect; the former composed so the farm appeared
picturesque beneath a dramatic sky. Elisofon invited readers to decide for yourself
which was right. Such knotty considerations were rarely addressed in the thirties,
and that such a self-consciously popular publication did so illustrates the educative
role the camera periodicals aspired to ll.
Because documentary seemed a new development and its status still unsettled,
periodicals made room as well for a few pieces disputing its legitimacy. One by
John Kabel, a successful travel photographer, argued that symbolic photographs
of junk yards and ash cans and For Rent signs betokened merely a passing fad;
photographys real vocation was to provide armchair travelers with vicarious expe-
rience. Another disputant, Ted Cook, also a professional, was less categorical but
no less condemnatory. Gene [sic] Atget, he said, had made documentary pictures
with love and understanding, but the politics of documentarians led them to
misrepresent reality, and their pictures created an erroneous impression of cultural
breakdown. These left wing photographers were so preoccupied with social pro-
test that they failed to acknowledge the majority of hard-working Americans who
kept the nation going.29
The most vitriolic blast came from James Thrall Soby, a well-known writer on
modern art and soon to be an ofcial at MoMA. He also believed the documentar-
ians too leftist, too much committed to reform and too little to accurate reporting,
but he went furthermuch further. Being hopelessly decient in emotive power,
no photograph of any kind could rival the other visual arts in expressing the creative
impulse, he maintained, because its subject matter was its sole distinguishing char-
acteristic. He claimed that documentary photographers implicitly acknowledged
this but still had the effrontery to lay claim to being artists, using mannerisms to
disguise their crafts limitations and emphasizing a fanatically uniform sharp-
ness of detail that squeezed the air out of the picture and left it a at, glisten-
ing surface. Their work would not endure, he was certain, and snapshots would
be far more valuable for posteritys understanding of the thirties. In a curious way
his denunciatory vehemence testied to how well established as an artful practice
documentary had become by . A less honored one would not have called forth
such rodomontade.30
U.S. Camera Magazine ran a sidebar dissociating the editors from Sobys views,
but it was redundant because all the camera periodicals had so warmly embraced
documentary by often reproducing it and proling its leading workers. If it was
not the eras only mode, as later it seemed to have been, the visibility they provided
Camera Periodicals
107
left no doubt that they considered it among the key developments in thirties pho-
tography. A categorical denunciation by the likes of Soby could only seem cranky
108 alongside ringing endorsements by such authoritative gures as Steichen, Strand,
and Lorenz.
Ironically, about the time Sobys piece appeared MoMA appointed him to its new
Department of Photographys advisory committee, a symbolic foreshadowing of
the fate that awaited documentary. Aside from the special case of Evans it would
not for many years command such respectful attention from the museum world as
it did in prewar camera periodicals. In them, documentary mingled on terms of
democratic equality with nudes and couture shots by fashion specialists, Steichens
portraits, Westons landscapes, still lifes by his erstwhile Group f. colleagues, and
much more. Especially in the annuals some pictures were banal and many more
technically adept but forgettable, as could hardly be otherwise in such an omnibus
gathering. From within this profusion clear judgments of artistic merit nevertheless
emerged, signied by which photographers were singled out for textual attention
and the frequency of their appearance in the portfolios.31
The camera periodicals roster of leading workers mostly overlapped and also
enlarged Newhalls in Photography, . Of MoMAs thirty or so contem-
porary Americans all except Evans, Stieglitz, and Strand showed in the portfolios,
and most did so repeatedly; about two-thirds were proled (including Stieglitz and
Strand), in some cases more than once. With the important exception of Evans
those not proled were mostly lesser lights, such as Ira Martin, William Rittase, and
Alfredo Valente. Newhall had implied a hierarchy by the number of exhibits allot-
ted each exhibitor, and so did the camera periodicals coverage although with less
mathematical precision. In the rst tier, as at MoMA, were Stieglitz and Strand, but
Steichen was the preeminent elder. More importance was assigned to Abbott, Adams,
Bourke-White, and Edward Weston, and Lange replaced Evans. By decades end
Hine also joined this leading group as his long career began to be recognized. The
second tier included others from the FSALee, Post Wolcott, Rothstein, Shahn,
and Vachonas well as the documentarians Elisofon, Glaha, and Swank, none seen
at MoMA. More stress was given to Dahl-Wolfe and Munkcsi, while Frissell and
Horst were added to the museums representation of fashion adepts. The annuals
also showed Barbara Morgan and Laura Gilpin, as Newhall had not. Likewise occu-
pying this tier at both MoMA and in the periodicals was a heterogeneous group that
included the Californians Imogen Cunningham and Brett Weston, Anton Bruehl,
George Platt Lynes, Paul Outerbridge, and the documentarians Charles Krutch
and Peter Sekaer. Unseen at MoMA but rounding out this level were several mem-
bers of the Photo LeagueHarold Corsini, Morris Engel, Jack Mendelsohn, Sol
Libsohn, and Aaron Siskindalthough an article on its Harlem Document project
that Lange urged on Steichen never appeared.
Crude as such a calculus is it illustrates two striking transformations in thirties
photographic culture that camera periodicals materially aided. The rst is its mul-
tiplicity and sheer energy, so revitalized from the sectarianism and lethargy of a few
years earlier. That some thirty-ve photographers often showed their work, and in
venues where many thousands would see it, testies to how ample photographys
art world had become and how vigorous and inclusive were the instrumentalites
that enlarged and enhanced it. Moreover, the audience had become informed, alert
to photographers aims, procedures, and larger achievements and knowledgeable
about ongoing debates over photographic practices.
A second transformation is apparent as well. All art worlds engage in canon
formation, identifying important practitioners, encouraging particular practices
and styles, and determining the shape of a mediums history. Photographys dyna-
mism made that a particularly vigorous enterprise during the thirties, although it
was conducted on somewhat different lines than in the older, more established arts,
where it is the work of a mandarin class of critics and impresarios, artists turned
critics, and persons of institutional importance. They carry on their assessments
in more or less specialized arenas such as critical monographs and anthologies, lim-
ited-circulation journals, exhibition catalogs, and symposia. Some of photographys
canon deliberations tted that modelMoMAs exhibitions and catalogs most obvi-
ouslybut others did not. With very few exceptions photography was not featured
in leading intellectual magazines, and it had not developed serious journals of its
own or attached itself to existing ones. In this atmosphere authority was so widely
diffused that popular media could exercise an inuence that ordinarily it would not
have. MoMAs exhibitions perhaps inuenced the camera periodicals, the museums
prestige giving special weight to its judgmentsbut not slavishly so as the differing
elements and emphases in the hierarchies they developed indicated. Photographys
canon was formulated pluralistically in the thirties. That and its bountifulness lent
an air of democratic inclusiveness to the entire enterprise.
The Audience Speaks

Audiences are key participants in any art world although rarely is it possible to dis-
cover what they think. But in allocating unusually generous space to readers let-
tersdozens in each issueU.S. Camera Magazine opened a window for glimpsing
the opinions of the rank and le. Even if this feature only padded its pages with free
contributions it nevertheless reected a special feature of photographys art world
also observable elsewhere: Audiences could play a more active, independent, and
vocal role than was usual in the arts. Among many other issues readers addressed
the distinction, or lack of it, in Strands photographs; the validity of documentary;
Camera Periodicals
109
and what genres the magazine ought to emphasize. Sometimes one letter would
provoke others, and the ensuring dialogue could be lively and frank. At least one
110 reader valued these exchanges so much that he named them the magazines out-
standing feature.32
No article exercised readers more than one reprinting fourteen of Lusha Nel-
sons candid pictures of Stieglitz at his Lake George summer home, with a text by
Steichen. Nelson, a young but recently deceased Cond Nast photographer, had
made them a few years before, and Steichen suggested they would surprise read-
ers who knew only of the haloed minence gris. In Nelsons magnicent portrait
document, said Steichen, Stieglitz was revealed as a down-to-earth fellow sitting
on his own plainly American front porch, perhaps chuckling at a story he had told
on himself.33
Steichens praise was wildly overblown, as readers scornfully pointed out. One said
Nelsons pictures were terrible, no better than a beginning snapshooters. Another
complained of their compositional inferiority, in one a telephone wire seeming to
grow from Stieglitzs head. Yet another pointed out a ner Stieglitz portrait in a
competitive camera magazine (by Dorothy Norman in Popular Photography). Sev-
eral correspondents chided the magazine for becoming what one called a personal
appreciation periodical so dazzled by Stieglitzs and Steichens names as to publish
such inferior work. A Sacramento reader remained incensed more than a year later.
Stieglitz, he said, was a good photographer; a pioneer; an unprepossessing old man;
one picture. But a whole spread of pictures! Its New York provincialism.34
Extrapolating from such letters the photographic publics attitudes would require
assuming their typicality, and there are good reasons for not doing so. Letter writers
constitute a self-selecting group with, possibly, superior linguistic skills and unusual
self-condence in their judgments. They are likely as well to be among an audiences
most intensely committed members. Moreover, it is probable that the editors pub-
lished only the most articulate and engaging letters. Nevertheless, the sheer quantity
the magazine did reprint provides a basis for at least some tentative observations
about its correspondents and the larger audience of which they were a part.
Their disdain for Nelsons pictures and Steichens judgment suggests several nota-
ble characteristics. Most obviously, writers were undeterred by Steichens authority
or Stieglitzs eminence and uninhibited in impeaching the formers opinions and
the latters stature. Not a single one seconded Steichen, and that so many dissented
suggests that the rank and le were condent that their judgments ought to enjoy a
democratic equality with those of experts. Writers across the nation resented New
Yorks hegemony in cultural matters and betrayed no inhibition in pointing out its
narrowness. They showed condence in their technical and photographic knowl-
edge, too, identifying Nelsons esthetic deciencies and making a comparative case
to support their criticism. Most of all, perhaps, the letters indicated that readers
believed U.S. Camera Magazine was as much their forum as the professionals and
that their opinions mattered.
McCauslands appreciation of Strand also stimulated a strong response centered
on the quality of some of his best-known pictures, including Blind and White
Fence. The latter, thought an Iowa reader, was inferior to the random snapshots
of most box-camera amateurs, but Strands study of Quebecs Fox River made
the reader concede his greatness. Another writer who denominated Strands work
uninteresting provoked a stern rejoinder from a Michigan reader, who argued at
some length why it represented photography at its most vital. By advancing such
varying assessments these correspondents condently arrogated to themselves the
public evaluative function that is ordinarily delegated to the professional critic. In
doing so they denied, qualied, or afrmed McCauslands judgment that the body
of Paul Strands work stands as a monument of American photography. It is, of
course, not irrelevant that they argued their opinions less cogently than she, if only
because hers thereby had greater persuasive power. That letter writers felt their
opinions passionately enough to make them public, however, hints at the certainty
they felt about being full members of photographys art world.35
The magazines strenuous promotion of documentary encouraged others to write.
Several praised Abbotts two-part, well-illustrated article on Atget, one designating
it one of the most important biographical pieces yet published on any photogra-
pher, and another asked for a similarly comprehensive piece about Hine (McCaus-
lands Hine essay had, in fact, appeared two years earlier). But several others disap-
proved of documentary, mostly on the grounds of its partiality and deceptiveness.
Scofng at a Bourke-White prole that praised her pictures of tenant farmers for
having photographic IT, a correspondent asserted that they were lousy and
urged the publication of pictures showing a few of the thousands of cheerful,
happy share-croppers that exist everywhere. Langes prole educed more nuanced
but similar sentiments from a Los Angeles reader. I think Miss Lange is a swell
though depressing photographer, he wrote, but then added, I am getting quite
tired of reading about the great social consciousness which, it seems, must dominate
all photographs, paintings, plays, novels, music, etc., etc. His letter encouraged
another, whose writer cited experience as a sanitation ofcer in migrant camps to
chide the magazine for running so many documentary images, which he believed
to be tendentious and misleading. I am thoroughly sick of the doctrinaire attitude
of much of the work that has been published, he said. Photographers ought to lay
aside their vaunted social consciousness and get back to the main business of
photography.36
The representativeness of such sentiments is unknowable. Although they do
not much accord with those gathered by the FSA at its Grand Central Palace
exhibition and redacted in Steichens appreciation, they are more in line with U.S.
Camera Periodicals
111
Camera Magazines own equally unscientic poll in which documentary came in
near the bottom of genres readers especially liked, ahead only of abstractions
112 and x-rays. Even this fragmentary data suggests, though, that resistance to it was
widespread, and contemporary audiences regarded it as less than the key practice
it has subsequently seemed. And because camera periodicals continued to feature
documentary prominently in the face of this possible uninterest or even distaste
among readers, it also indicates that editors self-consciously embraced the taste-
making function gatekeepers frequently assume, of leading their audience where
it otherwise balked at going.37
Just what workers and practices the magazine ought to emphasize was another
frequent if inconclusive topic of disagreement. Some correspondents thought U.S.
Camera too arty, one urging the editors to toss away your smocks and berets.
Another complained of too much stress on leading photographers. In time, he
warned, your readers will certainly rebel at a personal organ of Stieglitz, Steichen,
Adams, et al. But yet another argued the opposite. The magazines most valuable
service, he said, was featuring pictures by leading photographers and discussions
of how they achieved their results. A California reader criticized the emphasis on
so-called straight or pure photography and wanted more attention to pictorialists.
But many others vehemently disagreed. Salons on the whole, wrote one, have
the odor of decayed vegetables, wax owers, old lace, and hoop skirts, and the
pictorialists dont know their (censored) from a hole in the ground.38
Like many who wrote, a reader in New Mexico expressed gratitude for the breadth
of coverage, both in the annuals and the magazine. To us who live more or less in
the sticks, she said, camera periodicals afford us our only opportunity to see the
work of the topnotchers in the photographic world. Similarly appreciative was
a midwestern correspondent. He commiserated with the editors having to satisfy
demanding readers who want more pictures and fewer pictures, more nudes and
no nudes, technical articles and non-technical articles, art-for-arts-sake and how-to-
do-it articles. Because contemporary photography had become so lively and varied,
he added, no magazine could please all its readers, including him, but he was glad
to testify that U.S. Camera Magazine consistently gave him his moneys worth.39
The opinions and judgments these letters expressed were usually more passion-
ate than sophisticated, but they evinced the degree to which many members of
photographys art world felt strongly about some of its key issues. In assessing
leading photographers and debating the value of certain practices, U.S. Camera
Magazines correspondents participated in a public conversation that in the other
arts was ordinarily conducted among a more exclusive, hierophantic group. No art
worlds audience is entirely passive, but photographys was particularly vigorous in
the thirties, reecting the mediums rich blossoming and the invention of effective
means to involve a popular audience with it.
Steichen as Impresario
In U.S. Cameras inaugural issue Steichens portrait of Stieglitz occupied the
page just following the preface as homage to his former Photo-Secession colleague.
With its conspicuous placement, and as the only historical photograph, it apotheo-
sized Stieglitz as the annuals presiding spirit and proposed that the new publica-
tion would carry on the heroic work for photography that he had shouldered in an
earlier era. But it was a symbolic gesture of co-optation. The annual represented
practices Stieglitz abominated, including mixing artistic and commissioned pho-
tographs (and erasing the line between them), a democratic inclusiveness rather
than a draconian selectivity, and photomechanical reproduction rather than origi-
nal ne prints or meticulously printed gravures. Most of all, though, the portrait
indicated how by Stieglitz had become a monument or totem. His spirit could
be invoked entirely detached from his principles, with the implication that the lat-
ter were superannuated. U.S. Cameras homage indicated how toothless Stieglitzs
authority had become.
Two years later, in essentially the same position, the annual highlighted Noel
Hiram Deeks portrait of Steichen at Work, made during the lming of a Para-
mount Pictures short about him. Portrayed from a heroicizing low angle Steichen
stands next to his camera, one hand at the ready on his shutter release, the other
upraised to direct his sitter. Brilliant light reects off his eyeglasses, and around his
neck and draping his body is a focusing cloth as if it were an ecclesiastical vestment.
His quasi-sacred, commanding authority is unmistakable.
In nearly every issue Maloney testied to Steichens key role. He was U.S. Cam-
eras foster father, severest critic and best friend, Maloney said, his knowledge of
photography compendious, command of technique absolute, and judgment infal-
lible. The structurally juxtaposed portraits symbolized Steichens assumption of
the gatekeeping authority Stieglitz had enjoyed in the centurys rst three decades.
Even as adviser to the U.S. Camera publications, though, Steichen could not match
the preeminent position Stieglitz once heldphotographys boisterous multiplicity
no longer allowed a single gure to be so dominant. But by choosing the periodicals
contents and often mounting the editorial pulpit himself to preach his own views
of photographys destiny he had become rst among equals of those dedicated to
reshaping the contours of its art world and making photography in the thirties such
a robustly public enterprise and central form of cultural expression.
Camera Periodicals
113
8
Culture Morphology in
Berenice Abbotts New York
An Uncertain Reputation
Although in the thirties Berenice Abbott occupied a prominent position in
photographys art world, recognition of her Changing New York project sub-
sequently became muted, perhaps because none of her later activities over a
long life (she died in ) matched its achievement but even more because its
visibility was eclipsed by the installation of the Farm Security Administration
(FSA) as the decades supreme expression of documentary practice. Abbotts
career has not precisely been neglectedshe appears in all histories of twen-
tieth-century photographybut neither has her New York work regained
its initial standing nor has its exploration of the thirties cultural antinomies
been sufciently plumbed.1
Abbott participated in all the important omnibus exhibitions, from the
Harvard Societys in to the Pageant of Photography in , and had
a number of one-person shows at the Julien Levy Gallery, the First Interna-
tional Photographic Exposition, and twice at the Museum of the City of New York,
where the second led to a Life magazine spread. Reproductions in camera periodi-
cals and other magazines further enlarged her national audience. Her campaign for
Eugne Atget as a model for American photographers also gave her a public presence,
and she wrote A Guide to Better Photography, at once a handbook of technical advice
and a compact treatise on photographic history and esthetics. Not least, the volume
Changing New York appeared in under the imprint of E. P. Dutton, making her
one of a select number of photographers to publish a monograph. These activities
gave her work uncommon visibility, both within the art world and beyond.2
But this luminosity faded and not solely because Abbotts later work failed to
match her achievements during the thirties. She made most of her New York pho-
tographs under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)s Federal
Art Project (FAP) between and , which let her go the next year because
Congress, hostile to government support of the arts, made draconian cuts in its
budget. Although the WPA employed hundreds of photographers, nearly all were
restricted to record shots of the agencys relief projects and only a few units permit-
ted personal work. The New York director, Audrey McMahon, was also president
of the College Art Association and sympathetic to photographys artistic ambitions,
but her receptivity was not shared by the WPA/FAPs national leadership, which
saw its mission as supporting workers in traditional artistic mediums. For subse-
quent visibility the insignicance of artful photography in the WPA/FAP tended to
occlude those few examples where it was distinguished. When the agency was dis-
solved it deposited Abbotts pictures with the Museum of the City of New York, an
appropriate home for them but lacking the prestige and prominence of the Library
of Congress, the FSA les ultimate repository.3
From a cultural perspective Abbotts early career should have positioned her for
postwar recognition as among the thirties leading artists, but other circumstances
tended to retard it. Her biography matched Malcolm Cowleys taxonomy in Exiles
Return of the career pattern of American modernist artists whose experience of
retreat and return prepared them to grapple with the depressions difculties as well
as the new energies it released. Born in and a member of the self-conscious
generation that came of age around World War I, Abbott grew up in the Midwest,
migrated to New Yorks artistic bohemia to escape provincial narrowness, became
disillusioned with the cultural thinness of American life, and expatriated herself
to Paris. There fate led her to become Man Rays darkroom assistant and to begin
taking pictures herself. Soon her portraits of James Joyce, Andr Gide, Jean Coc-
teau, and others signied her acceptance in avant-garde circles, as did invitations
to participate in the Salon de lEscalier and the Film und Foto exhibi-
tions. When as an admired portraitist she returned to New York for a visit in
she saw the city with fresh eyes and knew it was my country, something I had to
115
set down in photographs. This epiphany caused Abbott to give up living abroad
and inspired her work for the next ten years.4
116 The fact that Abbott championed Atget, whom she met in Paris and for whom
she became de facto artistic executrix in , complicated and confused percep-
tions of her own artistic reputation. He was virtually unknown, but she instantly
recognized the genius of his photographs; following his death she purchased his
archive, glass plates and , printsand saved it from being scattered or
lost. From that moment until she sold the archive to the Museum of Modern Art
forty years later she indefatigably campaigned for Atgets recognition. Her crusades
success is one of the debts photography owes Abbott, but it had also invidious con-
sequences because it deected appreciation of her own work, as she recognized.
People would forget about Berenice Abbott, and I became Atgets caretaker, she
recollected in . This was a terrible thing for me. And because her New York
project resembled his survey of an earlier Paris she was sometimes patronized as a
lesser Atget.5
Abbotts urban subject matter also contributed to making her pictures subse-
quently seem less relevant to reprises of the thirties than rural depictions, which
continued to have vibrant symbolic resonance. Many of the eras best-known artis-
tic artifacts center on the countryside, the FSA photographs and volumes such as
You Have Seen Their Faces and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; John Steinbecks
novels, especially The Grapes of Wrath and the Oscar-winning lm adapted from it;
and other lms like Our Daily Bread and the documentaries The Plow That Broke
the Plains and Power and the Land. Public memory of the thirties continues to have
a rural aspect, as in a number of Hollywood movies that include Bonnie and Clyde,
Thieves Like Us, Places in the Heart, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? In concen-
trating on the city Abbott was out of step with this tendency, a preoccupation that
would have repercussions for her photographs visibility.
Finally, her pictures rarely portray typical depression scenes, nor do they employ
the iconography of disorder and dislocation characteristic of many of the decades
best-known documentary photographs. They include no scenes of evictions or of
backbreaking labor nor many of poverty or haggard faces. Indeed, they contain
few faces at all, gaunt or otherwise. Instead Abbott focused on bridges, skyscrap-
ers, stores, churches, and newsstandsthe cityscapes built environment perceived
only dimly as background by most inhabitants.
This emphasis was consonant with her preferred equipment, an x Century
Universal view camera that permitted subtle tonality, depth of focus, and sharp
discrimination of detail. To achieve these qualities required a small lens opening
and long exposure, which made it difcult to include human subjects whose move-
ments would aw the image. Moreover, the cameras bulky unwieldiness militated
against the spontaneity such pictures would have demanded. She recognized that
these technical limitations might make her photographs seem sterile but believed
she could overcome this danger by using her cameras strengths to bring out the
human meanings of buildings and objects and thus meet her own stringent require-
ments: precision in the rendering and denition of detail and materials, surfaces
and textures; instantaneity of observation; acute and faithful presentation of what
has actually existed in the external world at a particular time and place.6 Abbotts
discerning eye, masterful sense of pictorial dynamics, and acute cultural imagina-
tion make her photographs uncommonly ripe in observation about the thirties, its
belief systems, tensions, and historical purview. Her pictures deserve to regain in
our time the central place they occupied in their own.
A City of Extraordinary Contrasts

Abbott made some one thousand negatives of New York, from which she printed
as her projects denitive summation. Many she showed in her numerous exhibitions
and periodical appearances, but the volume Changing New York, with ninety-seven
of them, is its most enduring artifact. The books publication history is clouded,
especially its captions ascribed to Elizabeth McCausland, and also its contents and
structure, making it uncertain how much authority Abbott exercised over its ulti-
mate form.
Bonnie Yochelson provides the fullest account without entirely clarifying these
questions. Once Dutton accepted the book the most nagging difculty had to do
with McCauslands texts, complicated by the fact that she and Abbott were not only
co-workers in the WPA/FAP but also companions. Dutton rejected McCauslands
rst two efforts. The rst was shelved because an unconventional layout strove
to simulate cinematic montage by experimentally juxtaposing words and images
and reproducing the photographs in differing formats, whereas what the publisher
had in mind was a more conventional presentation organized geographically. The
second effort failed because the captions were too didactic and windy. They were
then edited by Lincoln Rothschild, director of the WPA/FAPs Index of Ameri-
can Design, who condensed them to mostly declarations of factual information.
Yochelson intimates that Abbott was dissatised with these decisions, but Abbott
later claimed that she and McCausland did not consult about the book.7
Yochelson also says that Dutton compromised Abbotts choice of photographs to
be included. First it rejected fourteen of the one hundred she designated, requir-
ing a stronger representation of Midtown and less of Lower New York. Then it
excised three of the most idiosyncratic and controversial, a Harlem storefront
church, the Times Square statue of Father Duffy swaddled in canvas, and a West
Side construction site. Duttons rst demand may have been fueled by commercial
117
considerations. It hoped the book would appeal to Worlds Fair visitors, for whom
Midtown would be the citys best-known area, but the new pictures also gave the
118 book a rmer geographic balance and fortied some of its thematic emphases. With
the possible exception of the surrealistic overtones of the statue shot it is difcult to
nd anything controversial or even idiosyncratic in the three excised photographs;
design considerations seem a more likely reason for their exclusion. In any case, nei-
ther at the time nor later did Abbott express dissatisfaction with the book, whether
with its roster of pictures or their sequence, not even during a free-swinging and
lengthy interview in in which she found much to otherwise complain about.8
The book is organized geographically, which comports well with its ambition to
compose a history of New York, beginning with the earliest settlement and proceed-
ing northward to sites that evoke key moments in the nearly three intervening cen-
turies. This structure also permits juxtapositions that emphasize a dialectic between
the monumental and the intimate, the inanimate and the human features of the city,
and thus encourages what Abbott believed to be the optimal mode for viewing pho-
tographs, to see a rapid succession of pictures, to fuse them in mind and memory,
to reinforce each separate image with the strength and meaning of all the others.
It achieves this because while geography is the unifying organizational principle
it is not rigidly adhered to, and succeeding pages often depict sites of contrasting
scales and uses and employ conspicuously different compositional strategies. For
instance, the Department of Docks and Police Station () and the Firehouse,
Battery () are separated by ve photographs that move as far aeld as the Lower
East Side despite the buildings location within a hundred yards of one another and
similar Italianate style. This violation of geographical integrity is purposeful. One
of the collections strongest impressions is of the nearness of water everywhere in
Manhattan, reminding viewers of the complex system required to transport people
and goods onto the island. Placing the two waterside photographs together would
have diminished this emphasis. Both buildings, moreover, were small relative to most
others in the BatteryWall Street district, and the pages preceding and following
their pictures depict views from skyscraper rooftops, looking down vertiginously
on the streets below. These juxtapositionsmontages of contrast in size, building
style, and historical developmenthighlight one of Changing New Yorks themes,
that New York is a city of extraordinary contrasts with old and new, large and small,
jumbled together in a heterogeneous cityscape that is unique among the worlds
cities and reects more generally the aleatoric nature of American development.9
Abbotts nominal purpose was to memorialize buildings in danger of being razed
in this helter-skelter atmosphere, but in fact this ambition was subordinate to oth-
ers at which the books omissions as well as its structure hinted. Excluded are vir-
tually all of the citys most celebrated sights. There are no views of Times Square,
the Broadway theater district, the Chrysler Building, or Central Park. Two of New
Yorks most photographed structures, the newly built Empire State Building and
the Statue of Liberty, do appear but so deeply in the background as to be barely vis-
ible. Not included either is a parcel of light so adored by photographers, the city
at night as seen from some elevated viewpoint, although Abbott had made such a
picture. Changing New York served only poorly as a tourist guidebook or souvenir.
The exclusions also underline how determinedly Changing New York resisted
the ahistorical romantic city as such views would inevitably have suggested. It
critiques this attitude by incorporating pictures that evoke it in its opening and
conclusion but bracketed by others emphasizing a contrasting historicist perspec-
tive. Its second and penultimate photographs are able but conventional images of
the romantic city. Broadway to the Battery () is an aerial shot from the Irving
Trust Building on Wall Street over the peaks of other skyscrapers to the busy harbor
beyond and the distant Statue of Liberty, familiar sites according to the caption.
Midway between shore and statue is the S.S. Normandie, steaming toward Europe.
In Manhattan Skyline (), taken from New Jersey, a telephoto lens compresses
the stunning midtown skyline dominated by the RCA Building; the Normandie, in
middle distance, is now docked at its Hudson River berth. Had they been the books
opening and closing pictures they would have announced and conrmed a romantic
view of New Yorkthe resplendent Gotham of awesome skyscrapers and fabulous
arrivals and departuresbut because they are not this notion is constrained by what
precedes and follows them.
Changing New Yorks rst photograph depicts a considerably more obscure site,
the statue of Colonel Abraham de Peyster in Bowling Green modeled by the early
afternoon sun and with the ofce buildings of lower Broadway looming behind it.
De Peyster had been a leading political gure in colonial days, and opening with
his memorial implies that New Yorks history, not its romance, will be the books
emphasis. The photograph invites viewers to ponder the citys humble beginnings as
an outpost of imperialism and to contrast its origins with what it had since become,
the leading metropolis of a world power, emblematized by the mass and solidity of
the Financial District buildings that encircle the statue. The caption amplies this
notion and announces another. The statues site had formerly held a lead likeness
of King George III that revolutionary patriots pulled down and melted to make
Continental Army bullets, denoting a later stage of imperial domination overthrown
by resistance to arbitrary and absentee authority. Moreover, the de Peyster statue
had not been erected until , two centuries after his mayoralty, which suggests
Americans belated and perhaps attenuated sense of their past. Photograph and
caption thus announce Changing New Yorks ambition: to illuminate and fortify
historical perception by challenging viewers to confront the artifacts of their past
and speculate about their meanings.
The books nal photograph is also of a relatively obscure site and likewise invites
119
historical judgment. Hell Gate Bridge () portrays the central steel arch of the
massive parabolic railway link between the Bronx and Queens. Compositionally, ton-
120 ally, and in its rendering of texture it is a bravura performance. Seen from a forty-
ve-degree angle, the bridges sinuous outline is dominated by black or nearly black
tones, the solidity of its span modied by the archs lacy fretwork and accented by
soft cirrus clouds above it. Behind and from this angle below its span is the newly
completed Triborough automobile bridge, its concave catenaries complementing the
Hell Gate Bridges convex arch and its delicate suspension construction emphasiz-
ing the railway bridges immense sturdiness. Deliberately out of focus in the fore-
ground are two thin branches and a few feathery leaves that provide a contrast in
texture and line and enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality. It is an unusually
strong photograph, even in a volume containing scores of superb ones, and it closes
the book with a resounding demonstration of Abbotts technical mastery.
Hell Gate Bridge is an appropriate closing image for more than esthetic reasons,
or, rather, its esthetic strength is integral to its summation of the books thematic
and methodological premises. The bridge, completed in , was unique among
the citys great spans as well as an anachronism. Gustav Lindenthal, its builder, bril-
liantly employed a parabolic form long after most engineers believed it outmoded by
girder-and-beam construction. In both engineering and esthetic terms the bridge was
a triumph, reinvigorating an older form and representing the creative application of
lessons from history to a modern problem. Such recognition of the uses of history
paralleled an attitude Abbott was ambitious for her collection to instill in viewers.
Hell Gate Bridge also reprises Abbotts methodological assumptions. Compo-
sition and the use of deep focus (and a lter for the clouds) emphasize four distinct
planestrees, parabolic bridge, suspension bridge, and skyand invite a series of
comparisons and contrasts. Two might be to assess the esthetic distinction of each
bridge and calculate the social utility of the differing modes of transport each car-
ried. The foreground trees could imply that one or both bridges are grounded in an
organic principle or, conversely, that the trees are ironic, natures feeble attempt to
assert itself in a city of obdurate steel. The high sky might suggest an overarching
natural sovereignty that dwarfs even these colossal structures or be no more than
a limpid background to frame the awesome Hell Gate. The photograph allows
even demandsthe viewers active participation in order to tease out its complex
and sometimes contradictory interpretive possibilities. In this respect it resembles
the work of other modernists. William Faulkner in Absalom! Absalom! () and
Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (), to take two examples from many, contrived
sophisticated, multilevel forms to encourage audiences to participate in their work
rather than be mere spectators of it. All three artists also had in common the fact
that they used these techniques to require active consideration of the relationship
of past and present, how history shaped modern culture.
De Peyster Statue and Hell Gate Bridge thus counterpoint Broadway to the
Battery and Manhattan Skyline. In the latter two Abbott acknowledges and even
celebrates the romantic city of Rodgers and Harts Manhattan (); Gilbert
Seldess rst modern photographic book of New York, This Is New York ();
or Busby Berkeleys Lullaby of Broadway sequence in Golddiggers of . She
does so, however, in a framework that constrains their evocative power and sug-
gests the limpness of their social perspective. They, and the congeries of attitudes
they represent, deny history, see the past as merely quaint if they see it at all, and
encourage a single, premeditated response from audiences. The two images, the
only unabashedly romantic ones in Changing New York, are represented because
this view, too, was part of the pasts legacy. But Abbott locates it within a context
that demythologizes it by providing more complex historical and even psychologi-
cal perspectives for understanding the citys cultural signicance.10
Photographing Cultural History

In The World of Atget Abbott observed, The history he brought to life for us is not
conned to parliaments and congresses. It recites the everyday activities of those
men and women who are the stuff of which history is made. If championing his
work retarded her recognition the debt was partially repaid by his inspiration. She,
too, concentrated on cultural history and was attentive to ordinary experience. In
that sense her work also resembled some of the thirties most interesting artistic
undertakings although more obliquely than much of the depressions art that cel-
ebrated the people.11
Abbott believed that the history of architecture is perhaps the surest external
index to an epoch because the built environment wove together so many cultural
strands. Some structures she depicted were celebrated, but many others were not.
Neither an architectural grand tour of New Yorks notable buildings nor a panegy-
ric to the distinguished gures who designed them nor the great enterprises they
housed, Changing New York explored what she called culture morphologyhow
structural form embedded the citys history. That interest demanded scrutinizing
the obscure as well as the famous, the old and the new, and what artifacts meant
rather than how distinguished they were.12
The history her book traces is a progression from smaller to larger structures
reecting an increasingly complex, culturally heterogeneous, and commercially
ambitious city. Most preCivil War buildings she photographed were houses below
Fourteenth Street. Varying her cameras distance simulated the cinematic technique
of an establishing shot of a row of buildings, a midshot of a smaller number, and a
close-up that revealed a single one. These variations not only prevented them from
121
becoming visually monotonous but also created a dynamic interplay between their
environment and individual specicities. Clustered in the second quarter of the book,
122 they also contrasted with the skyscrapers of the preceding and following sections
and invoked a city that once had been less imperial in its ambitions and built to a
more human scale. To be sure, though, early New York had not been an egalitarian
society, as the close-ups emphasized. The Ionic columns, enclosing arch, and intri-
cately worked fanlight of Doorway: Tredwell House () surpass in richness the
more severe Doorway: W. th Street (), but the gap between them and
their earliest occupants, a merchant and an artisan, respectively, seems modest by
later measures.13
The buildings had originally been single-family dwellings, reecting the space
then available to a less populous city as well as the Jacksonian Eras buoyant indi-
vidualism. One establishing shot especially analyzes change over a century of growth
and development. Washington Square, Looking North () employs deep focus to
reveal ve distinct planes, each delineating a different stage in New Yorks past and
thus compressing its history into a single revealing image. The parks open spaces
nearest the camera are a remnant of prehistory, as it were, when it was an Indian
settlement and then a potters eld. Just beyond its perimeter and extending out
of the frame, the row of spare, modest, and harmonious Greek Revival houses of
Washington Square North, built in the s, suggests the ethos of a self-contained
polis. It had been supplanted by when the Roman arch at the parks entrance
was erected to commemorate the centennial of Washingtons inauguration. The
archs imperial associations connoted a new cultural ambition that condently looked
forward to the United States, and its largest city, becoming leading world powers.
The towering, apartment building just behind these structures betokens the
tremendous pressure on living space as New Yorks population swelled. It illustrates
as well how under this pressure the cityscape degenerated into the anarchistic un-
planning that Abbott believed it was her mission to expose. In the pictures deepest
plane may be glimpsed the outline of the recently completed Empire State Building,
erected just three generations after the Washington Square North houses. It had
instantly become New Yorks most recognizable building, symbolizing the fulll-
ment of the nations grandiose ambitions, a perception emphasized by her careful
juxtaposition of it with the arch in the compositions center. By deploying her view
cameras special resources with such acuity Abbott distilled a remarkable synecdo-
che for this history.14
Linked visually and thematically to the preCivil War houses are thirteen pho-
tographs of small business enterprises. These were contemporary establishments,
but in the logic of Changing New York they were anachronisms having more in
common with the nineteenth than twentieth century. The pictures sequential loca-
tion as well as Abbotts strategy for photographing these concerns underscore this.
Most of the businesses appeared near the houses. With many she moved close-in
to concentrate on framed display windows, thus creating a visual equivalency with
the houses doorways. Several businesses had roots in ethnic communities, and a
few were notably old fashioned.
Rope Store: Peerless Equipment Co. () depicts goods purveyed by a marine
supply rm, coils of rope, lifebuoys, hoists, and blocks, all arranged neatly and in
clear focus as is a pot-bellied stove in the foreground. Behind it sits an elderly man,
tilted back in a swivel chair and smoking a cigar. During the long exposure required
to achieve such clarity the cigar smoke blurred his face and torso, making him appear
to be fading away. For all her dedication to realism Abbott employed surrealistic
motifs when they served her purposes, as is the case here. In a historical sense the
shopkeeper and his orderly shop were anachronisms more appropriate to an age of
wind power than the twentieth century.
Chicken Market () and Bread Store () also feature fading shopkeepers.
Both portray small businesses through close-in compositions that emphasize ethnic-
ity. Display windows advertise fresh-killed kosher chickens and artfully arranged
loaves of Italian bread. Both photographs, though, reveal more than one plane of
vision. Chicken Market has two, the window, with its Yiddish and English lettering
and hanging chickens, and in his shop the shadowy but palpable proprietor in cap
and apron, turned three-quarters and looking out at the camera. An even stronger
photograph, Bread Store has four planes, remarkable for such a close-in view. In
the nearest, across its bottom third, are straw baskets for delivering bread and a vent
for the basement ovens. The second is the plate-glass window, with signs and some
three dozen loaves displayed in it. Behind them is the faint image of the proprietor
looking out, and, nally, buildings across Bleecker Street are reected in the window.
The baskets and unwrapped bread indicate the enterprises old-fashionedness; the
proprietors fate as an individual entrepreneur is implied by her ghostly image, as
the kosher butchers had been. These solitary individuals, their images indistinct,
were becoming irrelevancies and no longer embodied the cultures primary energies.
Abbott, moreover, like Atget believed that reections are mysterious and sugges-
tive and a very legitimate montage effect in reality itself. The windows reec-
tion is one of these. Reversed, the reection reads Moving Vans and Storage, an
objective correlative of the unsettled mobility in American culture that imperiled
such ethnic neighborhood enterprises.15
Country Store Interior (), Abbotts most poignant photograph of a small
shop, is near the end of the book. It is difcult to imagine that such an enterprise
as Ye Olde Country Store in Spuyten Duyveil in the northern Bronx existed in
New York after , much less in the thirties. And it hardly seems to be a store at
all. There are no counters, displays of goods, or other commercial paraphernalia
aside from two placards for Havranek Bros. Meat Products. The store contains
123
instead a Cannon Ball stove; a pair of wire chairs and a folding wooden one with an
askew cushion; a porcelain bowl that holds waste; a pendulum clock and an electric
124 meter; a row of coat hooks with a solitary cap; and a litter of boxes, paper, and pieces
of wood. The pictures formal interest is in contrasts between spherical and linear
objects and in patterns created by the sun streaming through an unseen window.
As a still life it is visually compelling but has little cultural information. In light of
the previous small enterprises it suggests something more, however, a remnant of
the past that has unaccountably persevered to the present, its function uncertain
and its future even more so. The stores anachronistic irrelevance is emphasized by
George Washington Bridge (), which precedes it. In this view Abbott adopts a
monumentalizing perspective, shooting up at one of the new bridges cable towers
and emphasizing its massive girder construction that was a marvel of twentieth-
century engineering. Changing New Yorks nal photograph of small enterprise
immediately follows and clinches the point. Dominating Gasoline Station ()
by appearing six times are the name and trademark of the Texaco Corporation,
relegating the fact that the business itself is Abes Plaza Gas Station to a barely
noticeable addendum. The shadow but not the substance of individual small enter-
prise is here, and the outpost of a national corporation symbolizes a profound shift
in economic organization since the mid-nineteenth century.
Culture morphology reveals these new arrangements after the Civil War as struc-
tures become larger and consecrated to uses characteristic of the Gilded Ages
dynamic energies. Abbott focused particularly on those associated with extraor-
dinary advances in transportation, including bridges, docks, ferry terminals, and
mass-transit facilities. In Ferries, Foot of West rd Street (), one of the books
twelve studies of such developments, the broad terminals connecting passengers
with railway lines lacking a New York depot occupy the background. In the middle
distance a horse-drawn cart, electric streetcar, and automobiles compress yet other
stages of transportations history into a single image. Outlined against the sky and
dominating the vast space is a clock tower, its orid architecture also shared by the
terminals. Their eclectic French Renaissance style intimates the cultural pretensions,
and uncertainties, of the railroad barons who commissioned them. If the analogy
of Renaissance princes with tycoons implied a prideful self-estimate, the resort to
a monumental style borrowed wholesale from Europe and deployed in such anoma-
lous ways also betrayed the barons insecure grasping for historical pedigrees.16
Following this shot is the Grand Opera House (), once owned by the free-
booting railroad nanciers Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. Its ornate Italian Renaissance
facade aunted pilasters topped with likenesses of the Muses and cameos of Shake-
speare and Goethe. Fisk had purchased the theater to showcase his mistresss acting
talents, and he barricaded himself inside after his abortive attempt in to corner
the market in gold. Later his body lay there in state after his partner shot him in
a quarrel over the mistress. After its heyday as the plaything of railroad magnate
Jim Fisk, the caption notes, it had eventually become an RKO movie theater, a
fact invisible in the shot itself because Abbotts composition excludes the ground
oor and marquee to highlight the grandiose symbolism of its architecture.
Facade, Alwyn Court () employs a similar strategy of close attention to
symbolic architectural detail. Built shortly after the turn of the twentieth century,
Alwyn Court was the citys most luxurious apartment building; each thirteen- or
fourteen-room unit included a wine cellar and a conservatory. The caption hints at
economic collapse during the depression, however. The building was foreclosured
in and remodeled into three- and four-room apartments that left only its outer
shell intact. But this facade is Abbotts focus, with its intricate stone tapestry that
brandishes the heraldic salamanders of Franois Premier to proclaim the aristo-
cratic pretensions of its original occupants.
Contrasting with these orid examples of Gilded Age extravagance are ve of
nineteenth-century tenement housing. They are plain, monotonous, and squalid,
the gap between them and the citys best residences considerably widened since
the days of single-family dwellings. All are seen in long shots, stressing the envi-
ronment they inhabit rather than architectural details. Court of the First Model
Tenement in New York City (), built in , looks up through a crazy-quilt of
drying laundry at the dreary, six-oor walkups that surround the court. Because of
the cameras slightly raised angle and the distraction of the haphazard clotheslines
the three children in the courtyard are isolated and dwarfed in a blank and uninvit-
ing space. In Henry Street () Abbotts similarly uptilted lens underlines the
contrast between haves and have-nots, the pictures composition, focus, and lighting
conveying a historical perception of the widening gap between wealth and poverty.
Henry Street is lined with bleak tenements characteristic of the Lower East Side,
but its vista opens onto the more recent Transportation, Woolworth, and Munici-
pal Buildings in the distance. Deep focus is not employed here, and these tower-
ing buildings are slightly indistinct; their ethereality is further emphasized by the
early-afternoon winter light that puts much of Henry Street in shadow and gauzily
illuminates the distant skyscrapers.
The forces driving this enormous expansion of wealth are evoked in Custom
House Statues and New York Produce Exchange Building (), from and
, respectively. Two of Daniel Chester Frenchs allegorical groups representing
the continents occupy a portion of the foreground and middle distance, but span-
ning the frame and in sharper focus is the monumental building that housed the
Exchange and U.S. Customs House, its design derived from Roman aqueducts and
its facade adorned with terra cotta great seals and representations of the products
125
traded within. Depicting the statuary and building together further emphasizes
their imperial associations and the condence in American destiny that expanded
126 trade and commerce encouraged in these years.
That condence found its nest expression in the Brooklyn Bridge, and Chang-
ing New York includes three photographs of it, the only structure depicted so often.
Although each portrays it as the eras supreme union of engineering genius and
esthetic vision, Abbotts views of it are not merely celebratory. They develop its
relationship to economic and cultural transformations in the Gilded Age.
Water Front: From Pier , East River () emphasizes the bridges contribu-
tion to the complex network of water trafc, railroads, and roadways on which the
citys prosperity depended. The piers wooden pilings and two refrigerated box-
cars dominate the foreground, each a strong horizontal extending out of the frame.
Behind them is a docked freighter, only its top decks and vertical boom and funnel
visible. Rising above it are the roadway, towers, catenaries, and suspension cables of
the bridge. The composition eliminates inessentials, and the tension between hori-
zontals and verticals pulls the eye toward the suspension cables soaring diagonals.
Pier, boxcars, ship, and bridge are all modes of transport, but only the bridge also
brings a viewer the exhilaration associated with a work of the creative imagination.
Brooklyn Bridge, with Pier , Pennsylvania R.R. () moves nearer to the
bridges axis so that more than its silhouette is visible. The shots foreground is
exceedingly cluttered; a ramshackle cart, trash barrels, and assorted vehicles are
arrayed higgledy-piggledy on the street below. The railroad freight terminal in the
middle distance lacks the fussy ornateness of the Twenty-third Street ferries, but
its stone wreaths, tablets, and projecting bows like those of Viking ships mark it as
stylistically different only in degree, not kind. Above the terminal, rising to the top
of the frame, are the bridges great Gothic towers, which support its roadbed and
grid of cables that extend up and out of the picture. The compositions deep focus
emphasizes the bridges commanding sweep that transcends the disorderly scene
below it and contrasts the terminals derivative motifs with the bridges inspired
yet functional design. As with the design for the Hell Gate Bridge, it borrows a
historical motif but makes it new by fusing it with native expression of esthetic and
engineering genius.
Like this view, the composition of Brooklyn Bridge () invites attention to the
relation among its several elements and encourages historical judgment, as does its
remarkable tonal range. Its four components are, in the foreground, a low, nineteenth-
century warehouse; to its left is the girder framework of a new construction; behind
them on the other side of the East River are the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan; and
over all, angling diagonally across the picture to frame the jagged line of skyscrap-
ers, is the ligree of the bridges roadbed, the suspension cables, and a corner of its
tower. The roadbed is a glossy black against a neutral sky, the warehouse mid-gray,
the new buildings girders darker, and the skyscrapers are pearly, not only sharply
discriminating among them but also emphasizing the bridges oxymoronic delicacy
and strength. These tonal contrasts and the cameras perspective exalt the bridge
as an engineering and artistic triumph. The photograph also suggests how past and
present intermingleand not always felicitously. The warehouses anchor plates
indicate its premodern technic limiting its height. Advances in structural engineer-
ing that permitted the bridges construction also heralded the skyscrapers. These
innovations allowed formidable distances to be spanned and great heights to be
reached, changing forever the face of the city and its inhabitants sense of the pos-
sible, as in these years they witnessed the astonishing triumphs of technology over
nature. But they could have unintended consequences, as the steel-frame building
being erected implies. When completed it will blot out the view of the city beyond,
destroy this arresting vista to replace it with a more constrained and inhospitable
space. Not only did the bridge presage such alterations in the cityscape but it also
was, in economic terms, the nexus of the expanding city. The low warehouse, built
the year after the bridge, owed its existence to increased commercial opportunities
the bridge allowed, and the skyscrapers, too, were their fruits. Thus, Brooklyn
Bridge dramatizes the esthetic distinction of its eponymous subject and how it
represented American creative genius. At the same time it illustrates how materi-
ally the bridge contributed to the Gilded Ages unfettered development.
New Yorks skyscrapers most strikingly embodied the fulllment of this economic
expansion, and Abbotts examination of twentieth-century culture morphology
centered on them, with some sixteen shots in which they are the dominant feature.
She was deeply ambivalent about the modern megaliths:
I may feel that the skyscrapers are beautiful and majestic. Or I may feel that
they are ugly, inhuman, illogical, ridiculous, pathological growths which have
no place in the planned city. Whatever I think and feel about the skyscrap-
ers, I say through understanding of and application of composition. Vertical
lines may seem to topple toward each other, or to fall apart, ready to collapse;
they do not create a balanced whole. On the other hand, the photograph may
present the skyscrapers in such a manner that verticals sway in a majestic and
graceful rhythm expressing unity and order. Even more complex is the prob-
lem if the photographer sees the skyscrapers as both beautiful and ugly and
seeks to create such a duality in the photograph by posing opposite tendencies
against each other in dynamic composition.17
All three types appear in Changing New York, more of her compositions dualistic
than either of the other possibilities.
Abbotts Flatiron Building () is beautiful and majestic. The earliest built
of the skyscrapers she photographed, the Flatiron was completed in and was
at that time among the nations tallest buildings. Showing it to strong advantage,
127
the uptilted camera is distant enough to take in its full height and aimed slightly to
the left of its narrow apex, bringing out the corrugations of its rusticated limestone
128 facade. To emphasize the Flatirons distinctive shape and handsome architectural
features the ground oor, with its polyglot shops, and the busy intersection are
excluded. But it is not quite solitarythe camera placement includes fragments
of surrounding buildings as well, notably an adjacent one carrying a paint compa-
nys advertisement so large as to parallel six stories of the Flatiron. In the image,
paint pours from a bucket and envelops a globe with the legend Cover the Earth.
As the caption reports, the Flatiron had been commissioned by a newly rich gold
miner as a monument to his success. The skyscraper and the paint companys slo-
gan derive from the same imperial ambitions that were making the leading U.S.
city the worlds most important commercial center. Like the Brooklyn Bridge, the
Flatiron Building is both a superb artistic achievement and embodies the cultures
dominant lines of force.
Two pictures imply that skyscrapers are pathological growths. In Wall Street,
Showing East River () the camera tilts downward from the top of one skyscraper
at a thirty-degree angle. The frame fragments the adjoining skyscrapers, and a wide-
angle lens makes the verticals appear to fall away from the center. A contrasting
perspective in Canyon: Broadway and Exchange Place () creates the illusion
that the buildings are toppling toward one another. In this shot the camera is titled
upward seventy-ve degrees from ground level and aimed at the roofs of three
Financial District skyscrapers, which ominously loom over it.
Most of Changing New Yorks skyscrapers are dualistic, concentrating Abbotts
ambivalence in a single image. Fortieth Street between Sixth and Seventh Ave-
nues (), another roof-top shot, is typical. The lens is almost parallel to several
skyscrapers two blocks away, and the composition does not fragment them; instead
they harmoniously rise to the frames top edge and occupy nearly its entire breadth.
The direct but modulated early-winter-morning sunlight rakes their eastern expo-
sures, and shadows on their northern ones attractively model their volumes. In the
pictures bottom third, however, mostly in deeper shadow and between the camera
and the skyscrapers, are numerous nineteenth-century structures that also occupy
its breadth. The skyscrapers are majestic in the morning sunlight, but they (or
their unseen counterparts) leave the lower buildings in nearly permanent dimness.
Abbotts composition and careful exploitation of light emphasize the dispropor-
tions of scale, magnifying the disparity between large and small structures. The
photographs effect is paradoxical. It exalts the skyscrapers impressive contribution
to the skyline of modern New York and proposes that they reveal a social failure in
civic neglect of the requirement that the cityscape be orderly and harmonious.
The lack of planning that permitted such disharmonies disturbed Abbott, and
in her speculations on it she routinely adverted to the skyscrapers. The sharp con-
trasts between the skyscrapers and the brownstone fronts intensies chaos, she
wrote in one. The culture morphology of New York shows sharp antagonisms in
form, an anarchic heterogeneity. She believed that exposing these failures of plan-
ning ought to be an obligation of urban photographers. Such an emphasis on city
planning had considerable currency in the thirties, notably in the work of Lewis
Mumford, who Abbott hoped would write the introduction to Changing New York.
He declined to do so, however, perhaps because he was otherwise occupied with The
City, a lm he was making with Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, to be shown
at the New York Worlds Fair. Although it is more prescriptive than Changing
New York, the two works share certain similarities. Both admired individual small
enterprises and lamented their passing. Each indicted unchecked capitalism as the
leading cause of the citys anarchic heterogeneity and prescribed planning as an
antidote. And in depicting city life neither emphasized the artistic activities and
institutions that ourish in urban settings and are their chief glory.18
These similarities are real enough, but differences are at least as striking. The City
fails to convey much sense of urban lifes stimulating dynamism, stressing instead
its routinization, atmosphere of constriction, and general unpleasantness. It holds
out greenbelt suburban communities as a planned alternative to the urban centers
anarchy. Abbotts photographs, however, unmistakably reveal her fondness for the
city and her pleasure in its multiform life. The lms city inhabitants seem to be
interchangeable parts in a vast inhuman mechanism, wolng their meals, rushing
from place to place, and stalled in mammoth trafc jams as they try to escape the
citys center. Although many of Abbotts shots lack human gures, when they do
appear they are as often as not individualized, as with the shop proprietors, and
Changing New York contains just two pictures of crowded streets. The City arraigns
contemporary urban life, never approaching the mixed tone of her pictures of the
Brooklyn Bridge or Fortieth Street skyscrapers that simultaneously suggest the
richness and deciencies of American urban life. Abbotts commitment to planning
was no doubt genuine, but it did not always consort with her eyes pleasure in the
cityscapes arresting variety.
Two views of the decades most important planned development, Rockefeller
Center, hint at Abbotts ambivalence by what they avoid showing. It was at the
time the most ambitious urban project ever undertaken, and although criticized
when plans were announced in , by the end of the decade Rockefeller Center
enjoyed a general reputation as a distinguished model of what urban planning could
achieve. One-sixth of its three-square-block area was open space, and the siting of
its twelve buildings had been calculated to form a harmonious arrangement of forms
and shade one another as little as possible. Its Channel and Plaza with a summer
cafe and winter skating rink already numbered among the citys busiest gathering
spots, and Radio City Music Hall was a favorite entertainment venue. Rockefeller
129
Center with Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Foreground () emphasizes
the church considerably more than the Center, contrasting the formers ponderous
130 Victorian Gothic with the streamlined slab architecture of the RCA Building and
the uncompleted Time-Life Building, a vivid instance of conicting styles, scales,
and uses in the cityscape. In Rockefeller Center: From Madison Avenue ()
Abbotts distant elevated view reveals the tallest buildings careful siting, but the
Channel and Plaza are virtually invisible in its lower one-fth, obscured in deep
shadow. Neither photograph conveys much sense of the Centers planning and novel
use of space to create an engaging cityscape that mediated between the monumental
and the human.
The composition of Park Avenue and th Street () especially exemplies
Abbotts ambivalence. According to the caption, it depicts a sleek House of the
Modern Age erected at this location to demonstrate the affordable, efcient hous-
ing modern planning made possible. But in her panoramic view it occupies only a
tiny fraction near the frames bottom edge. A viewer can discern little more than
its basic lines. Dominating the picture instead are a plethora of buildings, old and
new, which surround the demonstration house for a space of several blocks, espe-
cially four skyscrapers spaced rhythmically across its upper half. They tower over
the house and the other buildings but are not made to seem pathological growths
that have no place in the planned city because of Abbotts strategy in depicting
them. They touch, or nearly so, the top of the frame, and it would have been an easy
matter to have them project out of it, making them less of a harmonious arrange-
ment. The warm autumn sunlight picks out details on their facades; photographing
them in shadow would have made them less graceful and more ominous. This rich
photograph is not solely a demonstration of the cityscapes disharmonies, nor does
it make an unambiguous plea for planning. Rather, it asserts the ragged, irregular
growth of New York at the same time it rejoices in the visual pleasures of its com-
plex development.
Four of Changing New Yorks views of skyscrapers feature celebrated examples
of the modernist functional style, all recently built: the two of Rockefeller Center,
McGraw-Hill Building (), and Daily News Building (). With each she
set up her camera distant enough to take in an entire building and thus emphasize
its unembellished facade and commanding presence. The structures marked the
triumph of an esthetic no longer dependent on allusion to the glories of European
civilizations. That architects embraced this esthetic represented self-condence in
an American destiny that matched the nations economic and political power.
The photographs also exhibit the historical acuity of Abbotts pictures of late-
nineteenth-century structures. If that eras advances in transportation had fueled
economic development and altered the cityscape as well as its inhabitants con-
sciousness, by the thirties the great communications enterprises housed in these
skyscrapers ranked among the nations most central cultural and economic insti-
tutions. Time and Life, McGraw-Hill, the Daily News, and RCA as a manufacturer
of radios and phonograph equipment as well as owner of the NBC networks and a
lm studio were all beneciaries of, and leading participants in, a communications
revolution that accelerated creation of a more unitary national cultureeven to
a larger extent than the earlier transportation one. All these enterprises, like the
buildings housing them, were twentieth-century creations. Even McGraw-Hill, a
giant rm specializing in scientic publishing, resembled its nineteenth-century
forebears as little as the tabloid Daily News did its journalistic ones.
The culture morphology of the twentieth century, then, revealed a number of
linked antinomies: the growth of a singular and powerful national culture dominated
by increasingly larger enterprises dissociated from the common life, the creation of
a visually vibrant cityscape rendered dissonant by an anarchic heterogeneity, the
triumph of a modernist esthetic appropriate to American preeminence that disre-
garded the human scale, and the extraordinary development of mass communica-
tions intimately tied to and aggrandizing the dominance of corporate enterprise.
Abbotts complex rendering of this history did not permit simplistic judgments
and consisted more of a set of implicit questions than unqualied answers. Perhaps
this is yet another reason for the subsequent neglect of her New York photographs.
The thirties are most often thought of as a decade in which artists and intellectuals
condently offered solutions.
Culture and Civilization

Besides its historical conspectus, Changing New York is a key document of the thir-
ties in its attention to the idea of culture. An inuential essay by Warren I. Susman
argues that preoccupation with culture characterized the decade, making Ameri-
cans begin to think as never before in terms of patterns of behavior and belief,
values and life-styles, symbols and meanings. In conict with it, he says, was the
idea of civilization, epitomized by the industrial and commercial institutions that
had matured in concert with modernization. These vast bureaucracies measured
quality of life solely in material terms and were sedulously devoted to standardiza-
tion and an ideal of efciency. Culture, however, expressed itself in smaller, more
discrete social units and encouraged a more intimate, concrete ideal of community.
It also permitted greater idiosyncrasy and was more responsive to the nonmaterial
needs of individuals. Civilization was fundamentally ahistoricalone of its cardi-
nal tenets was progress, and it faced only the present and futurewhereas culture
131
sought continuity and meaning in the conuence of past and present. Susman dis-
cusses a number of important thirties texts that address this distinction. Although
132 Changing New York is not one of them, it, too, exposes this dualism.19
The small shops pictured were linked visually and thematically with the preced-
ing century but were ongoing enterprises. They participated in community life by
serving clientele in face-to-face relationships and purveying goods that were often
the products of hand labor. Their scale, in absolute as well as human terms, differed
entirely from, say, RCAs, a mammoth corporation that imagined customers as a
mass audience. Abbotts emphasis on ethnicity especially located these small busi-
nesses within the orbit of culture, not only the kosher butcher and the bread store
but also an Italian Cheese Store (), the Lebanon Restaurant (), a Lower
East Side Snuff Shop (), the Mori Restaurant (), and Flam & Flam (),
a law rm sharing quarters with another such enterprise, Avocati Italiani, staffed
by partners named Mirabella, Levy, and Katz.
The Lebanon Restaurant has no evanescent proprietor but includes a parallel
symbol of the extinction such enterprises potentially faced. The close-in camera
placement magnies its ethnic basis, with signs in both English and Arabic, a window
display of a Turkish coffee service, and painted representations of Middle-Eastern
pottery. On the window closest to the viewer because of the oblique camera angle is
RCAs famous trademark His Masters Voice, and more Arabic writing and two
phonograph records are displayed in the window. Juxtaposing these symbols of
culture and civilization possibly suggested that such small ethnic enterprises were
capable of absorbing RCAs output without being themselves transformed, but more
likely that the trademark was a Trojan Horse preguring a standardization that
would lead to the demise of the distinctive community the restaurant served.20
Snuff Shop, composed similarly, foregrounds a sidewalk wooden Scotch
Indian in tam and kilt offering cigars to passersby. Supplementing this ethnic
mlange is another: S. Scharlin and Son, which advertises its wares in both Yiddish
and English and manufactures snuff named after Leon Gambetta, hero of French
Republicanism. The mixture of ethnicities is comic, but the caption adds a fore-
boding note. Heartless city ofcials paying no heed to his antiquity or authentic
folk-art beauty, it says, conscated the Scotch Indian for obstructing the sidewalk
and hauled him to the dump. Such institutional disdain for the artistic, eccentric,
or historical was not unique, as another group of pictures demonstrated.
Among the modest number of human portraits in Changing New York are three
of street peddlers, who added color and variety to the citys streets. Handled dif-
ferently they might have been typical depression subjects, but neither impov-
erishment nor despair is their keynote. The Hot Dog Stand () vendor stands
condently in his clean, white apron next to his cart, dominating his small domain.
The Traveling Tin Shop () merchant is less well turned out and his bearing
is less self-condent, but he, too, seems purposeful as he arranges his wares. Only
the Roast Corn Man (), older than the other two and in shabby clothing, verges
on the pathetic, but he is nevertheless reaching into his pushcart, a man at work.
All three captions repeat virtually identical information, that municipal ofcials
were legislating street peddlers out of existence by banning them from the streets,
corralling them into modern enclosed markets. Their suppression was analogous
to the Scotch Indians conscation in making them victims of a dubious modern
efciency. The pictures could dramatize what the peddlers added to the vitality of
street life but required captions (or the contemporary viewers knowledge) to reveal
what threatened thema bureaucracy indifferent to history (roast corn venders
dated back to ), hell-bent on centralization, and enforcing bland uniformity.
Together, photographs and captions suggested civilization riding roughshod over
a living culture that united past and present.
A fair number of photographs allude to this conict, but three of churches espe-
cially do so. They could epitomize it because of their role as loci of community, their
concentration on spiritual rather than material values, their modest size relative
to other buildings of institutional importance, and their historicity. None Abbott
included in the book was among the citys best-known, such as archdiocesan St.
Patricks Cathedral, or Riverside Church (built with Rockefeller money), or Trinity
Church at the foot of Wall Street, perhaps because their other associations might
have raised peripheral issues.
St. Lukes Chapel and Old Houses () dated from the s, and except for
a barely visible truck the image might have been made in the nineteenth century.
Abbott situated her camera on Hudson Streets east side, catercornered from the
modest brick church, so as to give more prominence, just in front of the churchyard
fence, to a pair of parked baby carriages, two seated mothers, and two older children.
The late-afternoon summer sunlight is particularly lambent. It creates distinct but
not harsh shadows and serves as natural backlighting, softening the texture of the
brick, modeling the square bell towers volume, and making the churchyards shrubs
and trees luminous. All these details contrive to give the picture a pastoral quality,
an airiness, spaciousness, and tranquility that belie its being taken in modern New
York. The churchs great age, its simple modesty, and the sense it is an informal
gathering spot all make it an evocation of the idea of culture. The Greenwich Vil-
lage neighborhood of St. Lukes is a community where life-styles retain continuities
with the past and where scale is not disproportionate to people.
An entirely different impression is given in Rockefeller Center with Collegiate
Church of St. Nicholas in the Foreground (). A larger and considerably more
elaborate Gilded Age church than St. Lukes, it is nevertheless overtopped and
hemmed in by Rockefeller Center. Its heavy, Gothic arches and ying buttresses
appear especially anachronistic and irrelevant in the same picture with the skyscrap-
133
ers sleek angularity. Along the frames bottom edge, blurred automobiles on Fifth
Avenue simultaneously suggest speed and congestion, a contrast to St. Lukes peace-
134 fulness. Only the fact that Abbott composed with the churchs steeple extending
out of the frame, thereby diminishing the contrast of height, allows the perception
that St. Nicholas exists in an uneasy equipoise with the buildings around it and the
utterly different values they represent.
St. Marks Church with Skywriting is among the books least subtle pictures,
not least in the uncharacteristic way Abbotts title directs attention to its irony. St.
Marks, one of the citys oldest churches, was consecrated in on the site of
Peter Stuyvesants chapel. The uptilted view excludes all of Second Avenues sur-
rounding buildings (still known in the thirties as the Jewish Rialto, with a lively
mixture of ethnic restaurants and Yiddish theaters), concentrating instead on the
churchs portico, pediment, and especially its steeple. Full sunlight emphasizes the
shabby condition of steeple and building and the bare, lifeless vines that straggle
from the portico. These details suggest a neglected, perhaps disused, church. The
pediments curious fresco depicts heron and deer in a shady glade while sh swim
in adjoining ponds, a pastoralism incongruous with the setting. Behind and above
the steeple, high in the blank sky, an airplane pumps out smoke letters to advertise
some commodity. Once the steeple rose above the city and signied the churchs
cultural centrality, but now its bedraggled state indicates its superuity while high
in heavens above it the combined powers of science, technology, and corporate
enterprise combine to give New Yorkers something else to look up to, a symbol
more consonant with twentieth-century civilization.
These pictures of churches illuminate the clash of culture and civilization that
Susman identies as characterizing thirties intellectual and artistic life, and for
Abbott it was inscribed elsewhere in the city as well, in its neighborhood shops, on
its streets and sidewalks, and across the facades of its most impressive buildings.
Her camera was an unusually sensitive recording instrument because it had an
extraordinary capacity to bring out contrasts of large and small, the mass and the
individual, the uniform and the eccentric, and do so with remarkable compression.
But it is her certain grasp of composition and keen eye for revealing detail, guided
by her alertness to the eras tensions, that make these photographs such an acute
exploration of a conict lying beneath the decades more visible perturbations.
The New Deal

A handful of Abbotts photographs, however, do address the depressions palpa-
ble consequences, three by focusing on the forgotten man. In Tri-Boro Barber
School () a disheveled Bowery denizen loitering in the schools doorway is remi-
niscent of the FSA in its ironic juxtaposition of a social victim with a verbal mes-
sage that underscores his redundancy. Why be Idle? asks a sign in the schools
window. Talman Street, between Jay and Bridge Streets () likewise might have
been by the FSA but for its urban setting. The African American mother and two
youngsters at the edge of a rubble-strewn lot that must serve as the childrens play-
ground are indisputably victims of poverty, its meanness indicated by the shabby
tenements that line the street behind them. Shelter on the Waterfront () lacks
the clarity and tonal range of most of her picturesshe used a smaller-format Lin-
hof rather than her view camerabut it matters little because the theme is so sin-
gularly apprehended. Its contrast between seven bindle stiffs loang or sleeping on
a waterfront pier and the background skyscrapers dramatizes the glaring inequities
of American society. Only the potential for violence among the downtroddenone
man appears just to have attacked anothermakes this picture out of the ordinary
in depression social documentary.
More unusual are three photographs that allude to the New Deal and imply skep-
ticism about its goals and achievements, perhaps surprising from a photographer
employed by one of its most ambitious undertakings. WPA labor had expanded
the Downtown Skyport (), a terminal for seaplanes that, in the captions words,
brought Wall Street close to commuters from Oyster Bay, Boston and Philadelphia.
Like many of her compositions, this one incorporates several planes of vision. In the
foreground is the skyport itself, two seaplanes docked at its pier. Behind it, several
low buildings of the nineteenth century jostle with the modern white skyscraper
at Wall Street. In the background, in diffused focus and thus distantly ethereal,
towers the Cities Service Building at Pine Street. These contrasts of old and
new, large and small, sleek and blowsy, reiterate Abbotts view of the cityscape as
anarchically heterogeneous. But giving the picture its special edge are, in the nearest
foreground and squeezed into its corner, two prepubescent shoeshine boys seated
on the skyport pier, their small stature diminished even further by their placement
in the frame. With their kits at the ready these enterprising youths evoke the rags-
to-riches tales of Horatio Alger. Whatever its validity in the nineteenth century, this
still-reigning social myth seems impossible of fulllment in the twentieth because of
the enormous gap that had opened between the aspirations the boys represent and
the entrenched wealth symbolized by the skyscrapers behind them. The seaplanes,
emblems of modernization and requiring resources only the very wealthy could
command, also connote its superannuation. What is more, the nanciers who used
the skyport to shuttle between their distant homes and Wall Street brokerages, and
who on arrival had their shoes shined, were held by popular opinion to be respon-
sible for the depression. It was a mordant irony that the unemployed should have
135
been used to enhance a facility to serve them. Thus compressed into this image are
the exposure of an outmoded social myth and an indictment of New Deal policies,
136 which, it intimates, cater to the already well-off.21
Union Square () suggests a similar skepticism, although more humorously.
This site was famous for its left-wing political gatherings, but Abbotts picture does
not even hint at them. Instead she aimed her camera across Fourth Avenue at the
S. Klein Department Store, which had a working-class clientele. The store is actu-
ally three buildings with advertising signs spanning their facades, a feeble effort to
unify what is architecturally chaotic. Its immediate neighbor is the dignied clas-
sical Union Savings Bank, which she obscured by locating her camera in the park
behind the Lafayette statue facing the store, his left hand outstretched. Emblazoned
on the largest sign brandishing the stores name is the Blue Eagle of the National
Recovery Administration (NRA), the New Deals most ubiquitous icon before the
agency was declared unconstitutional in . In this juxtaposition Lafayettes
gesture may be seen as either revelation or puzzlement, but in either case it implies
fundamental discontinuity between the early Republics ideals and the tenor of the
thirties. The NRA, emphasizing the elimination of competition, contrived to bol-
ster businesss fortunes by raising prices, a political initiative far removed from the
ideal of legislative disinterestedness that Lafayette may be presumed to represent.
In Susmans terms the NRA was an institution of civilization and prized bureau-
cratic oversight, centralization of authority, and efciency, as did, by implication
in Abbotts photograph, the entire New Deal.
Fourth Avenue, No. (), of boarded-up, old-law tenements in Brooklyn,
makes an even more corrosive critique. These brick apartments, old but structurally
sound, sit unused because their owner refused to make renovations that would meet
re codes. Depicting the abandonment of the serviceable buildings in an era when so
many citizens were ill-housed implicitly condemned capitalist greed and neglect of
social responsibility, a common observation in thirties art. The photograph also puts
forward another, more complex argument. Plastered on them at street level are doz-
ens of posters advertising movies, dance halls, and athletic events, most fully legible
because of the pictures clarity. Almost lost in this welter touting My Man Godfrey
and The Great Ziegfeld and Harlem Nite are two or three urging Brooklynites to
vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Abbott made the photograph on October ,
(all titles included dates), less than one week before the election and seven years to
the day after the Crash. All its elements combine to make a provocativeif open-
endedobservation about American life in the thirties. The depressions profound
social dislocations represented by the empty tenements still existed seven years after
it had begun, and the New Deal had failed to solve them. In this light the plethora
of posters suggests two possibilities, neither of them hopeful about the efcacy of
conventional American politics. On the one hand, if the New Deal had once rep-
resented the possibility of political renewal that viewpoint was subsequently over-
whelmed by escapist entertainments, and citizens had been lulled into quiescence by
gaudy circuses. On the other hand, despite the depressions intractability Americans
had demonstrated admirable resilience, continuing to nd pleasure in diversions and
entertainments. In neither case did the New Deal matter much.
The Loneliness of a Large City

Several of Changing New Yorks most arresting pictures combine social observation
with a psychological insight less common in documentary photography and much of
the realistic art of the thirties, and they do so in ways that enlarge on its exploration
of culture morphology. When in Life ran a story about Abbotts project one
of the photographs it reproduced was Fifth Avenue, Nos. , , (), of a row
of houses built in the nineteenth century by the blueblood Rhinelander family. Life
saw a similarity between it and Edward Hoppers city paintings, but Abbott scoffed
at the comparison. When told that a picture resembles a Hopper painting, Life
reported, Abbott answers that she was doing this sort of thing before Hopper, and
what artists like him are attempting is better done in photography anyway.22
Abbotts hauteur barely concealed defensiveness about photography. Hopper was a
well-established and esteemed artist working in the prestige medium of oil painting;
she was an adept of what some considered a merely mechanical form of reproduction.
Photography, according to this view, required none of the dexterity or imaginative
perception of painting, and its practitioners were not artists but only journeymen.
Because artful photography had ourished so in the thirties that attitude no longer
had much plausibility, but it nevertheless needed to be rmly countered, especially
with Lifes popular audience. It was no wonder that Abbott bristled.
In fact, her picture of the Rhinelander residences does resemble a Hopper paint-
ing in its attraction to Victorian architecture, bold divisions between light and dark,
oblique framing, and brooding stillness. Although it is the most explicitly Hopper-
esque of any of her photographs, others are similarly close in spirit to his depic-
tions of urban life, both in the sites they portray and the cultural and psychological
meanings with which they invest the city. By , when photographys stature as
an art had long since become unexceptionable, Abbott acknowledged and even took
pride in the comparison. In a retrospective of her nearly fty years as a photogra-
pher she reprinted the Rhinelander houses directly opposite her later portrait of
Hopper. It was not a confession of inuence, which she continued to deny, but an
acknowledgment of the congruity of their sensibilities.23
These similarities are both formal and emotional. Both artists were drawn to the
contrasts created by direct sunlight and deep shadow, fond of portraying subjects
137
from oblique vantages, and dexterous in manipulating the verticals and horizon-
tals that characterize the citys geometry. Each had an uncommon eye for revealing
138 detail and especially relished vernacular architecture as well as apparently prosaic
settings. Most strikingly, both artists invested the city with a sense of loneliness,
with an air of quiet that was not necessarily serene, and they often chose settings
that connoted the withdrawal of a sense of community that might have nourished
the individual. A similar air of reserved melancholy characterizes Hoppers paint-
ings and Abbotts photographs and distinguishes their work from that of many of
their contemporaries.
The solitary aging man purchasing a ticket in Lyric Theatre (), surrounded
by gaudy posters and lobby cards, might have attracted Hoppers eye, too. Although
differently handled it conveys the same mixed air of ennui and distracted excite-
ment as his New York Movie (), with its pensive usher, rapt viewers, and orid
decoration. Abbotts patron, stooped and his black garb absorbing the intense sun-
light, seems entirely isolated and a gure of pathos overwhelmed by kinetic repre-
sentations of Big Boy Williams brandishing his pistols in The Law of the s and
Charlie Chaplins Little Tramp insouciantly dofng his bowler. The patron is the
nal consumer of commodities spawned by the communications revolution that
had altered the twentieth centurys consciousness. The movies on offer all purvey
ctive worlds distant from the reality of this shabby theater and its patron, those
of rough frontier justice and the Little Tramps triumphs over the forces of social
superciliousness as well as of glittering celebrity in the third feature, The Headline
Woman. By an imaginative sleight-of-hand the shots formal structure highlights
this incongruity and emphasizes the escapism these lms provide. It simulates a
cinematic shot/reverse-shot that pairs Chaplins ebullience with the lone patrons
hunched stoop, and by tonally linking the patrons dark clothing with the deep shad-
ows of the theaters entrance it also anticipates the enveloping darkness that awaits
inside. The movie theaters anonymity and the solitary experience of consuming
the mass-produced dreams available in it are what the twentieth century offers in
lieu of more intimate and intensely shared cultural experience.
A similar contrast of social isolation and the commercial exploitation of it char-
acterizes Newsstand (). As in Lyric Theatre, Abbott set up near enough to
exclude the titular subjects neighbors and to make verbal details legible. Once again,
its major elements are a solitary gure, here a working-class man of middle age, and
an effusion of the products of modern mass communications, scores of illustrated
magazine covers. The angle of each shot differs, however. That of Lyric Theatre
was only slightly oblique, to bring into close conjunction the moviegoer and Chaplin.
In Newsstand the obliquity is considerably greater, and the newsstand recedes
from the viewer so its patron is at its left edge and near its bottom one, diminish-
ing his size relative to the magazine display and giving him an air of insignicant
forlornness. A viewers eye is usually drawn to human gures, but here the com-
position contrives to bafe that instinct and encourage instead a nervous tacking
back and forth between the man and the magazines, thus encouraging assessment
of the relationship between them. The publications are various, but predominating
are movie-fan and pulp adventure magazines that invite escape into more incan-
descent experience than quotidian reality permits. The small man in workers cap,
his hands shoved into his suit pockets, is visually subordinate to the showy covers
that promise adventure, mystery, glamour, and romance. One possible implication
is that he is psychologically addicted to their satisfactions as well. Although such
magazines, like the movies, provide a common realm of experience for their con-
sumers, that experience is so solitary and disconnected from ordinary experience
as to alienate users from perceiving any sense of an organic community that might
otherwise sustain them.
Hopper often painted solitary gures who seem lost in contemplation of some
private misfortune, their aloneness exacerbated by the impersonality of a modern
urban setting. Among many others Automat () and Room in Brooklyn ()
are two such paintings with this atmosphere. Neither Hopper nor Abbott favored
the New York crowds that inspired other contemporary city artists like Reginald
Marsh or Kenneth Hayes Miller, preferring instead unpeopled cityscapes or those
with only one or two human gures because it was not the citys rambunctious vigor
that compelled them but its more psychologically revealing moments of stillness.
Civic Repertory Theatre () and Warehouse () portray large, late-nine-
teenth-century structures that dwarf the solitary gures idling in front of them.
The theater had once known great days but before its demolishment in had
been allowed to fall into ill-repair. Its facades decay is clearly visible, the decrepi-
tude further emphasized by a shiny automobile parked at the curb. Its atmosphere
of abandonment is palpable, and the photographs structure imputes a parallel air
of desolation to the lone man seated on the base of one of its columns. Similarly,
Warehouse is seen from a distance to include much of the building and is also
composed to portray near its bottom edge the gure of another seated man. The
cameras distance and the buildings massiveness miniaturize the human gures,
and the way each building extends horizontally out of the frame intimates that
they occupy only an insecure redoubt in a vast, unpopulated space. Both men have
seated themselves in the bright sunlight, moreover, as if psychologically needful of
its warmth. Hopper also frequently depicted anonymous settings in which people
sought the sun, as in Summertime () and People in the Sun (). Because sit-
ters in the photographs seem more to be perched than ensconced in these spaces,
they also imply transitoriness. The structure of both photographs suggests a city
where the individuals signicance is anything but assured and where its psycho-
logical byproducts are loneliness and isolation.
139
El Station Interior, Sixth and Ninth Avenue Lines, Downtown Side ()
fuses in one extraordinary image much of what Abbott felt about life in the modern
140 city. In its formal structure it is reminiscent of Hoppers best-known city painting,
Nighthawks (). In each the viewer is outside a public space and looking in. It
is both anonymous and a haven from a vaguely threatening environment outside,
and the gures within are physically proximate yet simultaneously encapsulated
and cut off from one another. Both compositions, moreover, assume a perspective
that makes their dominant lines neither horizontal nor vertical, and that obliquity
accentuates the unsettling feeling each picture conveys.
El Station Interior is one of just three interior shots in Changing New York,
the only one made with a ash. Compositionally it is the books most complex
image. The foreground turnstile and the stovepipe extending diagonally out of the
frame create a sense of three-dimensionality further enhanced by three indistinct
persons seen through the frost-dimmed windows on the platform outside. The
three gures inside are framed by the two exits and almost perfectly balanced in
the compositions center, but the symmetry is in tension with the disequilibrium
created by jutting diagonals of the turnstile and stovepipe as well as by the subtle
distortions of a wide-angle lens, which causes objects at its edges to fall slightly
away from its center.
Almost in the middle is an old-fashioned, potbellied stove, and the stances of the
three people who hover near it give the photograph its extraordinary resonance. Each
turns away from the others and occupies a private space, an apartness duplicated by
the outside gures, and each displays a markedly different response to the camera.
The dapper young man on the left, insouciant with his hand in his overcoat pocket,
stares unabashedly at it; the middle-aged man in the center warms his hands and
looks blankly to one side; and the woman on the right, her back almost to the cam-
era, looks over her shoulder at it grimly and suspiciously. El Station is a subtle
depiction of the sense of isolation and insularity experienced by individuals in the
modern city, which is a cold place, guratively and in this case literally. Even in
act of trying to warm themselves those who inhabit it are cut off from one another.
Abbott left no record of her intentions with this remarkable image, but Hoppers
comment on Nighthawks illuminates her photograph as well. While he was painting
the canvas he did not imagine it as representing the psychology of modern urban
life, but he later realized that unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneli-
ness of a large city.24
Abbotts and Hoppers depictions of how a modern city shapes individual con-
sciousness link their work, but the comparison is necessarily limitedand not only
because their mediums technical resources differed. Color was available to him,
for example, as it was not to her. He did not share her historical interests, nor did
he invest his paintings with the social criticism of many of her photographs. She
had an ambitious agenda for a photographic mapping of the city and more or less
methodically pursued it. He, however, took up with no apparent plan only subjects
that compelled him at the moment and thus neglected vast regions of New Yorks
life. Hopper worked slowly as well, with an annual output of only a few oils. Hardly
a year went by without a new city painting, but over a long career he completed per-
haps fty of them, many fewer than a photographer could make in a single year. His
paintings generalized the citys geography, altering it to suit his purposes, whereas
her camera inescapably particularlized specic locales, as may be seen in the one
instance in which they worked at the same location. Abbotts Washington Square,
Looking North itemized each element in the view, from the parks greensward
and Arch to the row of Greek Revival houses and background skyscrapers. In The
City ()its title itself a generalizationHopper suppressed details of park and
houses to bring into higher relief the ornate decorative elements of nearby buildings
and those of a towering one in the background, projecting out of the frame. This
northerly buildings solitariness likewise indicated the liberties painting permitted
him because no such actual view could fail to include many more taller buildings.
These dissimilarities notwithstanding, both artists created extraordinary bodies of
work that resembled one another in revealing the subtle effects of the urban envi-
ronment on individual lives, and in that achievement they were their eras most
important city artists.
Like all penetrating works of art, Changing New York both illuminates its time
and transcends it. Periods of deep social uncertainty like the depression create a
pressure to reassess the past and regure its meaning so as to make it congruent
with contemporary realities. Abbotts ambition to formulate a history responded to
that need as did several other of the eras artistic undertakings, including John Dos
Passoss U.S.A. trilogy (), Orson Welless Citizen Kane () and Magnicent
Ambersons (), and Jacob Lawrences The Migration of the Negro series (
). Abbotts depictions of the conicts between culture and civilization likewise
explored a tension that preoccupied other artists and intellectuals in the thirties.
And because of her mediums literalness, her camera could not help but reproduce
what had actually existed at particular moments on New York streets and thus be
a faithful record of that time and place.
Abbotts account of New York in the thirties, though, was also folded into a
more ambitious outline of American development that sought to reveal its broader
patterns. Her photographs documented the citys growth from a modest regional
capital to the worlds leading metropolis. Accompanying this development was a
steadily increasing concentration of power within bureaucratic institutionsindus-
trial, nancial, and politicaland a corresponding decline in the sovereignty and
autonomy of individual citizens. In this process the sense of community afliation
became vitiated and forms of common experience that modern civilization had
141
devised to compensate for this loss had proven inadequate to recreating it. The
depression had perhaps exacerbated the resulting sense of isolation and alienation
142 but had not alone caused it. If some of her photographs portrayed the awesomeness
and grandeur of the citys built environment, such magnicence was not without
price. Its effects on consciousness could be inferred from the disproportions in the
cityscape and witnessed in the bearings of its citizens.
No singularly encompassing interpretive grid dominated Abbotts collection, how-
ever, and many of its individual pictures proposed multiple, sometimes competing,
possibilities. Changing New York was kaleidoscopic and replete with antinomies. Its
city was simultaneously graceful and ungainly, romantic and impoverished, awe-
some and unsettling, monumental and intimate, humorous and pathetic, anarchic
and exciting. The book challenged viewers by its amplitude of negative capability
to respond to its photographs in a similarly critical spirit. The formal excellence of
the images would alone have made Changing New York an estimable achievement
in thirties photography. Because of its extraordinary and supple multiplicity, it is
also an uncommonly enduring one.
9
Farm Security
Administration Photography
and the Dilemmas of Art
A More Important Record Than It Now Seems
Photographs by the Historical Section of the Resettlement and Farm Security
Administrations are unquestionably the best known of the thirties. Several cir-
cumstances coalesced to give them such posthumous prominence. The sheer
size and extraordinary scope of the Sections archiveseventy-seven thou-
sand prints and nearly twice as many negatives, along with the projects deep
coverage of the entire United Statesmake it indispensable for researchers,
and a detailed index permits efcient access to pictures of specic subjects
and locales. It is housed in the Library of Congress, which lends the prestige
of one of the nations preeminent cultural institutions. And unlike privately
held photographs the Sections require no reprint fees. They have become
ubiquitous as souvenirs of depression America and are copiously reproduced in
anthologies, scholarly and popular histories, and textbooks. But not only their scope,
144 accessibility, and inexpensiveness account for their prominence. The uncommonly
talented men and women who created them rank among documentary photographys
leading adepts and include Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell
Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn. Collections of the
pictures began to appear in the sixties and continue unabated.1
The pictures contemporary visibility, though, is misleading, fostering the
impression that they were ubiquitous and that FSA documentary was the eras
most hailed practice. They are not singularly representative of thirties photogra-
phy, however, and their present renown greatly surpasses what it was in their own
era. If the Section was less obscure than other government photographic units,
neither did it enjoy universal recognition. Beaumont Newhall was not the only
impresario ignorant of it. Gardner Cowles Jr. only fortuitously heard about the
project eighteen months after it was underway through a relative in the Depart-
ment of Agriculture, despite his role in launching Look and afliation with the
Des Moines Register photo syndicate, a leading national distributor. In , when
Roy Stryker, the Sections director, was invited to address faculty and students
at progressive and arts-minded Bennington College, his host warned that your
audience will not know about Resettlement Administration photography. As late
as its visibility remained clouded where it might have been expected to be
obvious. One of the photographers reported that a Kentucky FSA ofce doesnt
even know that there is a photographic section in existence. Nor did the Section
itself attract much media attention as other New Deal cultural agencies didnot
even as much as other photographic projects such as those by Berenice Abbott and
Edward Weston, about which Life published articles.2
Most of the Sections photographs remained unseen in the thirties, although the
small percentage that did appear surpassed in quantityand often qualitypictures
by other federal photographic units. But they never become more than irregular
journalistic fare. Newspapers that did reprint them tended to favor inert progress
shots that blandly chronicled the FSAs programs rather than the photographers
more ambitious documentary work. They also commonly failed to run a credit line,
which made it impossible for readers to distinguish between the Sections pictures
and those from commercial syndicates. Nor, despite strenuous efforts, did Stryker
have more than modest success insinuating them into leading magazines. The most
widely circulated reprinted only a tiny handful, and the readership of the Sections
most faithful purveyor, Survey Graphic, was just twenty-ve thousand. After a year
of trying with Life Stryker concluded, We had best give up the idea of getting
pictures into Life; that is, any pictures that have any guts to them, thus seconding
Lees observation about the lousy, crappy stuff the magazine favored. Look was
slightly more receptive in its inaugural year, but it, too, failed to credit a dozen or
so pictures and thereafter used them only infrequently.3
If the extent to which the Sections pictures blanketed thirties culture has some-
times been exaggerated, the signicance of its archive cannot be overestimated,
for it constitutes a richer, more comprehensive visual record of the era than any
photographic survey before or since. More than any other legacy it has shaped the
national memory of the Great Depression. Many of its photographs are of superior
esthetic distinction, and some rank among the decades nest artistic achievements.
Although journalism was desultory in exploiting their excellence the pictures found
a more enthusiastic welcome in photographys art world, so much so that it became
the Sections most important arena for dissemination.
Unlike other New Deal cultural projects, the Sections impetus was propagan-
distic not artistic, and although it soon embraced artistic goals it never shed its
initial purpose. The incompatibility of those priorities created unresolved dilem-
mas. Ought it to be a publicist for the achievements of its agency sponsor, or was
its mission to reveal the larger circumstances the New Deal hoped to redress, or
should it emphasize taking the nations pulse in documentary photographs that
would be valued equally for their esthetic distinction as for what they portrayed?
These uncertainties entailed others. How much artistic autonomy ought the pho-
tographers have? If the Section federated gifted individual workers in an artistic
undertaking, what should be the role of its director, not himself a photographer?
In practice the Section muddled through these dilemmas without being disabled by
themas the strength of its archive revealsbut they have continued to roil later
assessments of its achievement and in this sense remain unresolved.
A satisfactory history of the Section is still unwritten, perhaps owing to the tasks
magnitude. At least ten photographers made major contributions, each with distinc-
tive predilections and visual styles. A historian would need an intimate acquaintance
with each photographers thousands of pictures and a grasp of how their experi-
ences inected them, both daunting challenges for such a number of prolic work-
ers. Although Strykers oversight has attracted a good deal of speculation, a critical
biography is needed before his role may be fairly assessed. Neither he nor the pho-
tographers were free agents, moreover, and as employees of a vast federal agency
they needed to accommodate themselves to its aims and those of the New Deal in
general. A history of the Section would need perforce to be an administrative and
political history as well, one that did not employ the word bureaucrat as a simplistic
pejorative but grappled with the complex negotiations about legitimacy, authority,
and autonomy that institutional life always demands, a fortiori when their object is
something so uncommon in government sponsorship as artistic expression. The uses
of the photographs are also imperfectly understood, and the historian faces another
daunting task in assessing this because no accurate census existsnor is it ever likely
FSA Photography and the Dilemmas of Art
145
to. Finally, its history would also need to assimilate the Sections activities to politi-
cal and cultural life over eight turbulent years of depression and war because these
146 larger developments also inuenced the pictures, the composition of staff, and its
operations as well as the leadership of the agency in which it was a unit.4
Such a history would require a volume in itself. This chapter centers more nar-
rowly on the Section as artistic patron, and the next discusses its cultivation of
photographys art world. Even if it was not unambiguously dedicated to being an
artistic undertaking, the Section nonetheless was determined to establish a con-
spicuous art world presence. In pursuing that ambition it contributed to validating
documentary as an artful practice and established its workers as peers among the
republic of photographys leading citizens. Following this strand of the Sections
history will not unravel all its threads, but it will reveal what made the Section such
an impressive center for artful photography.
Although Stryker worked tirelessly to disseminate the staff s pictures, he believed
that the historical archive he foresaw them becoming justied the Section far more
than their contemporary uses. As early as he dened its central goal as docu-
menting American history, a conviction that only strengthened as the le grew. I
feel certain, he presciently told Lange in , that some day it will be a more
important record than it now seems at the moment. In this light the pictures vis-
ibility during the thirties is beside the point. The Sections success in fullling
Strykers prediction is conrmed by their ubiquity in a new century.5
Propaganda and Art

Nonetheless, the Section was determined to have a contemporary presence. In fact,
it required it to sustain congressional support. The pictures public relations value
remained the primary measure by which Washington assessed its worth, and Stryker
thus expended much energy in cajoling editors to reprint them. When he sensed
an opportunity the le could not meet he directed the photographers to ll the gap,
as when he told Lee to make bucolic shots of spring farm work, You know, the
kind of syrup that the magazines sometimes request.6 In the Sections rst year
it sent out about two hundred photographs monthly to potential users, and by the
end of that number had grown to ,. Those gures considerably overstate
how many were actually published. Pictures were offered on spec, and more were
always sent than could be used. The gures do indicate, however, how strenuously
the Section sought outlets.
The requirement to produce pictures attractive to editors was not the only engine
driving its activities. The Section was a tiny unit in a sprawling bureaucratic agency,
and the priorities of top administrators sometimes inuenced photographers agen-
das. Stryker postponed Langes trip to the Northwest in to send her through
the South to photograph cotton farmers. Tenancy had become the overriding issue
for the agencys brass, he told her, and the only one they wanted to publicize. Two
years later he was even more forthright with Lee. The mechanization of agriculture
was now exciting the higher-ups, and pictures of it would strengthen the Sections
intramural hand. If we can play up our ability to handle this problem, Stryker
said, then we may get more nances advanced to us.7
Within the FSA hierarchy the Section reported to the Information Division,
which made incessant and inescapable demands for public relations pictures. Because
it considered the photographs purely instrumental its ideas about what they ought
to depict were insipid. The news people, Stryker complained to Rothstein, were
running us ragged for shots of debt adjustment committees, eld personnel con-
sulting with clients, and supervisors teaching homemakers about canning. Treating
such banal subjects with any visual brio was virtually impossible, and the photog-
raphers hated the assignments. They equally disliked photographing local projects
for FSA regional ofces, often under the ham-handed direction of resident ofcials.
So stultifying were these routine assignments that Stryker at one point proposed
hiring a photographer not too much interested in documentary pictures to be
responsible for all of them, leaving the rest of the staff free for creative work, but
the budget never permitted it. Rather dull progress photographs constituted a
signicant proportion of the archive, as he ruefully confessed to a journalist.8
Seventy percent of New Deal agencies employed photographers and maintained
public information ofces to disseminate their pictures. A book by Katherine
Glover about the reenergized conservation movement, for example, included more
than photographs, most by government workers from twelve different agen-
cies. Eighteen FSA pictures were used, but more came from the Tennessee Valley
Authority and the Soil Conservation and Forest Services, and nearly as many were
by the Biological Survey and Bureau of Reclamation. In order for its pictures to be
published the Section had to compete not only with photojournalists but also with
other federal units vying for congressional support.9
None of the other agencies, though, matched even the limited visibility the Sec-
tion achieved. The most obvious reason was that it employed gifted workers who
made arresting pictures that editors might publish whereas those who worked for
the other agencies were mostly journeymen glad for employment and uncomplain-
ing about routine assignments. A second reason is that Stryker proactively sought
outlets for the pictures and campaigned for credit when they were used. In Glovers
book only ve illustrations from other agencies included a photographers credit,
whereas all the FSAs did (although some were misattributed).
Credits enhanced the Sections standing, and as a bureaucrat its repute was always
vital to Stryker. In one instance he asked the author of a magazine piece to credit
147
the photographers although, he said, if it is too difcult to get the photographers
names in, just use the Resettlement credit line. He also knew that individual credits
148 provided the photographers with an additional psychic term of recognization of
a job well done and bolstered morale.10 Because artistic work in any medium did
not appear unsigned, moreover, credits distinguished the Sections pictures from a
journeymans and lifted them above the realm of mere reportage.
Strykers emphasis on publication credit suggests the most important reason
for the Sections greater visibility: It distinguished itself as an artistic undertaking.
The FSAs rst Annual Report underscored its departure from the conventions
of government photography. These assumed only two criteria of effectiveness: a
pictures accuracy in depicting a federal program and its potential publicity value.
But, said the report, there ought to be a third criterion for evaluating government
photographs, as works of art, and the FSA was unique in applying the standard
of adequacy of technique utilized by the photographer. The acceptance of its
images in the art circles of the United States, the report boasted, justif[ies]
fully the original approach to the problem of governmental photography which
the Resettlement Administration has made.11
Such a claim was barely credible when it was made late in . Social documenta-
rys standing in such circles was still tenuous, as its scanty presence at MoMA the
next year indicated. Moreover, this condent declaration notwithstanding, Stryker
and most of his staff were ambivalent about whether they were creating art or even
if they wanted to. Art was not a word he remembered photographers using, Paul
Vanderbilt said, and when ve later gathered for a symposium they all dismissed
the idea that they had been artists. As Lee brusquely put it, Lets forget this angle
of art. Stryker was no less chary. He and the staff never talked about composi-
tion, he said, and it was a tabu word among them. He feared the self-conscious
aestheticism of the tradition [photography] inherited from the graphic arts might
be imputed to the FSA pictures. If it were, he believed, their social meaning would
be compromised. Stryker did not just object to formalism. Sometimes he spoke as
if art occupied a rareed ideal realm antipodal to the hardscrabble reality that he
believed the Section ought to depict. Writing about a prospective museum exhibi-
tion, he told Post Wolcott that its director wanted only sweet and lovely art from
us, but he will have to use some of our more brutal stuff or we wont play ball.12
Such a crude polarization is philistine, a sensibility of which Stryker was not entirely
free. But his sentiments even more reected a half-conscious pose encouraged by
the special conditions government patronage imposed.
The Sections reason for being was to generate favorable publicity for the FSA.
Although early on it broadly interpreted that goal to include depicting the social
conditions the agency hoped to redress, and soon to pictures with no relationship to
resettlement activities, the photographs potential as propaganda always remained a
key consideration. As Strykers assistant Edwin Rosskam put it, the photographers
knew . . . that they were hired to produce visual evidence, not works of art. Art, if
it happened, was strictly a byproduct. His dichotomizing is misleading because
there is no irrepressible conict between visual evidence and works of art, but
it indicates how the Section understood its mandate. Stryker and most of the staff,
moreover, embraced the reformist goals of the Second New Deal that inspired the
FSAs creation. (Evans was an exception in his politics, as in his conviction that his
photographs were more appropriately construed as works of art than as visual
evidence.) The photographers shared a belief that their work could help foster
social renewal and that commitment encouraged them to deemphasize, discursively
at least, the notion that the Sections pictures expressed an artists individual sen-
sibility. What was stressed instead was their utility as handmaidens to reform.13
Another political consideration compelled the Section to be ambivalent about
artistic reputation. The governments engagement as an arts patron began in
with murals in post ofces and other federal buildings, reaching full tide the next year
with Works Progess Administration (WPA) arts projects. Although these cultural
initiatives are now remembered as among the New Deals most notable achievements,
in the thirties they provoked vitriolic condemnation in and out of Congress. They
were accused of partisanship and subversion and of being boondoggles rewarding
mediocrity. Federal patronage was denounced for intruding into realms outside
governments purview and competence, thus conveniently representing what its
critics hated most about the New Deal. Attacks were unrelenting and led to investi-
gations by the House Un-American Activities and appropriations committees. As a
result, Congress shut down the drama project in and drastically curtailed other
units. In this poisonous atmosphere it was not surprising that the Section became
disingenuous about its artistic ambitions in order to avoid the calumny directed at
arts projects. After its ofcial pronouncements tempered the boast that it held
the photographs to an artistic standard.14
Yet a reputation for artistry beneted the Section in two ways. First, it distin-
guished the photographs as superior to not only those by other government units
but also standard journalistic fare. A reputation for esthetically strong photographs
could be an invaluable bargaining chip with editors. So was establishing the staff s
reputation for making them, a consideration that lay behind Strykers campaign
for credit lines. He told Lange early in that he had been having quite a battle
with Life about including a credit but thought he had persuaded the magazine that
doing so was a low price to pay for such good pictures as hers. With Looks pub-
lisher he was more blunt. Credit lines, Stryker urged, were of tremendous value
if we are to be permitted to go ahead and keep up the quality of photography we
are now doing.15
The Section would accrue a second, and even more valuable, asset by encourag-
149
ing the perception that its staff made artistically distinguished photographs. Many
Americans distrusted ofcial propaganda, whether the Creel Committees barrage
150 during the Great War or agrant untruths emanating from Germany, Italy, and
the Soviet Union. An accusation of propaganda then was deadly censure, Wil-
liam Stott observes, and propaganda against propaganda enjoyed wide popularity.
When a syndicated columnist such as Dorothy Thompson criticized the FSA for
disseminating propaganda the charge could be lethal. Photographers, ex-news-
papermen, special writers, are all busy, not at administering a government bureau,
but at selling that bureaus necessity, wisdom and efciency to the people who pay
for it, she said, and those activities ought to be squelched.16
Art, however, could be brought forward as propagandas antithesis. It was not
intended to mislead, honored esthetic rather than instrumental goals, and expressed
an individual rather than an institutional viewpoint. Art versus propaganda was the
decades favorite esthetic debate, observed Murray Kempton, a diametric opposi-
tion that indicates how categorically each was understood at the time. If the FSA
photographs could be gured as art they would escape the imputation of being
merely propaganda. Propaganda? queried a headline in one of the few journalistic
accounts of the Section, raising this specter only to dismiss itand by emphasiz-
ing the photographs artistry. Its author, Hartley Howe, conceded that there might
be legitimate dispute about a government agencys publicity efforts, but because
the FSA was accurate in depicting its policies, and the problems they addressed,
its photographs provided essential information and were not propaganda. The
most compelling justication for the Section, he went on, was its notable record
of achievement in making the nest collection of pictures of rural America in
existence.17 The word nest could encompass a number of virtues, and paramount
among them was the pictures esthetic distinction, which measured their distance
from crude, bald-faced propaganda.
The question of whether its photographs could be art as well as information put
the Section in a double bind it never succeeded in escaping. To dodge the accusa-
tion that it wasted taxpayers money and transgressed boundaries that government
ought to observe the Section often formulated its mission as strictly functional, its
anodyne purpose to introduce America to Americans as Stryker quoted Rexford
Tugwell, the New Deal administrator who initiated it. But in order to call attention
to its pictures it needed to advertise how they surpassed the ordinary standard of
governmental and journalistic photographyto proclaim that they were meritori-
ously artful. A key strategy for achieving that was to win the endorsement of the
art world, whose imprimatur would authenticate them as more than propaganda.
The Section also needed to proclaim the special distinction of photographers whose
superior individual vision made them capable of such memorable work.18
By its actions, if not always its rhetoric, the Section evinced determination to par-
ticipate in photographys art world. Stryker energetically sought venues that would
call attention to the photographs esthetic distinction. FSA images were displayed
on the walls of a number of museums and galleries; in omnibus shows like those in
New York in and San Francisco in ; in books by such prominent literary
gures as Archibald MacLeish, Sherwood Anderson, and Richard Wright; and in
the pages of the camera periodicals. Those efforts succeeded in distinguishing the
pictures from workaday ones by journalists and other federal photographers, and
in the art world they fostered the conviction that the Sections photographers were
among the decades leading documentary artists. Thus, Newhall could write just a
year after the MoMA show that FSA photographers produced photographs which
deserve the consideration of all who appreciate art in its richest and fullest meaning.
Steichen about the same time fulsomely characterized them as the most remark-
able human documents that were ever rendered in pictures.19 Such endorsements
were not only gratifying in themselves but also ratied the FSAs claim in its rst
annual report that the canons of art guided its photographers in making pictures.
Record Shots, News, and Documentary

Some work the photographers undertook, though, was utterly routine and without
aspiration to be any more than memoranda of the FSAs activities. Such pictures
constituted perhaps as much as one-fourth of the le. Stryker distinguished among
three broad types of photographs: record shots, news, and documentary. Records
were strictly journeyman work, the progress photographs that depicted tangible
achievementshomes built for resettled farmers, new community buildings, or FSA
functionaries interacting with clients. They resembled the commonplace pictures
made by other federal agencies and were used mostly to illustrate reports and in-
house exhibits. In , for instance, Lee spent time at the FSAs Southeast Missouri
Farms project, making several hundred studies of construction workers building
privies, completing truss work for a food storage plant, and erecting prefabricated
houses. These entirely commonplace shots were added to the le but without much
likelihood of subsequent use except in the agencys internal operations.20
Record shots imperceptibly merged with news photographs. Not news in the
conventional journalistic sense, they dramatized how the agency beneted clients
and thus even more than record shots served as public relations vehicles. At the
Southeast Missouri Farms Lee also photographed cooperative store meetings, chil-
dren on a playground, and families enjoying their new homes. In spite of being
visually undistinguished, one of these pictures became a particular favorite of news-
papers, perhaps because it invoked a cozy domesticity with which readers could
identify. It showed a client couple in their new living room, the woman absorbed in
151
reading and her husband ensconced in his easy chair. It was usually paired with a
contrasting picture of another tenant familys shanty, like the one from which the
152 rst couple had presumably moved.21
The Information Division expected the Section to produce a steady output of
record and news pictures for its publicity efforts. Like Lee in Missouri, Rothstein
covered the FSAs Visalia migrant camp in California to serve that purpose. In fact,
Stryker directed him to photograph it so we will quit being harassed so much
by people around Washington. Rothstein made a few strictly record shotsthe
camps entrance, cabins of sanitary steel, and labor homesbut most of his
nearly two hundred pictures depicted purposeful residents in daily activities from
gardening and sewing to a baseball game and Saturday dance. He also photographed
elections for resident ofces and meetings of voluntary associations. The pictures
conveyed an impression of the migrants democratic ordinarinessmeant speci-
cally to counteract the stereotype of degraded Okies and Arkiesand of how
well run the camp was, thus simultaneously afrming their worthiness and the
agencys prudent use of taxpayer money. Such news pictures called for more com-
plex treatment than record shots, but their basis in public relations usually made
them visually routine.22
Not long before the election, after cuts in its budget and with its future in
doubt, Stryker lamented that the Section was down to two photographers, which
permitted only routine work, pictures of the news information type such as
Lees and Rothsteins. He despaired of being able to abet the sort of photography
embodying broader documentary ideas that he hoped to foster, and he was com-
ing to believe it could only be made outside the government and far removed from
any Information Division, with its unceasing demands for publicity work. This
particular ill wind blew over, but the issue continued to be an irritant. If record
and news photographs sanctioned the Sections existence they were only necessary
expedients to underwrite the documentary photographs that Stryker and the pho-
tographers cared most about.23
Documentary for him was more a qualitative than a descriptive term because
record and news shots also documented something. He was imprecise, though, about
how such superior photographs might be recognized except that they distinguished
themselves from the technical type of picture by integrating their subjects cul-
tural features into the composition. By that he meant that a documentary photo-
graph depicted an immediate reality but also resonated more broadly so that it also
emblematized some larger social circumstance. His distinction suggested that its
superiority resided in subject matter, so the photographer functioned as a witness,
oxymoronically both passionate and disinterested. The photographers determina-
tion to seek out such resonant subjects, and their capacity to recognize them when
they materialized, constituted their genius, to which their cameras then objectively
testied. Strykers scheme neglected a photographs formal properties as either a
criterion of its excellence or an embodiment of its makers attitudes.24
Such condence in the photographs transparency seems naive now, but it was
commonplace during the thirties. In fact, it had provided the inspiration for the
Section. Tugwell, its New Deal sponsor and Strykers as well, believed that although
the truthfulness of language had become suspect a photographs was unimpeach-
able and could counter verbal misrepresentations that impugned the governments
programs. Just so, even had Stryker been inclined, he had no incentive to empha-
size the photographs constructedness. To do so would imply that the photograph
was an interpretation and not a literal depiction of reality.25
If a cultural predisposition and this practical consideration made him inatten-
tive to an images formal properties, his reductive understanding of the relation
between form and content also led him to distinguish sharply between documen-
tary and artistic photography. He characterized the latter as preoccupied with
mere composition and technique for their own sake whereas documentary was as
much or more concerned with social substance. This judgment caricatured both
modes and failed to provide a plausible theoretical basis for asserting the excellence
of that fraction of the FSAs work that transcended record and news reportage. As
with the famous judicial denition of pornography, his stance appeared to be that
he would know it when he saw it.26
Such muddled imprecision and his suspicion that art and artiness were synony-
mous made him a curious gure to serve as the middleman between the Section
and photographys art world. But perhaps to demand coherent theorizing or even
crisp denitional clarity is to take too much the scholars view because Stryker only
irregularly and without much energy brought himself forward as a spokesperson
about such matters. He had virtually no standing as a theoretician of photogra-
phy or even of its documentary branch. Only twice during his tenure as Section
director did he write about it. The rst piece in , originally a brief paper at a
scholarly meeting and then included in a book published by a university press, was
little noticed. The second, in , appeared as the Sections work was winding
down and consisted of only a few pages in a mammoth, ten-volume encyclopedia.
A handful of informal addresses, some mentions in articles about the project, an
anecdotal prole in Popular Photographythese constituted his public visibility in
the thirties.27
Unlike other middlemen who mediated between photographers and audiences
Adams at the Worlds Fair, or Newhall at MoMA, or Steichen in U.S. Camera annu-
alsStryker played a largely invisible role. Nevertheless, he indefatigably cam-
paigned to install the Sections photographs in venues emphasizing their artfulness
and in this way was responsible for launching themand the photographers who
made themin photographys art world (chapter ). The photographers supe-
153
rior visual skill is of course the primary reason for their renown in this milieu, but
without Strykers efforts most would have been as little visible as their coevals in
154 other government photographic units.
Stryker as Impresario
Strykers middleman activities have been largely overlooked, but his other major
impresarios roledirecting the photographershas been the subject of consider-
able discussion. For F. Jack Hurley, in the rst book-length treatment of the Sec-
tion, he was the ideal person to shepherd it. Stryker was driven by an inspired aim
of enlisting the nations sympathy for the depressions victims and was quick to
recognize and encourage talented photographers. He also proved a canny bureau-
cratic inghter who against long odds kept the Section alive and productive for eight
years. The Section, according to Hurley, was to a great extent the product of its
directors energy and talent. In a later book James Curtis takes virtually the exact
opposite view. For Curtis, Stryker encouraged toadyism, was personally insecure
and ill at ease with artistic questions, jealous of Evanss and Langes stature as art-
ists, meddled in the photographers work, and was a vindictive martinet. He was a
bureaucrat, a descriptor Curtis uses often to connote Strykers despotism, who
favored the least-talented photographers and discouraged the most gifted, nally
laying off Evans and Lange when they resisted his overbearing direction.28
Such disparate views revolve around the question of how much autonomy the
photographers enjoyed. If Washington tyrannized them, then unless they resisted
they were journeymen and not artists and the proud proclamation of the rst annual
report was hypocritical cant. If, however, Stryker nourished their talents and ceded
them artistic prerogatives there was no gap between their status as federal employees
and their standing, in the thirties or later, as distinguished artists. Further compli-
cating the starkness of this opposition are the Sections original mission as a public
relations enterprise and its subsequent commitment to becoming an artistic under-
taking as well. These conicting aims meant that the photographers worked under
considerably different conditions than independent artists. They had prescribed
responsibilities, often requiring them to expend much energy on mundane work;
moreover, publicity requirements threatened to draw tight boundaries around what
they might photograph and even their strategies in doing so.29
Stryker did not conne himself to administrative oversight, moreover, and fre-
quently sent suggestions to the photographers in the eld. He not only directed
them to make the record and news shots for which the Information Division clam-
ored but also issued a stream of shooting scripts that specied topics for their more
ambitious documentary work. Furthermore, after photographers submitted their
negatives to Washington he went through them, making notes on which to keep or
kill. Then the laboratory struck le prints without the photographers supervision.
They enjoyed no proprietary rights either. Their pictures belonged to the federal
government, and they did not control their use.
These circumstances have led Curtis and others to conclude that Strykers role
was invidious and to imply that insofar as they accepted these conditions the pho-
tographers artistic autonomy was deeply compromised. If their independence was
impaired and their perquisites abridged by Washingtons procedures, then these
taints could not but inhere in the work they accomplished. Behind such a view is a
romantic ideal of the inspired artist with absolute authority over his or her creation.
Although various forms of patronage and dissemination often modify this freedom,
the ideal continues to be a measure of whether an artifact is artistically authentic,
with the degree of deviation calibrated as an index of value. The Sections mis-
sion and its bureaucratic organization unquestionably meant that photographers
had less than total autonomy. The question is, To what degree did Stryker and the
arrangements over which he presided either abet individual vision or deform the
photographers opportunities to achieve it?
Most testimony from photographers suggests that not only did Stryker not inhibit
them but also that his oversight was instrumental in encouraging their best work.
He was, said Rothstein, an irritant, a stimulus, a catalyst, a man who made you
think about your work, a sentiment Delano echoed. Stryker told you what to
look for, he remembered, but if you didnt nd or like it, and wanted to shoot
something else, hed say, You do what you want to. He was trying to stimulate
you enough so that you would nd out what was really there. Even Lange, who
regularly squabbled with him, said that he conveyed to the photographers a sense
of freedom plus responsibility, a sense of support, and enthusiasm [for] their
undertakings. Most remarked that he could be imperious, too, but in the affec-
tionate way one speaks of a demanding and inspiring teacher. Only Evans did not
remember his oversight fondly. Stryker was just a big Boy Scout, he thought, most
concerned with enforcing a regimen of productivity. Evans resented the implication
that Strykers directives had any effect on him whatsoever. He wasnt directing
me, Evans snorted, I wouldnt let him.30
These reminiscences were made long after the Sections demise and thus are pos-
sibly unreliable. But the assessmentsincluding Evanss about resisting Strykers
directionare largely substantiated by contemporary documents that disclose, often
in rich detail, the relationships between Washington and the photographers in the
eld. They also reveal that the staff developed a strong esprit de corps, remarkably
so inasmuch as they rarely saw one another, and that their camaraderie contributed
155
to an invigorating sense of purposefulness. They fail to corroborate the imputation
that the Sections procedures egregiously violated the photographers autonomy or
156 that Stryker repressed their creative afatus.
The examples of Evans and Lange are most often adduced to demonstrate Stryk-
ers hostility to artistic independence. Curtis says his alienation . . . from the art
world of Evans and Lange activated his insecurities and with both individuals
resulted in a larger struggle between a photographers demand for autonomy and
a bureaucrats insistence on accountability. Inasmuch as Evans and Lange were
the staff s most gifted photographersand ones Stryker dismissedhis irritable
relations with them would seem to support Curtiss judgment that he was less a
patron of photography as ne art than a philistine bureaucrat determined to keep
his staff on a short leash.31
But that opposition puts the matter too tendentiously. Although Stryker was by
denition a bureaucrat with goals other than fostering ne art he was not indiffer-
ent, much less implacably opposed, to the photographers artistic ambitions. As the
rst annual report indicated, he recognized that a reputation for superior artistry
distinguished the Section from other governmental photographic units, opened
venues and made reproduction more likely, and gave it a unique and invaluable
cachet. If he was not in the honoric sense a patron of photography as ne art, for
the Sections well-being he was determined to make it one of the roles he played.
But in the case of Evans it clashed with another responsibility, of making certain
that the Section remained sufciently productive to satisfy FSA administrators
and deect recurring threats to its existence. From the outset Stryker appreciated
Evanss talent. He is one of the best photographers in this country for the job of
photographically documenting American history, he wrote to an academic friend
shortly before Evans joined the staff. Once in the eld, though, Evans adopted a
stance of passive aggression to Strykers entreaties to keep in touch with Washington
and generate a greater volume of work. Writing early in Stryker tried to appeal
to Evanss self-interest. In the Information Division, he said, there was perhaps
less sympathy with the desire to build up a le of documentary pictures than there
was formerly, but he was condent that this priority he and Evans shared could
be sustained if we turn in a sufcient number of pictures which can be used for
information purposes and if Evans contributed more substantially to the le so
as to ward off the possibility of his being utilized as a project photographer.32
Evans ignored his pleas. Years later he described his FSA stint as a great oppor-
tunity to go around freelyat the expense of the federal government and photo-
graph whatever compelled his eye. He was, he said, exploiting the United States
government, rather than having them exploit me. . . . If I was asked to do some
bureaucratic, stupid thing, I just wouldnt do it. . . . I just photographed like mad
whatever I wanted to. I paid no attention to Washington bureaucracy.33
Evanss and Strykers measure for photographing like mad differed consider-
ably, and although all agreed that the pictures Evans did send in were excellent his
low productivity sealed his doom as a FSA photographer. His output had never
been large, but with one notable exception it diminished even more after the spring
of when he turned to a lmmaking project with Shahn, an effort undertaken
with Tugwells blessing. The exception was a unique arrangement, instigated by
James Agee and Evans and brokered by Stryker, to lend his services to Fortune for
two months in the summer to photograph Alabama tenant families, a project that
resulted in some of the strongest pictures Evans ever made, eventually published
in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Stryker at the time judged them most excel-
lent, conrming his belief in the importance of permitting a photographer to
remain on a given job until he has had time to cover that as thoroughly as he can
at a given period. But after returning from Alabama Evans concentrated on the
lmmaking projectwhich was never brought to completionand was let go in
March .34
This was Strykers decision, and it certainly reected his exasperation with
Evanss resistance to his entreaties and possibly as well his sense that the cool, dis-
tanced photographs Evans did make lacked the social passion Stryker especially
prized. If the latter were soand his surviving comments on Evanss pictures are
consistently complimentary, so it may not bethen his judgment would correspond
with the many others at the time who reprinted Evanss work much less frequently
than his colleagues. But it is evident that Stryker recognized that their extraordi-
nary artistry conferred exceptional prestige on the Section, indicated by the com-
position of its rst important exhibition, which was sponsored by the College Art
Association in the autumn of . Of exhibits by eight photographers Evans
had far more than any other, about half its total.35
That accolade notwithstanding, other events about the same time proved more
decisive in determining Evanss future with the Section. The fate of the Resettle-
ment Administration was in doubt, especially after Tugwell resigned in November,
and the Sections reduced budget required that some of the Washington ofce be
laid off and Langes appointment made per diem. A transfer to the Department of
Agriculture early in eased fears the agency would be dissolved, but budget dif-
culties and uncertainties concerning its new home remained. In the midst of this
turmoil the FSAs nance director, Max Wasserman, bore down hard on Stryker to
justify the photographers salaries, and the measure he demanded was quantitative. By
that standard Evans was clearly the least productive (and highest-paid), and because
a reduced budget required eliminating one photographer Evans was red.36
Stryker could have let one of the others go insteadLange, Lee, or Rothstein, the
latter two less gifted than Evansbut it would not have stopped Wassermans bean
counting. With Evans still on the payroll the Sections intramural standing would
157
continue to be contentious. The conict between Evans and Stryker was probably
irrepressible given the ones contempt for some bureaucratic, stupid thing and
158 the others obligation to attend to such matters. Perhaps the remarkable fact is that
things took eighteen months to come to a head. Theo Jung and Paul Carter had
been swiftly red because of their pictures inferiority, and Stryker had actually
allowed Evans more latitude than the other photographers, rarely asking him to do
record or news work. But by early circumstances had changed, and Stryker,
forced to a decision, judged Evans most expendable. There may have been some
relief on both sides in this parting, as Penelope Dixon has suggested, but there
was signicant loss as wellfor the Section, documentary photography, and Evans.
Never again would he make so many photographs of lasting distinction as he had
under the Sections aegis.37
Although Lange was on the staff considerably longer, from intermittently
through , she, too, was let go when another budget shortfall required paring
a photographerand on the same grounds as Evans. In Strykers view Lange was
the person who would give me least cooperation in the job that is laid before me.
No overriding issue like Evanss low productivity led to her termination. Rather, a
series of irritations both began feeling shortly after she was appointed, all organiza-
tional and none about her works quality or quantity, accumulated to make Stryker
conclude that Lange was less reliable than the others on the staff in , Lee, Post
Wolcott, and Rothstein.38
From surviving records it is difcult to calibrate the intensity, or even the just-
ness, of these irritations. They simmer mostly between the lines of Langes and
Strykers frequent and usually cordial correspondence. Her residence in California
activated some of them. She and Stryker sparred over how her pictures were to
be developed, printed, archived, and distributed. Initially she asked for a labora-
tory with an assistant to process them, but he said the FSA would never approve
a facility duplicating its Washington one. She then built a home darkroom at her
own expense, and Stryker got the FSA to chip in $ a month to help cover its
expenses. Subsequently there were contretemps over supplies. Lange complained
that the wrong printing paper had been sent, and he said he had been in very bad
with the business ofce for a long time because her requests had been so imprecise
and confusing.39
The archiving of Langes negatives became another sore point. She initially
wanted to keep them in California, but he insisted they be sent to Washington so
prints could be made expeditiously to meet demand for them. At issue were two
irreconcilable principles, that a photographer ought to exercise oversight over her
own pictures and that the federal government had underwritten them in the expec-
tation that they would be disseminated as widely as possible. Lange, having little
choice but committed to the Sections publicity mission, conceded Washingtons
priority but continued to disagree with Stryker about particulars. On one occasion
she asked permission to make prints of new work on Imperial Valley migrants for
the FSAs California ofce, which would then supply them to local newspapers
unwilling to reprint older pictures that had become stale from overuse. The local
ofce, she said, feel[s] that Washington doesnt realize whats happeninghere
I have come in with what in the interest of the work they must have, the public is
aroused, and I cant give it to them. Stryker reluctantly agreed that she could give
a few of your set to the local ofce before sending her negatives to Washington,
but he reminded her that we are desirous of keeping the most likely set of your
negatives to be part of the general layout on the migrant problem for some publi-
cations with a national outlook such as , , , and A.P.
Special Features, which were also uninterested in already published photographs.
Like the disagreement about her archive, their difference of opinion over the most
effective use of her pictures admits of no simple resolution. Framing it simply as
Strykers determination to wrest control of her photographs to aggrandize his own
bureaucratic power trivializes it.40
There were more mundane irritations as well. Lange quarreled with M. L. Gil-
fond, the Information Division director, over salary and what she took to be his
contemptible treatment. Her complaints caused such a dust-up in the Washington
ofce that Stryker asked her not to write again to Gilfond. She pleaded on several
occasions for Stryker to be in touch with her more frequently and that he join her
on a eld trip as he had some of the other photographers. He regularly felt obliged
to remind her to keep accurate expense and work records for the business ofce
and wait for authorization before undertaking a project.41
Yet withal their correspondence also reveals feelings of mutual admiration, hers
for his stewardship and his for her photographs. On one occasion Lange imagined
him on your big white horse and once more engaged in heavy battle with our
enemies, the publicity boys to sustain the idea that controls our Section, and
another time she wrote, First, it needs to be said, and not for the rst time, that I
very much appreciate your everlasting and persistent effort to keep the thing alive
and functioning. Regularly he complimented her on her pictures. He was very
much pleased with the swell stuff she had submitted on California migrants
(possibly including her Migrant Mother photographs made the previous month).
On her southern swing he was delighted and pleased by her shots, especially of
a Mississippi plantation boss with his foot planted on a cars bumper and a rickety,
horse-drawn wagon juxtaposed with a Ford billboard. When the agency seemed to
want to emphasize paintings he was indignant. Certainly, he said, the pictures
which you have taken of migratory workers are and will prove more important to
Resettlement in every waypublicity, documents, and recordsthan any twenty
paintings that can be made on the ground out there.42
159
In spite of Strykers admiration for her work, though, he came to feel the special
treatment Lange demanded and the difculties she caused outweighed her contri-
160 butions. In mid- she was again put on a per diem appointment. He told Grace
Falke, Tugwells aide and future wife, that every time [Lange] has caused so much
confusion I have had to forgive her when I saw the work she had sent in, but it
nevertheless had become out of the question for her to continue as a Resettlement
photographer. He was persuaded to take her back the next year, apparently by
Jonathan Garst, the head of the FSA ofce in California, but his impatience did
not subside. Langes distance from Washington in exacerbating their conicts has
possibly been overemphasized. Other photographers were in the eld most of the
time without causing tense relations. Langes biographer Milton Meltzer offers the
best explanation of why Stryker red her, that nally his patience wore through:
She asks too much, she takes too many exceptions, she wants special treatment
too often, she costs him too much time and trouble. That she had a difcult
personality, as Meltzer also says, was conceded as well by Garst, who once again
tried to persuade Stryker to reconsider. I can readily believe that Dorothea with
her pell-mell enthusiasm may be at times difcult to work with, he empathized,
and proposed that she be supervised by Fred Soule, the San Francisco representa-
tive of the Information Division, or at least be continued on a per diem basis. But
Stryker was unwilling to keep Lange on any terms. In any case, on the day after
Garsts letter Soule himself weighed in on Langes uncooperativeness. Writing to
John Fischer, his (and Strykers) Washington superior in the Information Division,
he said that she had not followed through on scheduled obligations and has been
somewhat temperamental, dropped some hints of proposed complaints to Wash-
ington, and so on, clearly indicating that if he had heard of Garsts proposal he
was opposed to it.43
Stryker, then, was not alone in nding Lange difcult. Nevertheless, the worst
decision he ever made was to cut her loose so unequivocally, especially since he
knew of Rothsteins ambition to move on and that the budget was likely to improve,
which it did in when he added photographers. The case was different than with
Evans. Langes loyalty to the Sections mission was unmistakable, and her contri-
butions to the le, in both quality and quantity, had been extraordinary. If dealing
with her was sometimes nettlesome that was a price an administrator ought to have
been willing to pay for such superior work.44
Aside from the confounded question of authority over her negatives their dis-
putes were not about artistic autonomy. Nor were they rooted in his jealousy of her
artistic standing, of which he was proud. When she came back on the full-time
staff late in he told her that people in the Information Division had opposed
her return because they thought she was too arty. He had one damned good stock
argument with which to trump them, he said, and that is to ask them how in hell
we would have had a MacLeish book [Land of the Free] if their type of photography
had been pursued consistently. More than half of the books FSA photographs
had been Langes. When she expressed uncertainty about how to respond to local
ofcials trying to direct her work, he urged her to use her own best artistic judg-
ment. I will always stand back of you on any decision you make as regards the
photographic importance or unimportance of the work you do, he said, and there
is no evidence that he ever failed to do so.45
Lange never wavered in her conviction that the Section provided an extraordinary
arena for her talents. After her rst year she expressed gratitude for the opportu-
nities I have had and a great working experience. Even after her dismissal, which
hurt her considerably, she confessed to Stryker how much she missed the Section.
Once an FSA guy, always an FSA guy, she said. You dont easily get over it. Late
in her life she recalled especially the atmosphere of a very special kind of freedom,
where you found your own way, without criticism from anyone.46
To take Evanss or Langes conicts with Stryker, then, as revolving around
his resentment of their artistic stature, or as gifted artists struggles for autonomy
against a jealous bureaucrat determined not to permit it, is neither conrmed by
extant documents nor by their extraordinary work. In any case, an exclusive empha-
sis on them implicitly relegates the rest of the staff to the status of spear carriers
whose work can bear no comparison with theirs. If Evans and Lange created the
Sections nest bodies of work, the other photographers were also regarded in their
own time (and ours) as leading practitioners of documentary photography, and cir-
cumstances that permitted this also bear examination
Arguments that the Sections operations egregiously violated the photographers
autonomy have emphasized three particular constraints. Strykers shooting scripts
prescribed their pictures; his autocratic triage determined which negatives would
be included in the le; and the laboratory arrogated to itself an artists prerogative
to process his or her pictures. Two additional limitations are also sometimes men-
tioned: the photographers lack of control over how their pictures were used and
the federal ownership of their negatives.47
A luncheon discussion in with Robert S. Lynd, the coauthor of Middletown,
inspired Stryker to compose a shooting script he then sent to the photographers.
Thereafter he continued to compile new ones, often derived from something he
was reading. He worked up one on The Highway from a government pamphlet
called Restless Americans and another on the Great Lakes from a Fortune piece.
Erle Kauffman of the American Forestry Association supplied him with topics of
interest to this group, and Hartley Howe suggested pictures to illustrate a proposed
book on New England, both of which Stryker turned into shooting scripts. Some-
times scripts were less thematically unied, listing categories in which the le was
weak or a larger representation wanted. One in , for example, asked for studies
161
of small-town movie-going, shopping, and baseball games, rural homes, barns, and
fences of all types, and other similarly miscellaneous topics.48
162 Although Stryker called such documents shooting scripts that term is a mis-
nomer because it connotes the shot-by-shot continuity boards a lm director might
use. They were never grids dening the photographers obligations, but they did put
forward a broad array of suggestions for possible locales and subjects, almost always
leaving to the photographers discretion what treatments of them would be most
effective. Categories were most often broadly ethnographic. In the Lynd-inspired
one, for instance, a large experiential category such as Where can people meet?
listed sitescountry clubs, saloons, and lodgeswhere such interactions might be
observed. Another entry proposed the wall decorations in homes as an index to
the different income groups and their reactions. A third suggested without fur-
ther specication the usefulness of a photographic study of the differences in the
mens world and the womens world. Rather than being prescriptive, such open-
ended categories strove to stimulate the photographers imaginations by sketching
the terrain in deliberately broad strokes.49
Strykers letters often made supplementary suggestions. One to Delano in
has been frequently cited, sometimes to imply his overbearing supervision. He asked
Delano to scout opportunities to depict autumnal plenitude and to pour maple
syrup over ityou knowmix well with white clouds, and put on a sky-blue plat-
ter. I know your damned photographers soul writhes, but . . . do you think I give
a damn about a photographers soul with Hitler at our doorstep? You are nothing
but camera fodder to me. Strykers ironies were returned by Delano a week later
when he reported that his wife was shopping for maple syrup to garnish a harvest
still-life to be called Schmaltz that ought to get my soul properly conditioned.
The playfulness of this exchange hardly suggests top-down marching orders. An
earlier paragraph in Strykers letter, moreover, in which he encourages Delano to
concentrate on doing the things which we planned with the minority groups sug-
gests collaboration rather than autarchy.50
There is no evidence that the photographers (except Evans) bridled at Strykers
suggestions or found them conning. Toward the end of his New England trip
Delano wrote that they had been such a help, and the outline swell. And in Mon-
tana to cover the cattle industry Rothstein complimented Stryker for the masterful
job of his shooting script, an assessment echoed by all the locals to whom he had
shown it. Most important, Stryker consistently made clear to the photographers
his conviction that the judgment of their eye alone should dictate their pictures. A
magazine piece by Pare Lorenz had impressed him so much he read it seven times,
he wrote to Lee, and he sent an annotated copy to suggest the sorts of pictures that
would interest him most. But then he added, You, of course, will have your own
reactions and as always, you will interpret it in your own way. Thank God. That
is what has made the le what it is. Delano would later aver that all the photog-
raphers felt empowered by the creative freedom they enjoyed because of Strykers
intense loyalty to them and because he wouldnt tell you what to photograph at
all, ever.51
As with the shooting scripts, Strykers procedure for selecting negatives to print
or kill has been taken as evidence that he methodically undermined the photog-
raphers autonomy. Curtis, for one, writes, What has struck some later critics as
artistic mutilation, Stryker regarded as basic editing. The photographers peri-
odically sent exposed lm to Washington to be developed and a rst print made
of each negative. Stryker would go through them, clipping the corners of those
he proposed to kill, or sometimes making notes in their margins, before they were
returned to the photographers. Roughly one of every two shots was killed, often
because they were alternate versions but sometimes because they were technically
inadequate. The sheer number of negatives arriving in Washington required some
triage because making le prints was the laboratorys most labor-intensive work.52
Only with the rst prints in their hands did the photographers see the results of
their shots made weeks earlier. An outline of general instructions unambiguously
spelled out their prerogatives: If you disagree with Mr. Strykers notes, or you
do not agree that certain prints should be killed, it is your privilege to leave the
print for the les, and so indicate. It is also your privilege to kill any prints you do
not wish in the les, by tearing the corners. Strykers letters conrm his delity
to that principle. Not long after Lee joined the staff he told him, We never reject
any negatives without the nal approval of the photographer, even though we have
to hold them for a few months. With Lange he was even more emphatic. He sent
a set of rst prints to Mississippi, where she was working in the summer of ,
divided into three lots, those he believed ought to go into the le, ones he was doubt-
ful about, and those he rejected. If, however, he told her, you feel that any from
the last two groups should go into the rst, do not hesitate to make the change. It
may have been that when you took these you had certain things in mind that would
entirely change the decision.53
If the notion that Stryker tyrannized this triage is a canard, the fact that the
photographers did not oversee developing and printing did abridge what artistic
photographers took as their prerogative. Given the circumstances in which they
worked, usually far from Washington and without access to a darkroom, it is dif-
cult to imagine a viable alternative system. Sending exposed lm to Washington
for developing was not mandatory, although usually the practice, and the photog-
raphers knowing the developer the laboratory used could specify if they wanted a
particular roll to be handled differently from the norm. With the rst prints they
could also indicate how the le copy should be cropped.54
Aside from Evans and Lange there is no evidence that photographers bridled
163
at this arrangement, perhaps bowing to the inevitable but more likely because the
quality of the laboratorys work was high, testied to by no less a perfectionist than
164 Ansel Adams, universally considered the eras nest darkroom craftsman. Lange
asked Adams to intercede with Stryker when she was still hoping to process her
negatives in California, and Adams paid a call to plead her case. He reported that
he had pushed as hard as he could, but Stryker resisted and he has a good reason
for this stand, namely the impossibility of justifying the expense of a duplicate
laboratory and the need to have negatives close at hand to meet requests. But, he
went on, she should feel reassured because the Washington laboratory maintained
unusually high standards. I saw lots of the work, and there is some grand stuff
being done. The lab here has made some very nice prints, and I dont think you
would object to their printing from your negatives as much as if it were ordinary
production. Adams did get Stryker to agree that she could develop her negatives
in California and send three preliminary prints to Washington with instructions on
how she wanted the le print to be done. I think I got something, he concluded.
I wish I had gotten more for you, but his set-up wont let him go further.55
The pictures were sometimes treated cavalierly by newspapers and magazines,
cropped arbitrarily or even airbrushed and otherwise deformed to t design require-
ments. A feature that invited Amarillo Daily News readers to [Take] a Look at
Inner Workings of Resettlement Administration was typical of these, reproduc-
ing several Rothstein shots to compose a nearly full-page mosaic, only one in its
normal proportions. The eccentric shapes of the remainder included ovals, circles,
and elongated rectangles. In some airbrushing entirely eliminated everything but
the human gures. The Indianapolis Times illustrated a similar article by artwork
that superimposed the agencys initials over two photographs and then eliminated
whatever fell outside the initials lines.56
Such blatant disrespect for a photographs integrity and the photographers cre-
ative intelligence was the tribute exacted from an undertaking predicated on public
relations. If these journalistic disgurations discouraged the photographers they
have left no record of it. They knew that publicity was the Sections life blood, so
favorable coverage of the FSA such as in the Amarillo and Indianapolis pieces might
compensate for such occasional mutilations. Much more often than not, though,
the media reproduced their pictures unaltered, which was also overwhelmingly the
case in exhibition and book formats. And the photographers knewif only because
Stryker emphasized it so oftenthat they were creating their work for posterity,
not the present alone. It would be part of a historical archive that would preserve
the pictures as they had intended them to be seen.57
Belinda Rathbone remarks that government ownership of the photographers
work was an unfortunate arrangement, which it was according to the principle
that artists should hold proprietary rights over their work. Evans and Lange perhaps
felt abused by this conditionboth may have made shots that they did not send to
Washingtonbut no evidence indicates that the other photographers did, then or
later. Perhaps they were victims of false consciousness, too ready to give up artistic
rights in return for a salary, but it is difcult to regard them as wage slaves in light
of their often-expressed zest for their work or, given their progressive convictions,
as naive victims of exploitation. Government-commissioned art that is publicly
held is common with sculpture and architecture; only its rarity in the graphic arts
makes public ownership seem a violation of a basic right the photographers ought
to have enjoyed.58
The institutional circumstances in which the Section photographers created
their bodies of work thus differed from those of independent artists. The FSAs
publicity needs dictated some of their pictures, and the more general documen-
tary idea that Stryker described as animating the Sectionclose attention to the
texture of ordinary Americans personal experiences and to the cultural settings in
which these occurredset boundaries within which they made their more creative
photographs, although so broadly that few possibilities were excluded. Legibility
was a stylistic requirement but virtually the only one. In the important ways pho-
tographers had substantial freedom to pursue their own visions. That they did so
is evident to even the most casual viewer of the le they created, extraordinarily
rich in its range and various enough in style so even without a caption many of its
images may be assigned to a specic photographer.
Strykers role as impresario in this achievement was a key one, certainly not greater
than that of the photographers but in its own way as important. For eight years he
adroitly navigated the Section through the shoals of budget vicissitudes and the reefs
of the intramural preference for bland publicity shots like those that dominated the
output of other governmental photography units. Although making record and news
photographs was inescapable, again and again his letters counsel photographers to
give priority to their creative documentary work. It is the pictures that are impor-
tant, and not I, he wrote in . I am only an individual who hangs around the
place, applying bits of enthusiasm here and there. I keep these subject matter people
from looking over the shoulders of our photographers and insisting that only they
know what is correct. His self-conscious false modesty notwithstanding, this was
a fair description of his determination to act as a buffer between the photographers
and a bureaucracy that regarded them as only journeymen.59
Stryker functioned as an impresario of artful photography in more proactive
ways as well by energetically working to make certain the FSA photographs were
more widely seen than those from other federal agencies and perhaps most of all
by ceding to the photographers the maximum artistic autonomy that the particular
conditions imposed by government sponsorship allowed. In Paul Hendricksons
apt phrase, Stryker was an antibureaucrats bureaucrat, attentive to and cagey
165
about the inescapable demands of institutional life but committed above all to a
belief that the photographers ought to have the widest possible latitude to make
166 their pictures as their own creative vision dictated. All the staff felt this, and it is
only slightly ironic that Evans expressed it best. When an interviewer asked him
if working for the FSA had been rewarding, he said, Oh gosh, yes! Of course, it
was. A subsidized freedom to do my stuff ! Good heavens, what more could anyone
ask for?60
10
Farm Security
Administration Photography
in the Aura of Art
Discovering Photographys Art World
When it was established in mid- the Historical Section had the impro-
visatory air of many New Deal initiatives: get the thing up and running and
then gure out what it ought to do. From the welter of responsibilities enu-
merated in its charter photography soon emerged as the only one it would
pursue. Because the public appetite for photographs seemed unquenchable
and of their reputation for transparency they promised to be a superior vehicle
for publicizing the Resettlement Administration, which, whatever its other
uncertainties, had been the Sections raison dtre from the outset. Less settled
were what the photographers ought to depict and how the pictures should be
deployed. As in other federal photographic units the staff would be expected
to record the agencys achievements for in-house publications and exhibits, but
almost immediately a more expansive agenda emerged as photographers began to
168 make far-ranging documentary pictures and Stryker sought wider dissemination of
their work. In its earliest days, though, perhaps because the Sections impetus was
so singularly instrumental, no one considered bringing the pictures forward under
the banner of artistic expression.
By the Section began to exploit photographys art world as a potential outlet.
It was a milieu of which Stryker knew little when he became director, or of photog-
raphy as an artistic discipline either, although Walker Evans and Ben Shahn strove
to educate him. But the conuence of two otherwise disconnected events in the
early autumn of a triumph and a threatrevealed the benets an art world
connection could provide. Among the Sections earliest successes with a national
publication were two pictures by Dorothea Lange and Arnold Rothstein in U.S.
Camera , also exhibited in its popular traveling show. These venues offered
considerable advantages over journalistic ones: better production values, receptivity
to the photographers most ambitious pictures, prominent credits for them and the
Section, and display alongside such highly regarded workers as Berenice Abbott,
Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, and Edward Weston. Art world audi-
ences were substantial, too, and could be expected to give the photographs more
respectful attention than newspaper readers would. But an art world connection also
offered an invaluable strategic advantage, one that became apparent in the weeks
around Labor Day.
About the time U.S. Camera appeared the Section came under heavy attack in a
controversy that was not only embarrassing but also potentially imperiled its exis-
tence. The incident was precipitated by a Rothstein shot made in South Dakotas
Badlands of a steers skull on a patch of parched, cracked dirt. It evoked the deadly
effect of the drought aficting the Great Plains but was also a study in texturethe
polished ivory skull against the webbed earthand a still life resembling some of
Georgia OKeeffes. Because the bright sun caused the skull to be duplicated by its
shadow, the image was also a witty pun on photographys positive-negative technol-
ogy. This multiplicity made it a tting representative of the Sections documentary
work, at once socially relevant and artful.
Its multiplicity, though, provided no shelter from the storm that broke around
it in late August when a Fargo newspaper hostile to the New Deal ran a lead
story claiming the photograph was faked. Rothstein, it implied, carried the skull as
a prop, and a patch of alkaline earth could easily be discovered, even in rainy years,
so his photograph was no more than a bogus wooden nickel. The story broke as
President Roosevelt toured the drought states on his way to Bismarck to parley with
a federal commission investigating the crisis. The news was meant to embarrass
him and discredit the New Deals initiatives as no more than partisan expedients
that its propaganda tried to legitimize.1
Newspapers hostile to the administration pounced on the story, and the next
month saw many more condemnations. The Chicago Tribune and New York Her-
ald Tribune uncovered the fact that Rothstein had also photographed the skull on a
grassy slope, arguing that versions with such differing connotations were irrefutable
evidence of a propagandistic deceit designed to bolster the New Deals fortunes.
The Columbus Dispatch editorialized that it was a shabby trick, even for New Deal
propaganda methods which have never been overscrupulous, and the Chicago News
likewise expressed indignation about New Deal propaganda photographers. A
widely published syndicated piece saw the faked picture as but one phase of the
propaganda the federal agency poured out to justify its continuance.2
To such damning censure of the Section as no more than a propaganda opera-
tion the art worlds imprimatur, as represented by U.S. Camera, offered an antidote
because it shifted the motive behind the Sections pictures from institutional per-
suasion and public relations to individual expression and humanistic revelation and
proposed other canons for understanding them than merely their delity to an ideal
of objective depiction. In fact, the two U.S. Camera pictures made a strong appeal
for the FSAs programs for marginal farmers and displaced migrants: Rothsteins
of a pregnant and distressed Sharecroppers Wife and bewildered daughter in
their cabins crude doorway, and Langes anxious Migrant Mother and fearful
children. While their political implications remained intact they accrued as well
an aura of art, demanding to be assessed for esthetic expressiveness as well as their
depiction of a social reality. Against the charge that the Sections photographers
were propagandists this context framed their creative work as circumscribed by the
disinterested regimens of art.3
As U.S. Camera revealed an arena for displaying the Sections work superior
to any it had been able to tap, so the skull picture imbroglio claried how an alli-
ance with photographys art world would benet it as a shield against allegations
that it was solely a propaganda operation. The First Annual Reports proclamation
that it evaluated its photographs as works of art followed close on the heels of
these events, reecting a consequential amendment to the Sections initial mis-
sion of documenting the agencys activities and providing good publicity for them.
Stryker would persevere in seeking media outlets, but he also began to campaign
for the photographs display in forums that would emphasize their artistry, both
in the camera periodicalswith considerable successand in exhibitions. Books
reproducing them would be another new outlet, not precisely an art world one but
signicantly overlapping with it in appeal to readers interested in the communica-
tive potential of visual art and how a pictures esthetic distinction enlarged it. Not
FSA Photography in the Aura of Art
169
only were these venues superior to media outlets in technical presentation but they
also emphasized the Sections documentary photographs and not its more mundane
170 news and record shots, presented them in large enough numbers to convey a dis-
tinct sense of their aspiration, nearly always credited them, and sought an intensely
interested audience as attentive to their artfulness as what they depicted.
Beginning principally as a publicity operation, by its second year the Section had
expanded its purview and sharply differentiated itself from its federal peers. The
publicity mission remained, but the practical impetus coexisted with others that
had become at least as central: to quicken sympathy for the depressions victims,
to range broadly and widely enough to make its le a historical archive of thirties
culture rather than merely a record of the agencys activities, and to establish its
visibility in photographys art world by advertising its photographs and photogra-
phers as exemplary representatives of documentary practice.
The Pictures Are the Thing

Books reproducing photographs were not new, but they ourished in the thirties as
publishers moved to capitalize on photographys new vigor and enlarged audience.
Not only did their numbers increase but the quantity and prominence of pictures
in them did so as well; in many, photographs and text were equally conspicuous.
This burgeoning genre offered the Section a new channel for circulating its pic-
tures in a format that had a prestige and artifactual durability that no newspaper
or magazine could match.4
The state guidebooks produced by the Works Progress Administration Federal
Writers Project that began to appear in did not treat photographs and texts
equally, but they did, however, publish some ve thousand pictures. Perhaps the
most universally celebrated of the New Deals cultural initiatives, the American
Guide Series prodigiously chronicled the history and lore of the forty-eight states
and packed the information into essays and auto itineraries exhaustively enumer-
ating what tourists ought to see. About a hundred photographs illustrated each
volume, mostly insipid depictions of local sites, but thirty-six guides also included
some of the Sections pictures, making the American Guide Series quantita-
tively its most prolic client. As an undertaking without any apparent propagandis-
tic aimthe books were published by leading commercial housesand dedicated
to documenting American culture in prose as the Section was in photography, the
American Guide Series ought to have been an outstanding medium for showcasing
the photographers work. In fact, it contributed little to advancing the Sections
reputation for artful photography because its usually more arresting pictures tended
to become lost amid the welter of mediocre ones, were poorly reproduced, and
most of all because the editors gave no thought to how photographs might enhance
the volumes.5
The guides favored the Sections landscapes and cultural studies of people
engaged in workaday activities rather than its pictures of depression calamities. A
few included tenants and itinerant eldworkers, but prosperous spreads, purposeful
farmers, and characteristic expressions of local culture appeared more often. Avoid-
ing the Sections more corrosive pictures may have reected political timidity, but
more likely the editors understood that emphasizing a states most distinctive and
durable qualities would better advise tourists. Although the photographs had not
been made as travel illustrations, the guides inevitably gave them that coloration.
Some evoked regional stereotypes, such as Russell Lees bewhiskered Louisiana
Southern Colonel and Rothsteins mounted Nevada Buckeroo in full western
getup. Many others depicted typical scenes along state highways, oil rigs in Okla-
homa and Texas, coal mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, or stockraising opera-
tions in Colorado and Wyoming. Portraits were also plentiful, usually incorporating
indigenous cultural themes such as Marion Post Wolcotts West Virginia quilting
bee, Ben Shahns study of African Americans on an Arkansas cabins porch, and
Arnold Rothsteins upcountry Maryland woman spinning wool. Such positive
pictures harmonized well with the guides boosterish tone.
Reproduction quality was low, even by journalistic standards. Pictures were muddy,
and dingy paper obscured tonality and detail. Layouts grouped them in unimagi-
native categoriesagriculture, industry, and so onoften crowding pictures two
or even three to a page. The shabby presentation reected the editors indiffer-
ence to photography as a medium of communication, much less artistic expres-
sion. The guides writing could be lively, but their illustrative sections, aside from
the Sections pictures and a few others, included only mediocre work. Featuring
so many photographs was a concession to the public appetite for them, but no one
considered how they might be made integral to a volume rather than an awkward
appendage. No guide listed a photo editor, and only one (New Mexicos) noted the
photographs editorially. These deciencies made Stryker lose interest after initial
enthusiasm. As the rst guides began to appear he actively solicited the Louisiana
editor. This project sounds most exciting, he told him, and I am anxious to get
a photographer lined up on the job. And when the Louisiana volume appeared
three years later the Section, with twenty-two pictures, had more than any other
source except the New Orleans Item. In the meantime it had become apparent how
poorly the guides represented photography, and Strykers subsequent correspon-
dence never again alludes to them.6
A single exception indicates what would have been possible had the editors been
more alive to the photographs potential. Early in Shahn, let go by the FSAs
Special Skills Division, asked Stryker for an appointment to spell him until he
171
began a mural commission. When it came through he was in Ohio visiting his in-
laws and decided to stay on for the summer, and during that time he made more
172 than eight hundred pictures in and around central Ohio towns. In the Ohio guide
fteen appeared as a discrete section, a portrait of small town life made by Ben
Shahn of the Farm Security Administration. It is the only portfolio in any of the
guides and the most effective use of photographs in all of them.7
The pictures revealed Shahns ethnographic talent for capturing the social texture
and rituals of small communities, among them a beauty-shop window advertising
the Seasons Smartest Styles from Hollywood, parishioners chatting after church,
and studies of local festivals. He sometimes used a right-angle viewnder and with
this deception made candid pictures whose subjects evinced no self-consciousness.
Several street pictures have this spontaneous quality, of shoppers on a busy Saturday
afternoon and two elderly men kibitzing in front of an auto garage. These ordinary
moments isolated by his camera become emblematic of the rhythms of community
life. Asymmetrical composition that gave his pictures competing nodes of interest
was Shahns stylistic signature, as in Summer Solstice, keenly observant of these
everyday rituals. A man in dark trousers, white shirt, galluses, and straw hat lounges
against a corner pole on a downtown street while to his right an identically dressed
elderly pedestrian prepares either to step off the curb or continue a conversation
with a stout woman who has crossed toward him. Deep in the picture space and
catercornered, a group of idlers gathers around yet another light pole. Reinforcing
the sense of three asymmetrical yet linked points of interest is the slight distor-
tion created by Shahns lens, making the verticals lean away from the center. With
such arresting pictures the portfolio provided The Ohio Guides readers with not
only engaging vignettes of small-town culture but also demonstrated how a gifted
photographers vision organizes perception in esthetically challenging ways.
The Ohio portfolio suggests how an editorial leadership more attuned to the
photographs expressive possibilities might have made the American Guide Series
an outstanding venue for the Sections cultural work and not merely a numerically
preponderant one. Disseminating photographs is ineluctably a collaborative activ-
ity, and the Sections collaborators in this case were inadequate. But if the guides
contributed only a little to advancing the Sections fortunes, their publication his-
tory indicates its success in establishing a reputation for being a sponsor of distin-
guished work. The units responsible for each states volume worked with different
degrees of efciency, so that about one-fourth appeared in and , another
one-fourth in , and the remainder in and . Only three of the earliest
thirteen used FSA pictures, and just one had more than four. Of the later thirty-
ve, though, all but two did and usually in larger numbers. This increase reected
the les growing size and also suggests the Sections obscurity in its earliest years,
even to federal employees scouting for illustrations, and indicates that by a
corner had been turned. Even more revealing is the matter of credits. None among
the half earliest published credited the photographers although a substantial major-
ity of those appearing later did.8
A far more successful collaboration was with the poet Archibald MacLeish. The
publication of Land of the Free, in his words a book of photographs illustrated
by a poem, solidied the Sections reputation as a sponsor of distinguished work,
more so than any other single event. MacLeishs credentials included a Pulitzer
Prize for poetry, several national radio appearances, and prominent visibility in the
nations intellectual and artistic life. One observer named him the most interest-
ing writer in the United States today and averred that no one else so epitomizes
our own time. Some contemporaries disagreed and scorned his turn to public
poetry, derivativeness, and esthetic dilettantism, and his well-advertised liberalism
offended radicals. None of these cavils mattered to Stryker when MacLeish pro-
posed the book because MacLeishs politics matched his own, he was indifferent to
poetic controversies, and most of all because MacLeishs artistic prestige promised
to radiate an aura that would suffuse the photographs and certify them as works of
photographic art equal in importance to the mediums nest achievements. The
Sections nominal goal of publicity for the FSAs accomplishments was irrelevant
because MacLeish wanted only documentary pictures, no record or news shots. His
book would instead promote a broad justication for New Deal reform as it prof-
fered an unimpeachable endorsement of the Sections claim that its photographs
met a high artistic standard.9
MacLeish initially imagined a book of two hundred pictures with prose com-
mentaries, and Stryker hoped he would preface it by describing the type of thing
we are striving to do here at the R.A. In the summer of MacLeish came to
Washington to look over a huge bunch of the photographs and get a feel for the
le before Stryker selected ve hundred from which the poet would choose the two
hundred to gloss. But, as MacLeish later explained, seeing the pictures was such
a revelation that it made him rethink the books proportions. So great was the
power and the stubborn inward livingness of these vivid American documents, he
declared, that he altered his original plan and gave priority to the photographs, with
a poem to illustrate them. His paradox was disingenuous. Although each picture
stood alone with a portion of the text facing it, only MacLeishs name appeared
on the title page. The photographers were relegated to an appendix. Nevertheless,
no reader could doubt that text and photographs were meant to be both equal in
importance and symbiotic.10
MacLeishs rst-person-plural narrator expresses bitterness about the collapse
of the American ideal of self-reliance but mostly uncertainty about how to rem-
edy the economic and ecological disasters that had induced it. The puzzled refrain
We dont know reiterates the irrelevancy of traditional American entitlements, of
173
individual independence afforded by property ownership with the prospect of new
land always to the west guaranteeing it. MacLeish thus updated Frederick Jackson
174 Turners frontier thesis, aligning his poem with American historiographys domi-
nant paradigm, but unlike Turner almost fty years earlier he proposed a new way
to dene American liberty, as men: not land.
In the poem this reformulations meaning is obscure but achieves tangibility in the
closing pages photographs of massed groups of men and women in ritual celebra-
tion of shared social goals, at a May Day rally and in trade union solidarity. Such
pictures, MacLeish said elsewhere, supply xed points of reference like the xed
points supplied in other times by those proper names which referred to universally
understood myths or universally accepted historical events. The historical events
he had in mind in were recent but universally considered epochal, specically
the CIO victories at General Motors and U.S. Steel and more generally the New
Deals liberal reforms that had led to legislation such as the Wagner Act and made
these victories of collective action possible. The poems last linesWe wonder
/ We dont know / Were askingthus become no more than rhetorical closure
inasmuch as the answer to these puzzlements had been delivered by the preceding
three photographs. It is implied as well by Langes concluding one, a half-length
portrait of a grizzled migrant anked by two others, his arms akimbo, jaw rmly
set, and eyes narrowed under his hats brim, unabashedly addressing the viewer
with an air of concentration, determination, and will.11
Aside from Langes, MacLeish secured the photographs delivering this message
from news agencies, as he did the well-known pictures of Ford goons beating Walter
Reuther and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago. The FSA
le contained only a few shots of labor actions and none of industrial violence. Nor
did it include panoramas of the continents grandest mountain chains or studies of
bosky forests and undulating grasslands, all of which MacLeish wanted to contrast
American potential with the despoilations it had suffered, and for these, too, he
turned to other photographers, including Bourke-White and Willard Van Dyke.
But with sixty-two of its eighty-eight pictures the Section dominated Land of the
Free. Lange with thirty-three had most, but Rothstein and Lee were also well rep-
resented by ten and nine respectively, and Shahns four and Evanss three included
some of their strongest images. Many of the photographs would become iconic, their
publication in MacLeishs book a stimulus for their subsequent ubiquity. Langes
migrant mother and craggy but stunned Missouri refugee behind the wheel of
his vehicle were among those who dont know or arent sure, and Lees of
the arthritic hands of an evicted Iowa homesteaders wife, Shahns ragged Ozark
mountaineers daughter clasping a disgured doll, and Rothsteins Oklahoma boy
shielding his mouth in a dust storm all represented casualties of the depression.
MacLeish paired Evanss graveyard view of Bethlehem row houses and steel mills
with a non-FSA picture of a pristine clapboard Connecticut church and cemetery,
a before-and-after depiction of the pioneer past and diseased present, when the
west winds away from us. With the exception of Rothsteins shot of a well-kept
Maine farmstead under a peaceful sky, Land of the Free emphasized the Sections
hardscrabble pictures of people dazed by what had happened to them. One of sev-
eral examples of dispossessed people on the move, Langes full-length portrait of
a mother holding her infant and addressing the camera resembled innumerable
snapshots in subject and style, the mother decked out in a jaunty hat accessorized
with a feather, except that tire trouble has stranded her on a dreary roadside beside
a trailer piled higgledy-piggledy with her familys paltry possessions. MacLeishs
emphasis on such discomting photographs contrasted with those of more nor-
mative cultural activities simultaneously appearing in the American Guide Series.
The Sections reputation in the thirtiesand subsequentlywould be mostly for
its shots of hardship, not only because their timeliness tted journalisms empha-
ses and so many were visually arresting but also because in this highly visible book
MacLeish so determinedly emphasized them.12
Later commentators have almost uniformly found MacLeishs poem bombas-
tic and his alteration of one of the photographs indefensible. His narrative voice,
purporting to express the collective anxieties of the people depicted, has come in
for special criticism as an egregious usurpation of individual identities by someone
who, as a Harvard-trained lawyer, Fortune editor, and leading gure in New York
artistic circles, had little knowledge of and even less authority to speak for rural
people battered by the depression. His political critique has been seen as spongy
as well. For all his poems indignation it indicts no one nor identies any political
or social institutions as bearing responsibility for the nations disasters, and thus it
emphasizes victims without victimizers. His advocacy of a new ethos of collective
solidarity as represented by trade union activism splits the volume into two wildly
disproportionate and incompatible segments, one composing almost all of it and
centered on rural problems, the other compressed into a few closing pages and
invoking an industrial solution. Finally, his cropping of Langes Plantation Owner,
Clarksdale, Mississippi has been universally condemned for leaching away its racial
connotations and utterly reshaping its meaning. Land of the Frees version elimi-
nates four of the ve black individuals, the owners minions standing or seated near
him, the better to emphasize his imposing self-possession, which is heightened by
Langes upraised camera angle. The mans prominent jowls and wattles make him
especially t MacLeishs text, which proposes an analogy between a crowing cock
and American assertions of the traditional entitlement to liberty. Erased entirely
are the implications about caste and class in Langes negative.13
But few of these objections occurred to contemporary reviewers. Babette Deutsch
thought the poem insufciently poetic and too exhortatory, while Pare Lorentza
175
lmmaker with a penchant for exhortationfound it thin-blooded and cool. Next
to the photographs MacLeishs sound track felt contrived said The Nations critic.
176 Both reviewers for the leading New York book supplements maintained that the
collaboration between words and images created a new art form, singling out the
photographs as its senior partner. In fact, all the notices whatever their judgment
of MacLeishs contribution had only unstinting praise for the Sections photo-
graphs. Reviewers said they were superbly taken; amazingly good, technically
far superior to any words that might be written of them; [they] alone ash the
terrible truth; and the pictures are the thing. Even one reviewer whose doubts
about any photographs truthfulness led him to decry MacLeishs unfair method
urged readers not to miss the book because the pictures are excellent. Reviewers
seemed so overwhelmed by their emotive power and esthetic excellence that several
employed variations on the same sentiment to describe their awesome effect. The
pictures, they said, speak for themselves, or speak quite eloquently for them-
selves, and the best words would be weak alongside these photographs of the real
America and actual Americans.14
Reviewers of Land of the Free extravagantly admired the pictures, but they had
little vocabulary to discuss them except for superlatives. Nor was that surprising
because the practice of photographic criticism was still rudimentary and its practi-
tioners few. But that the photographs transcended commonplace journalism or illus-
tration they left in no doubt, and they forthrightly denominated that their makers
were, as one put it, artists working for the Resettlement Administration. Lange
was especially singled out for the spaciousness and penetration of her vision. I give
her full credit, Lorenz wrote, for putting on celluloid what Mr. MacLeish failed
to put into words: the sorrow, and the dignity, and the blood of the people.15
Where these encomia appeared was nearly as important as what they said for rati-
fying the Sections artistic bona des. Most ran in journals that assumed readers
shared a lively interest in the arts. While Time aspired to a general and news-minded
readership, The Nation and New Republic, both with impressive back-of-the-book
cultural sections, were the leading liberal magazines and had large inuence among
the intelligensia. The two New York newspaper book supplements functioned as
journals of record identifying a seasons most important books, and the Saturday
Review of Literature served a similar purpose for a less metropolitan and perhaps
more middlebrow audience. The little magazines Poetry and Yale Review had much
smaller circulations, but readers turned to them because of an intense curiosity about
contemporary cultural developments. No review of Land of the Free appeared in
The New Yorker, Atlantic, or Harpers, but otherwise it made nearly a triumphant
sweep of the major reviewing venues.16
MacLeishs book represented an important breakthrough for the Section. It did
not become a best-seller as You Have Seen Their Faces had six months earlier, but
MacLeishs sponsorship, as it were, conferred an imprimatur on the photographers
that lifted them to the realm that he himself occupied as a serious artist. His name,
moreover, guaranteed notice by leading journals as without it a collection of pho-
tographs would likely not have. And by introducing readers to such a substantial
selection of the photographers strongest work Land of the Free formulated the
Section as a unique collaborative enterprise whose staff simultaneously pursued
reportorial and esthetic goals, as the publication of single or scattered images could
only faintly intimate. Little wonder that Stryker was so delighted by its reception.
It certainly has done the photographic section and the photographers who partici-
pated no harm, he told Lange, and he expressed the hope that they could promote
something as good again.17
The Section would feature in at least eight more such hybrid collaborations
(in addition to the thirty-six WPA state guides) before closing down, and some
would attract respectful and even enthusiastic press attention, but none would be
as important as Land of the Free for solidifying its artistic standing. Subsequent
volumes could only burnish a reputation already established, but also none of the
later writers enjoyed the cultural stature MacLeish did however much posterity
has elevated some of them. James Agee is a more powerful writer than MacLeish,
and so is Richard Wright, but Agee was only a promising but minor poet when Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men appeared in , and Wright a newcomer on the liter-
ary scene. Native Son was published just a year before Twelve Million Black Voices.
Sherwood Andersons star, brightest in the twenties, had dimmed considerably by
the time he wrote Home Towns text. Paul Taylor, Langes collaborator on An Ameri-
can Exodus, was a respected academic, and so were Herman Nixon, Arthur Raper,
and Ira Reid, whose books on southern agriculture included generous selections
of FSA photographs. As social scientists of small national visibility, however, their
names carried no weight in artistic circles.18
Other circumstances also contributed to make Land of the Free most decisive in
bolstering the Sections artistic reputation. As an imprint of a leading publisher
(Harcourt Brace) it beneted from more advertising, better distribution, and greater
public exposure than the books by academics. Other than An American Exodus, most
were published by the University of North Carolina Press; even the Taylor-Lange
collaboration was from a small and relatively insignicant New York house. These
provenances translated into fewer, briefer, and less prominent reviews that would
do less to stimulate the hum and buzz of MacLeishs book. Of the books from trade
publishers Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sank almost immediately with hardly a
trace, its thin scattering of admiring notices not enough to keep it from being speed-
ily remaindered. Happenstance of timing (its publication was only weeks before
Pearl Harbor) meant that Twelve Million Black Voices would be swamped by the
nations plunge into a war that made everything else seem irrelevant. Andersons
177
Home Town did elicit considerable attention, including a front-page notice in the
New York Times Book Review, but its writing was notably gassy, and, as Nicholas
178 Natanson has pointed out, its representation of the FSA le a mediocre one as Land
of the Frees was not. In retrospect, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is not only the
most subtle, powerful, and artful use of documentary pictures of any in the thir-
ties but it is also the decades masterwork, far richer and more enduring than Land
of the Free, and a persuasive argument may be made that An American Exodus and
Twelve Million Black Voices are superior as well. From the perspective of the thir-
ties, however, MacLeishs book unquestionably contributed most to conrming the
Sections reputation for making documentary photographs of the highest esthetic
distinction, deserving of an honored place in photographys art world. To Hartley
Howe, writing two years later, it remained a unique tribute to the outstanding
quality of the Sections pictures.19
American Photographs
Walker Evanss American Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art promised
to consolidate what MacLeishs book could only intimate about the Section as an
exceptional patron of artful photography. Its sponsor ranked among the nations
most inuential artistic institutions and had already demonstrated its commitment
to proselytizing the art world with three prior photography exhibitions. One had
been Evanss rst one-person show ve years earlier in , but the museum pub-
licized American Photographs as its and Evanss rst, information that has been so
reiterated as to seem indisputable fact. The two one-person exhibitions differed,
though, in that American Photographs was more than twice as large, surveying most
of Evanss career, and it attracted far greater public attention, both circumstances
hinting at photographys integration into the art world in the interim.20
Its catalog was an entirely novel departure. Although a few books had featured a
photographers work none had so spaciously represented it with so few verbal clues
for understanding it, and none had carried a museums imprimatur. Production
values far surpassed standard presentation, with crisp letterpress reproductions on
creamy gloss paper. The distinctive design and structure also marked it as a new
departure. A nearly square volume, it has eighty-seven pictures framed by white
space, and each faces a blank leaf, their lapidary titles segregated at the end of two
sequences designated only as Part One and Part Two. This singular format
constructed the pictures as outstanding specimens of photographic genius, while
the structure balked most of the usual ways of understanding them, as illuminated
by a caption, or linked arrangements of related subject matter, or chronologically.
Lincoln Kirsteins ve-thousand-word essay followed the pictures and supplied
readers with a small-scale structural mappeople by photography in Part One
and the continuous fact of an indigenous American expression in Part Twobut
these expansive categories helped only a little to sort out the photographs relation-
ships to one another.21
Evans excluded from American Photographs his early experiments with mon-
tage and dramatic shooting anglesnotably his illustrations for Hart Cranes The
Bridgeand his recent pictures covertly surveilling subway riders because their
formal heterodoxy would clash with the pristine documentary style of most of
his thirties work. Otherwise it touched all the other bases. There was a good deal
of vernacular architecture, some from the project initiated by Kirstein and more
from Evanss later travels especially in the South; a dozen or so informal portraits
and a few posed ones, including of Allie Mae Burroughs made on the Fortune
assignment with Agee; street scenes and townscapes North and South; several pic-
tures from Evanss commission to illustrate Carleton Bealss The Crime of Cuba; a
half-dozen interiors, mostly unpeopled; and close-ups of advertising posters and
handmade signs that highlighted Evanss genius for discovering tantalizing irony in
ordinary objects. In subject matter the photographs were determinedly disparate.
What united them was a consistency in style emphasizing compositional simplicity,
frontality, and usually a pellucid natural light so that their strongest impression was
of the exceptional clarity with which Evans rendered an object and its surrounding
envelope of space. Their air of purity, Kirstein said, derived from the rigorous
directness of Evanss eye and imbued his pictures with the unsparing frankness
of a Russian ikon or a Flemish portrait.22
Forty-seven pictures had been made before Evanss tenure with the Section,
forty during it, with none from the eighteen months since he left. The two chron-
ological groups were consistent in style and overlapping in subject matter. Even
as the social meanings of their paired portraits differed, the wary suspicion of a
Cuban dock worker echoed the American Legionnaires for the FSA, and the
tightly framed views of ragged minstrel show posters, made in Alabama in ,
resembled Torn Movie Poster from six years earlier. Pictures from both periods
included numerous similarly composed and lighted views of houses, churches, and
commercial structures. The effect, quite deliberate, was to suggest a continuity of
vision over time, implicitly diminishing the signicance of any particular circum-
stance, biographical or institutional, which might have provided a special context
for Evanss making them.
An addendum to the title lists identied the FSA representation along with three
from the Fortune assignment reproduced with permission of Harper and Broth-
ers, still Let Us Now Praise Famous Mens prospective publisher. Evans also made
these acknowledgements in a hundred-word prefatory note, the nal sentence of
which asserted his exclusive authority over the pictures selection and disclaimed
179
any sponsorship or connection with the policies, aesthetic or political, of any of the
institutions, publications or government agencies for which some of the work has
180 been done. He thus publicly advertised what he had avowed privately three years
earlier in a memorandum listing negotiating points for his employment. He would
never make photographic statements for the government, he then told himself,
and underlined this determination with a nal caveat: whatever.23
Like the sequencing and the ensembles stylistic consistency this editorial context
diminished the signicance of Evanss employment by the Section, explicitly dis-
sociating him from its political aims and implicitly from the photographic practices
it represented. His commitment was solely to his art, which he ercely guarded
against usurpation by any peripheral cause. He may have been the beneciary of
government support, but this was an inconsequential fact because he had intransi-
gently resisted its regimens. Such a self-advertisement was potent, all the more so
for being mostly accurate, because it invoked one of the art worlds most cherished
beliefs, that the authentic modern artist stands in a proudly adversarial relation to
the dominant forces of political and social power.24
Kirsteins essay enlarged on the theme of artistic heroism by developing two sets
of comparisons, one contrasting Evanss work with competing practices and the
other associating it with leading poets and novelists. Two noxious brands of vision
infected contemporary photography, he argued. The rst was practiced by the self-
styled artist-photographer who fetishizes novelty and a striking approach by
depicting indiscriminate surfaces, textures, patterns and promiscuous abstract or
concrete objects. The second kind of offensive vision was that of candid-camera
men, eye-corruptors who try to convince viewers that they have witnessed a
signicant fact but fail to supply even a shard of psychological insight. Kirsteins
pseudo-artistic faddists included the Californians, particularly Westonwhose
Guggenheim Fellowship rankled, especially because Evanss application had been
rejectedand his miniature-camera users were photo-journalists but also Evanss
quondam Section colleagues. Unlike pictures by such miscreants, Kirstein said,
Evanss photographs were not conceived as isolated pictures made by the cam-
era indiscriminately turned here or there but represented a consistent attitude
revealed by their exhaustiveness of detail, their poetry of contrast, and . . . their
moral implication.25
This selective foray into contemporary practices established a negative standard
against which to measure Evanss achievement; Kirsteins many allusions to lead-
ing modernists afrmed a positive one. The puritanical eye of T. S. Eliot would be
sympathetic to the puritanical eye of Walker Evans, Kirstein averred, and the pho-
tographers pictures also called to mind the quartz-and-bone cameos of Marianne
Moore, the lyrical case-book of Dr. William Carlos Williams, the mural histories of
Ben Shahn. Evans had known Hart Crane, and, said Kirstein, the poets eye of
his photographs nds corroboration in the poets voice. Among those attack-
ing the subject matter of their own country in their own time, enumerated Kirst-
ein, were Dos Passos, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and Walker Evans.
Even Mathew Brady and Eugne Atget as Evanss spiritual and esthetic forefathers
served this purpose. As they were surely the complement of Stephen Crane and
Proust, so, too, by association was Evans. In this heady company the mundane fact
that Evans had made nearly half of the photographs for the Section was beneath
notice, and nowhere did Kirstein even allude to it.26
The editorial apparatus of American Photographs strongly inuenced the catalogs
reviews, several of which recycled Kirsteins excited but penetrating commentary,
as Time put it. Most closely replicating it was Thomas Dabney Mabrys notice in
Harpers Bazaar, unsurprising because he and Kirstein had consulted about what
the essay ought to emphasize and Mabry worked for MoMA. Carl Van Vechten
believed Kirsteins essay so comprehensive as to leave a reviewer little to add, and
much of his Herald Tribune Books notice merely reprised it. Paraphrases were even
more common in provincial newspapers, as in the Dallas Times-Herald, the Wash-
ington News, and the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, which also unabashedly
lifted unquoted passages almost verbatim. Several reviewers emulated Kirsteins
sleight-of-hand proclaiming Evans as at once the most gifted American photo-
graphic artist and simultaneously anti-art-photographic with likely no interest
in photography in itself. The Magazine of Art reviewer, for instance, expressed
surprise at the surpassing excellence of Evanss work considering the rather high
level of success with which the camera has lately come to be used but doubted
he has ever missed a shot worrying about the art of photography.27
Other reviewers, including some of the most inuential, avoided Kirsteins par-
adox and simply proclaimed Evanss genius. He was a remarkably gifted artist
declared Robert M. Coates in The New Yorker, his pictures revealing both master-
ful technique and acute perception. Edwin Alden Jewell in the New York Times
expressed amazement that a camera used by an artist with an original idea could
produce pictures that like a creative painting, seem in a legitimate sense suffused
with signature. He denominated Evanss motivation as altogether aesthetic. Wil-
liam Carlos Williams commended his particularization of the universalthe art-
ists unique domainand assured his New Republic readers that Evans is an artist.
Like Kirstein he discriminated between Evans and other contemporary photogra-
phers. Evanss photographs were not a long nose poking into dirty corners for pro-
paganda and for scandal, there are no trick shots, the composition isnt a particular
feature, Williams said, but the pictures talk to us and say plenty, although he
remained silent about what they did say. There were a few demurralsS. T. Wil-
liamson in the New York Times Book Review placed Evans among the cultists of
the ugly, an opinion unsurprisingly seconded by the pictorialist organ, American
181
Photographybut they were faint notes amid the crescendo of acclamation. Even
Eleanor Roosevelt joined the chorus in her syndicated newspaper column. American
182 Photographs, she said, shows us contemporary America and I think all of us who
care about our country will be deeply interested in this record.28
As Kirstein had, virtually all the reviewers overlooked the FSA. This omission so
outraged Pare Lorenz, whose Saturday Review of Literature notice appeared several
weeks after the others, that he devoted much of the review to denouncing it. While
conceding Evanss artistry Lorenz claimed he had not found the wave-length of
his vision until he joined the Section and came under Strykers direction. For good
measure he named the other photographers as implicitly his equals. Kirsteins essay
particularly exercised Lorenz, and he urged readers to read Steichens testimonial in
U.S. Camera as an antidote to its mystifying pronouncements. If as a FSA employee
himself Lorenzs impartiality might be questioned, there was no conict of interest
for the San Francisco News reviewer, who contrasted Evanss cold, austere pictures
with the Sections. The advertisements of Evanss independence were apparently
so effective that the critic failed to recognize that many shots had been made under
Section auspices. Refuting the necessity of turning out puritanically cold record
photographs of the passing parade such as [Evanss], the reviewer insisted, were
the FSA photographers more distinctive photographs.29
American Photographs further accelerated the momentum quickened by MoMAs
historical exhibition the previous year, a one-person show sponsored by one of the
nations leading artistic institutions conferring on photography an unimpeachable
imprimatur. Moreover, it established Evans as the eras preeminent photographic
artist within that fraction of the art world that looked to MoMA for its cues. But
because Evanss FSA connection was so attenuated at MoMA the reviews contrib-
uted little to the Sections ambition for artistic recognition, considerably less so than
had been the case with Land of the Free. It may be true, as Alan Trachtenberg has
remarked, that Evans brief association with the agency has colored the reception
of his book, but in its own time it unquestionably did not because it went nearly
unnoted. This near-invisibility likely accounted for the bland terseness of Strykers
congratulatory note. Dropped in to see the show, liked it a lot, he wrote to Evans,
although he could not resist adding that he wished Kirsteins article had been as
good as the photographs.30
MoMA sent an enlarged version of the exhibition on the road in and to
ve college galleries, an art school, two local art associations and a municipal museum,
even a department store. In each location it drew good crowds and provoked another
urry of notices, as in Los Angeles, its rst stop. In the Los Angeles Times Arthur
Millier invidiously compared pictorialist salons with Evanss exhibition and likened
his pictures warm seriousness to Rembrandts. Another reviewer found their sig-
nicance closer to home: When [Evans] goes into a town he looks for the faces and
places most typical of the American scene, misleadingly insisted Saturday Nights
reviewer, and his message was here is America. Ted Cook, a local professional,
called Evans one of the few real individuals in photography nowadays but found
Evanss work less important than Westons because of the latters exemplary atti-
tude, vast scope, and technical perfection. Some local chauvinism no doubt
lay behind this comparison, but it also indicated that MoMAs imprimatur was not
decisive everywhere in photographys art world. For the Sections artistic standing,
though, these notices had no effect whatsoever. Like those for the New York ver-
sion of Evanss exhibition, they neglected to mention any connection between the
federal agency and Evanss pictures.31
Exhibiting FSA Photography

But its near eclipse in American Photographs notwithstanding, the Section did enlarge
its reputation for photographs of uncommon distinction through other exhibitions
emphasizing both their esthetic excellence and revelation of social conditions. These
shows attracted audiences whose special interest in photography made them the cen-
tral constituency for the Sections claim that its pictures were held to a high artistic
standard. Some of their sponsors inuence in the art world gave their imprima-
turs special weight, including Edward Steichen, who formulated the U.S. Camera
exhibitions; the College Art Association (CAA) and its network of art educators;
Beaumont Newhall and MoMA; the Photographic Society of America; and Ansel
Adams as well as institutions of more local visibility such as the Photo League, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, and the many establishments hosting traveling shows.
At least two dozen exhibitions (many with multiple venues), probably more,
included FSA photographs. But information about some is sketchy to almost non-
existent because of the Sections unmethodical record keeping. The New Haven
Public Library held one in , for example, but its only remnant is a newspaper
piece commending the splendid group of pictures, worth seeing for their artistic
as well as humanistic value. Nor did record keeping improve over time. The only
account of a Bloomington, Illinois, show purporting to tell the story of migrants
in pictures as The Grapes of Wrath did in prose is another newspaper notice. Quota-
tions from the novel captioned the pictures, making the shows emphasis more issue-
specic than in New Haven, but the premise that the pictures were Steinbecks
inspiration rmly associated them with his celebrated novel. Even the exhibits in
a New York show at the Federal Art Project Gallery late in cannot be identi-
ed, only that all the photographers were represented. Although such fragmentary
records make additional undocumented shows seem probable, it is unlikely that any
major ones are unknown.32
183
The exhibitions sponsored by U.S. Camera and Leica annually attracted tens of
thousands to Rockefeller Center and many more as they traveled to other cities;
184 U.S. Cameras especially were key events in photographys art world. Beginning in
the Section exhibited in both, showing alongside leading workers and in an
atmosphere drawing attention to its pictures artfulness. U.S. Cameras ver-
sion, for instance, included at least ve FSA pictures, which Elizabeth McCausland
singled out for holding their own remarkably well besides the big names, Steichen,
Bruehl, Man Ray & company. The energy in photographys art world depended
signicantly on the enthusiasm of amateurs who made up these shows huge audi-
ences, but expert opinion like McCauslands was also required to advertise that the
Sections pictures merited special distinction. Thus when the College Art Asso-
ciation proposed an exhibition for its annual meeting in Philadelphia Stryker
embraced the opportunity. It promised not only to put FSA photographs before
an inuential audience of educators but also to afrm that the Sections brand of
documentary could lay claim to equal stature with other photographic practices
indeed, within the ne arts in general.33
P. Ingemann (later Peter) Sekaer selected CAAs exhibits and provided some
of the wording for the catalogs foreword although Rexford Tugwell signed it. The
thirty-ve-year-old Sekaer was friendly with Shahn, had studied with Abbott, and
worked as Evanss assistant, during which he made what is now a well-known
snapshot of Evans photographing in the Bethlehem graveyard. About the time of
the CAA show he became a government photographer for the Rural Electrica-
tion Administration, and the next year Newhall included three of his pictures in
MoMAs exhibition.34
The catalogno more than a pamphletlisted only titles, often not those used
in the FSA le, which makes it impossible to identify about one-third of the pic-
tures. This curious mode of cataloguing betrayed lingering uncertainty about how
to bring the photographs forward, whether as visual evidence or works of photo-
graphic art. It is impossible to imagine a CAA catalog excluding painters names. It
would be astounding if wall labels did not identify the photographers inasmuch as
the sponsoring organizations principal commitment was to the genius of individual
artists, but there is no way of knowing for certain. A comparable wavering charac-
terized Tugwells introduction. The FSAs pictures were purely documentary and
utilitarian in purpose, he insisted, and that they may be considered works of art
is complimentary, but incidental to our purpose. Yet they had more than ephem-
eral interest because gifted photographers well aware of compositional design and
subtle values made them, expressing a vital relation to contemporary life . . . [that]
has always been an essential factor of any great art expression. . . . As photography
develops as an art form, Tugwell concluded, it will be with this approach and
in this direction. His introduction thus reiterated the Sections never-resolved
dilemma of how to gure its work. Were its photographs purely documentary and
utilitarian or art expression, and if the former could they also be the latter?35
The entire staff showed, although in what proportions can only be approximated.
Evans had by far the most exhibits, about half the show, with Shahn far behind
and the others even more so. His preponderance reected his works excellence and
Sekaers friendship and also the fact that his pictures most resisted being construed
as utilitarian and thus especially tted an exhibition emphasizing art expres-
sion. One, a sure-handed organization of the profuse advertisements in Filling
Station, Reedsville, West Virginia, revealed his mastery of dynamic composition
and hinted as well at the ongoing signicance of a consumer culture in which auto-
mobiles played such an important role, but it revealed nothing about the depressions
depredations. Neither did Main Street Architecture, Selma, Alabama, its row of
nineteenth-century storefronts raked by strong sunlight and in treatment as well as
subject strongly reminiscent of Hoppers Early Sunday Morning, nor Penny Por-
traits, Birmingham, Alabama, with its implicit self-reexivity. Although some of
his exhibits carried social implicationsa West Virginia miners home insulated
with cardboard and advertising placards or the disproportions in scale and invest-
ment between a gigantic Birmingham steel mill and its workers dreary nearby
housesthey tended to be indirect. The strongest impression his pictures gave
was of formal excellence.36
Most of the other exhibits were also distant from the depressions exigencies, or,
to put it another way, they centered on cultural themes rather than social distress.
Shahns shots of a medicine show, a religious gathering, and village folk chatting
in a Kentucky small town illustrated his talent for capturing a communitys rhythms.
Rothsteins included two portraits from the Virginia mountains that evoked pre-
modern folk communities, a woman in an old-fashioned bonnet and a sturdy miller
paring his ngernails with a knife, as well as a luminous townscape of sunset light-
ing up the empty main street of Wall, South Dakota. Barely represented was Lange
with at most six pictures, probably because much of her work centered on the social
pathology the exhibition avoided. Excluded entirely were the Sections best-known
pictures, her Migrant Mother, Rothsteins Dust Storm, and Shahns studies
of destitute Ozark tenant families, likely because they comported poorly with the
shows cultural emphasis.37
Sponsorship by the nations leading scholarly organization for the visual arts
endowed the Section with cultural capital that afrmed its newfound ambition to
be known as an artistic endeavor. But the CAA show also accentuated the seams
in its evolving mission. Although they remained an inescapable responsibility for
the photographers, the record and news shots that had been its initial task were
entirely excluded. The commonplace treatment their publicity goals demanded
were incompatible with an exhibition emphasizing artistic achievement. The show
185
laid bare as well a cleavage in its more venturesome documentary program between
photographs revealing social distress and those centering on more normative con-
186 ditions. The exhibitions preponderance of cultural images must have strength-
ened Strykers fear that privileging artistic excellence might mean downplaying the
Sections photographs of hardship. If so, given the selections Sekaer made, it was
not an unreasonable inference. But the show as a whole also made palpable another
of the Sections commitments Stryker had formulated early on, to create a visual
archive that would be as comprehensive as possible, certainly not composed of just
record and news shots nor only of conditions the federal agency hoped to alleviate
either. These sometimes conicting aspirations were never resolved into a single,
overriding goal, and that indeterminacy turned out to be more a strength than a
liability. The obligation to make record and news shots remained an irritation, but
for Stryker and the photographers tensions among artistry, social purposefulness,
and cultural comprehensiveness were dynamic, and navagating them successfully
was a central reason why the Sections achievement far outstripped those of other
federal photography units.
The distinction between cultural and socially purposeful documentary surfaced
again during negotiations for a Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition to be held
early in , but by then the Section held a stronger hand. It had several success-
ful shows behind it and more in the ofng, Steichens tribute had just appeared in
U.S. Camera, and the accolades generated by Land of the Free were still fresh, all
making the artistic distinction of its work no longer such an open question. Writ-
ing to Stryker on behalf of Clevelands director, Van Fischer said the exhibition
would be just the museums third of photographs, the initial one of Steichen, Paul
Strand, Weston, Bourke-White, and Ralph Steiner and the second the traveling ver-
sion of MoMAs history. He specied the types of photographs the museum
wanted, those with a certain emphasis on art values and not too much that sug-
gests oripaganda (apparently a portmanteau neologism combining orientation
and propaganda). Particularly the director wished to avoid such pictures as
Legionnaires and the rear ends of cops, referring to Evanss and Shahns irreverent
studies. Stryker replied politely, expressing pleasure in the distinguished company
the Section would be joining in Cleveland but quarreling with Fischers specica-
tion. I do feel that we ought to put in a little more of the problem pictures than
suggested in your letter, he said. After all, we have made our reputation on that
type of photography. Reporting on this exchange to Post Wolcott he was more
bluff. Even though the museum had requested such photographs as the nicest
of Walker Evans, for example, he was condent it wanted the exhibition enough
that he could demand it include problem pictures as well. When a few months
later he sent photographs from which the museum would select the eighty to
be shown he reiterated his conviction that pictures showing the underprivileged
and the conditions under which they live ought to be in the exhibition, as in fact
they were owing to his preliminary selection and insistence that they be.38
No negotiations were required for the Sections exhibition at the First Inter-
national Photographic Exposition in New York because Lee and Rothstein put it
together. Held at the Grand Central Palace for a week in April it drew more
than a hundred thousand visitors to a mammoth display of some three thousand
photographs in every genre. In addition to the FSA with seventy-ve or so exhibits
documentary was given particular emphasis by the special areas set aside for Brady,
Atget, and Abbotts New York project. It amply displayed the Sections problem
pictures, with Rothsteins Dust Storm and Arkansas sharecroppers pregnant
wife, Langes Migrant Mother and six other pictures of distressed migrants,
Shahns destitute Ozark families, and Lees impoverished Iowa Christmas dinner
and homesteaders gnarled hands. About one-quarter duplicated those in the just-
published Land of the Free, and like the book the exhibition prominently featured
the Sections caustic work. But owing to its theme, in How American People Live a
fair number of exhibits, mostly by Rothstein and Lee, leavened this grittiness with
portraits of plucky American typesa Vermont handyman, Montana ranchers,
Minnesota lumberjacks, a North Dakota teacher, and old-fashioned Appalachian
hill people. Overall the ensemble conveyed an atmosphere of social anguish but also
of resilience, in this sense amending Land of the Frees emphasis on deprivation by
also bringing attention to the Sections repertoire of cultural shots.39
Most observers agreed that it was an impressive group of photographs, both in
social revelation and artistic quality. By association the expositions special displays
of Brady and Atget fashioned the Sections photographers (and Abbott) as their
avatars and did so for an enormous number of viewers who had intense interest
in photographys expressive capacities. The expositions audience, largely amateur
enthusiasts, complemented the more literary and intellectual one Land of the Free
was simultaneously reaching, and this two-pronged sortie thus addressed two pri-
mary constituencies that the Section needed to sustain its ambition to fortify its art
world standing. Our part of the show went across in a big way, Stryker crowed,
and even twenty-ve years later he remembered it as the one exhibit that I think
that we could place much weight on.40
After closing in New York, How American People Live traveled to Gimbels
department store in Philadelphiathis venue another sign of how strong public
interest in photography had becomeand then to the Department of Agricultures
exhibition space in Washington. Stryker especially wanted the photographs to be
shown in settings that would validate their artistic distinction, and managing that
required juggling among competing priorities in the home ofce. Late in he
hired Herbert Mayer to design thematic exhibits for regional FSA ofces so as to
take some of the heat off me, and also because of Mayers experience mounting
187
museum exhibitions. Once the Information Divisions inexorable publicity demands
were satised, Stryker told Lange, the Section could then concentrate on devel-
188 oping a few more elaborate exhibits for circulation to universities, libraries, and
museums, like the Cleveland show then in the ofng.41
Stryker was particularly ambitious for a MoMA exhibition. While Land of the
Free was being put together he solicited MacLeish to broach it, and in January
Stryker told Edwin Locke that the museum was interested. A few months later he
jubilantly announced to Rothstein that MoMA would like a Farm Security show
in the fall in their new building. But this certainty was ill-founded; near the end
of the year he was still chivvying Newhall about pushing along on the exhibit to
be held in the Museum after you get in the new building. It never happened, prob-
ably because American Photographs preempted it and made a second documentary
show unlikely.42
But if it failed to capture this prize the Section nevertheless established a connec-
tion with MoMA, if in less dramatic terms than Stryker had angled for. It originated
when Newhall saw How American People Live and judged it strong enough to carry
MoMAs imprimatur. At the time he had just published a piece implicitly amend-
ing his omission of social documentary from Photography, , observing
that the Sections dedication to a technical and an aesthetic standard pioneered
by Evans and Shahn had made it an important center for documentary work.
Newhalls testimonial and the exhibitions strength led MoMA to sponsor an FSA
show, Documents of America, that traveled to twelve cities in and .43
It was a reduced version of How American People Live, thirty exhibits in all
with two not seen in it, Evanss American Legionnaire and Shahns Fourth of
July Fish Fry and Carnival, made in Ohio after the New York show closed. The
additions represented the Sections cultural work, but the proportions of Newhalls
redaction concentrated more on depiction of social upheaval than had the source,
indicating that he did not believe art values precluded such pictures. By this time
there was no longer much question that social observation and artfulness could be
fruitfully reciprocal. The shows publicity, though, did emphasize the photographs
keen sense of experimentation and psychological, rather than formal composi-
tion, that is, the museum unsurprisingly gave priority to their esthetic distinction.
The new conguration also changed the proportions of photographers represented.
Whereas Lees and Rothsteins work made up more than half of the New York show,
Langes and Shahns did so in the traveling version, reecting Newhalls regard for
it and also his increased emphasis on problem photographs, including several of
Langes studies of migrants and Shahns of the Morgantown sheriff s ample der-
riere. All the photographers except John Vachon also appeared in the MoMA ver-
sion, and textual material emphasized that FSA photography was a group effort,
with all of the young photographers included . . . distinguished in their eld.44
Although Documents of America could not bestow the prestige an exhibition
at MoMA would have, no less a personage than President Franklin D. Roosevelt
emphasized the importance of the museums traveling exhibitions when from the
White House he addressed the nation to mark the opening of MoMAs new build-
ing. Much of his radio speech centered on this essential part of [the museums]
work. MoMA raised the standards of American taste by bringing to far-ung
communities results of the latest and nest achievements in all the arts, he said.
FDR especially emphasized how the museum enlarged the idea of art for Ameri-
cans who too often [have] been accustomed to think of the ne arts as painting and
possibly sculpture. Among other underappreciated branches of the visual arts
the president named photography as one for which MoMAs traveling exhibitions
would create a nation-wide public. In fact, by photographys audience was
already huge. The most important outcome of the museums sponsorship was to
advertise its endorsement of the Sections photographers as among the mediums
nest artists.45
While Documents of America circulated other exhibitions also indicated how
liberally the Section had ingratiated itself into photographys art world. The Photo
League held an FSA show in , with pictures by Lange, Lee, Rothstein, and
Shahn; another in that added Post Wolcott to the roster of exhibitors; and
in mounted a one-person Rothstein exhibition. A group of portraits, Ameri-
can Faces, went to St. Louis, the University of Wisconsin, and perhaps elsewhere.
According to the Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City was one stop for fty pictures
by Lange, Lee, Rothstein, and Shahn on their tour of federally-sponsored art
centers, although no record of other venues exists. FSA pictures were seen in the
Photographic Salon at the New York Worlds Fair during in its nal months,
Adams included Lange and Rothstein in the Pageant of Photographys permanent
exhibition at the San Francisco Worlds Fair, and FSA pictures of small towns were
among its roster of revolving special shows.46
The Sections largest, most ambitious, and best-attended exhibition, though,
was In the Image of America, which was sponsored by the Photographic Society
of America in and up for more than two months during the summer at the
Museum of Science and Industry in Rockefeller Center and then for another month
at Philadelphias Franklin Institute. It closed, as it happened, on the Sunday that
Pearl Harbor was attacked. The sponsor federated many of the nations camera
clubs, which had legions of amateurs. Also enticing potential visitors were additional
displays of a Messerschmidt ghter airplane, the British crown jewels, the Magna
Carta, and the Declaration of Independence. Stryker told the photographers that
New York has gone completely made [sic] over photography and that the museum
expected a million visitors.47
With pictures, In the Image of America aspired to be a panoramic sketch of
189
our countrythis vast, rich continentand our countrys people, strong in their
variety, as the text greeting attendees put it. Instead of being hung discretely as
190 in prior exhibitions, photographs were grouped thematically in several dozen x
panels. Thus eighteen portraits on four panels put forward the proposition that
All of us . . . are Americans and included Langes Japanese American woman and
child, Rothsteins elderly African American reading the Bible, and several of Del-
anos studies of ethnic AmericansJewish, Polish, Italian, and Armenianalong
with about an equal number of portraits without clear indicators of ethnicity. Sizes
varied. Delanos Armenian couple was x , Rothsteins Bible-reader was x
, and groups of x s anked the larger pictures. Cropping in some made their
point more singular. Delano had photographed a steelworker reading a Greek-lan-
guage newspaper in a cafe, part of an extensive study of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania,
where conict between steelworkers and the Jones and Laughlin rm had been
unusually bitter. A second gure, sporting a union placard, was eliminated in the
exhibitions version. Although the photographers names appeared with each picture,
no captions did beyond the rubrics organizing the panels, leaching away whatever
particularities of circumstance they might have indicated. Mr. and Mrs. Ovgren
Arakelian, for instance, the Armenian American couple, farmed vegetables on an
eleven-acre plot in West Andover, Massachusetts, but needed their sons income as
a textile worker in Lowell to keep aoat. Without this information from Delanos
caption their portrait represented only a generalized cultural pluralism.48
Several panels emphasized ethnographic categoriesfood, clothing, shelter,
social occasions, and religious practicesand an embracing one, The Ways of a
People, that highlighted Delanos much-enlarged shot of a Connecticut familys
Thanksgiving dinner. The Passing Show included seventeen photographs of
Americana, amusing signs and billboards, public festivals, and private rituals. Panels
entitled The Riches of a Nation, Power, Underground Wealth, and Pro-
ductive Capacity all illustrated the prodigious industrial and agricultural wealth
of the United States. Others featured distinctive regional themesPost Wolcotts
wagon alongside a cotton eld, Lees massive Rocky Mountain peak towering over
a solitary house, Rothsteins farmers setting out hog feed in a landscape reminiscent
of Grant Woods, and Delanos picket fence bisecting a view of Stonington, Con-
necticut, an homage to one of his patron Paul Strands best-known photographs.
The Sections cultural work entirely dominated. In this context even pictures
that might have otherwise intimated social disorder did not. The State That . . .
Covers All States was a triptych, the central panel two much enlarged Lange and
Rothstein views of empty highways receding to the horizon, the anking ones a
half-dozen smaller pictures featuring characteristic sights to be found along such
roads. Amid photographs of vehicles, service stations, and direction signs appeared
two of roadside wayfarers. One by Post Wolcott is of hitchhikers, and the other by
Lange is of two men, one with a bedroll slung over his shoulder. They pause on a
featureless and unwelcoming verge as the midday sun beats down on them. Post
Wolcotts hitchhikers are college students, as their clothing and youthful insouci-
ance suggests, heading home for a weekend. Langes photograph was among her
numerous studies of displaced people along Californias highways. Its social impli-
cations were smothered by surrounding pictures celebrating the American highway
and the sense of adventure it evoked, transforming her migrants into yet another
illustration of the triptychs expansive theme.49
In the Image of America featured scores of photographs of customary social ritu-
als and commonplace objects and occurrences made vivid by the cameras capacity
to isolate them from the ux of normal vision. Its rst and by far largest picture
occupying an entire panel with the exhibitions title superimposedsupplied a
mythic arch for the ensemble. It proposed that the representations of ordinariness
to follow were but smaller units of the rst pictures denition of quintessential
Americanness. Made by Rothstein in Montana two years earlier, it depicted a lone
mounted cowboy silhouetted against an enormous sky of swelling cumulous clouds.
Its invocation of western spaciousness and the solitary gure who commands it
called upon the most enduring of American foundation stories, one with an inten-
sied resonance in . Rothsteins lone rider conjured a historical myth that was
commonly believed to indicate the nations reserves of intrepidity, hardihood, and
will and intimated that viewers could expect these virtues to be exemplied as well
in all the photographs they were about to see.
The contrast between this exhibition and that at the Grand Central Palace three
years earlier could not have been greater. While the show displayed both cul-
tural and problem pictures it emphasized an America in the throes of the depres-
sion with some of the Sections most biting images of it, the ensemble providing
an accurate summary of the photographers complex ambition to discover both
the normative and the socially pathological in American life. The nation portrayed
in seemed entirely to have transcended its recent trials. It was energetic and
forward-looking, its citizenry united by commitment to democratic pluralism and
its economic strength guaranteed by the lands spaciousness and abundant natural
resources. Behind such a revised emphasis, of course, lay the looming possibility
of war. Like other artists in what turned out to be the depressions nal years, the
Sections photographers had begun to emphasize what distinguished American cul-
ture from the fascist ones that had utterly triumphed in Europe. In doing so they
began to tilt more toward making the sort of celebratory pictures represented in
the exhibition.
In the Image of America contrasted with earlier FSA exhibitions in another way
as well, in its deemphasis on the pictures artistry. Even with the photographers
names on wall labels the show more resembled the public relations displays circu-
191
lated to regional FSA ofces. In those photographs the photographers inspiration
was immaterial, and their pictures were subordinated to a verbal theme, meant only
192 to illustrate it. The insistent rubrics and montages did not encourage viewers to
dwell on any image, to tease out its nuances or admire its esthetic coherence. If in
this way it looked back to the agencys earliest purpose, to generate good public-
itynow for American cultures inherent soundness rather than a federal relief
programit also looked forward to what would become an inuential mode of
displaying photographs. That mode would begin the next year, when Steichen
would curate the Road to Victory exhibition at MoMA, and culminate in his Fam-
ily of Man show in . In both exhibitions the photographs would be assembled
in rigorously organized subject groupings and displayed in massive enlargements.
Both techniques were intended to supervise closely viewers responses and drive
home a shows theme. Inasmuch as Steichen gave an address at the In the Image
of America debut, it seems likely that its design inuenced his championing this
mode of exhibition.
Several circumstances contributed to this shift in how the Section brought for-
ward its pictures. Like Mayer, Edwin Rosskam had also been hired in as an
in-house exhibit specialist, and his facility in this workand contacts in the pub-
lishing worldso earned Strykers condence that he supervised the Sections con-
tribution to Home Town and became coauthor of Twelve Million Black Voices with
Richard Wright. Rosskam supervised In the Image of America, too, implementing
on a larger scale the insistent thematic orientation of the publicity exhibits. His
inuence in the Section coincided with an increasingly urgent public conviction
that the United States represented the ultimate bulwark against fascist tyranny and
the nation needed to be girded for the conict that many believed was certain to
come. That general disposition gave priority to imagining how the Sections pho-
tographs might be enlisted in this effort. Under such circumstances foregrounding
their artistry must have seemed a dispensable luxury.
But, in fact, by the Section no longer needed to establish its artistic bona
des because it had already so well succeeded in doing so. Nor did it any longer
have so great a need for an artistic reputation as a counterweight to allegations that
it was merely a propaganda operation. As the nation fell in line behind the notion
of a unied, intrepid, and uniquely democratic national culture, no one would cavil
at photographic efforts to further solidify it. In this atmosphere the pictures were
not measured as propaganda at all, as a New York Sun review of the exhibition indi-
cated. The conventional notion of documentary, wrote Norris Harkness, is that it
focuses on the sordid and unhealthy and uses photography as propaganda. The
exhibitions pictures severed that linkage. They were afrmations of national vigor
and made with the eye of the pictorialist and the technic of the documentarian.
If, for Harkness, art and propaganda continued to be antithetical categories he had
no doubt that the former term characterized the FSAs photographs and the latter
one not at all.
Myopic as Harkness was about In the Image of America, such an opinion was pre-
cisely the one the Sections efforts had long striven to encourage. Ironically, however,
it was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Propaganda, unabashed or subtle, would
be precisely what was most required after the day the exhibition closed. Decem-
ber altered nearly everything in American culture, and although photographers,
including the Sections, would continue to make esthetically powerful work and
photojournalism would be more omnipresent than ever, the broad public interest
in artful photography would dissipate. By the time the war was over the Section
had vanished, along with the standard of artistic excellence it spearheaded in gov-
ernment photography. So had the special atmosphere that had made photography
in the thirties such a robust public enterprise.50
193
11
The Nations
Newsstands
I Learned the Bases of What Little I Knew
from Coronet
One of John Vachons strongest pictures in a survey of Omaha depicts a
central city newsstand, its scores of magazines in serried ranks, a subject iden-
tical to Berenice Abbotts in Changing New York. Besides wanting to illustrate
contemporary preoccupations, both photographers were drawn to the formal
potential of orderly repetition within difference and by the implicit reexivity
magazines covers offered, their glamour shots a contrast to documentarys
plain-speaking. Vachons and Abbotts newsstands dramatized the thirties as
effulgent with magazines, especially ones featuring photographs.1
Most pictures published by magazines aspired only to be timely and illus-
trative, but a signicant minority transcended competent journeyman efforts.
Camera periodicals specialized in this more ambitious work as did Coronet,
a popular new magazine emphasizing the visual arts, but other publications
featured it too. Westways, the magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern Califor-
nia, disseminated over two years some of Edward Westons new landscapes to its
more than a hundred thousand readers, and Survey Graphics subscribers regularly
saw Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs in its pages. Occasionally
such superior pictures even showed up in the most widely circulated publications.
Life ran three articles on Westons Guggenheim project and another on Abbotts New
York photographs, and Look gave the Photo Leagues Harlem Document national
visibility. With Margaret Bourke-White, the decades best-known photojournalist,
it worked the other way around. Her pictures were rst seen in the Luce maga-
zines and then featured in exhibitions. That was also true of photographs from the
quality magazines Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harpers Bazaar, Edward Steichens
especially, but by other fashion specialists as well. Among the distinctive features
of thirties photography was the intermingling of the usually discrete realms of an
art world and popular journalism to a degree unknown before or since. What made
this possible was the nations tremendous interest in artful photography and the
circulation of such images to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Until its demise in Vanity Fair was among the most determined purveyors
to the degree that one photography historian claims that its (and Vogues) publisher
Cond Nast supplanted Alfred Stieglitz as the principal benefactor to photogra-
phers. Steichens sleek portraits gave Vanity Fair much of its panache, but oth-
ers by such exhibition veterans as Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, Lee
Miller, Doris Ulmann, and Weston also fed its ravenous appetite for personalities.
Celebrity portraits dominated, but Vanity Fair also made space for other sorts of
pictures. At the same moment Steichens view of the George Washington Bridge
greeted visitors to MoMAs photomural exhibition it also appeared in the magazine.
Bourke-Whites studies of the Soviet Five-Year Plan, on exhibition at the John
Becker Gallery, could be seen in Vanity Fair, too, as could exhibits from Stieglitzs
retrospective at An American Place. Just as Group f. announced Peter Stackpole
as its newest member the magazine launched his publishing career with his studies
of San Franciscos new bridges. Another making her debut was Louise Dahl-Wolfe
with an atmospheric study of an elderly farm woman, The Smokey Mountain-
eer, later exhibited at MoMA. Vanity Fairs dedication inspired one subscribers
enthusiastic testimonial to the cultural function the magazine served. Vanity Fair,
she wrote, is the only magazine in the country where we can nd beautiful pho-
tographs of this type, without buying a regular art magazine.2
Such an art magazine was Creative Art. Tasteful, well-illustrated, and expensive
at seventy-ve cents, it mostly centered on painting and sculpture but made room for
a few photography pieces before it expired in , a victim of hard times. Besides
Abbotts article introducing Eugne Atget it ran appreciations of Walker Evans,
Charles Sheeler, Steichen, Paul Strand (twice), and Paul Outerbridge. The pieces
The Nations Newsstands
195
abstractly itemized each photographers distinguishing characteristicsSheelers
language of art, Strands triumphant impersonality and objective sensuous-
196 nessusually attempting to align them with European artistic traditions, whether
Steichens odd mixture of Delacroix and Czanne, Outerbridges afnities with
the French school of modern painting, or Evanss study in France of mod-
ern Continental methods that led him to [spend] some time in experimenting.
Although inviting respectful attention to their artistic ambitions these efforts to
provide a European pedigree were often dubious and also irrelevant in light of most
American photographers indifference to continental inuences (aside from Atget).
Reverence for European models also comported poorly with the already-growing
belief that photography was, as Ansel Adams later put it, a decisive American art,
its sui generis achievements representing the national genius more richly than other
expressive forms.3
Camera periodicals rallied to the American standard and were more eclectic than
Vanity Fair and less high brow than Creative Art, but the publics appetite for pic-
tures appeared boundless, and many other new publications also hoped to exploit
it. Coronet, a monthly debuting in , was especially notable because it distin-
guished itself from Life and Look, the most conspicuous new picture magazines,
by making a lavish display of artful photographs rather than photojournalism its
cornerstone. Each number featured a portfolio of thirty to fty prominently cred-
ited pictures, reproduced one to a page and approximating a gallery show. Textual
glosses supplemented the pictures, and more than a score of well-illustrated pro-
les educated readers about leading photographers. Coronet aspired to be a popular
magazine of the ne arts and the nations most visually beautiful periodical. Small
in formatbook-sizedin no other sense was it a little magazine, targeting a
general rather than an esoteric readership.
For a while it succeeded handsomely. The inaugural issue of a quarter of a mil-
lion sold out in two days. After a year Coronets editor Arnold Gingrich could boast
that it ranked with Life, Look, and Esquire as popular triumphs, outselling other
magazines in its price range (thirty-ve cents) and surpassing even Time. Although
circulation then began to decline it was still a hundred thousand in when the
magazine changed emphasis to become, as Gingrich sardonically noted, a road
company edition of Readers Digest.4
Before that occurred, however, Coronet published well over , photographs.
Few in its rst two years were by leading Americans, although it then compensated
for that oversight with the decades most ambitious survey of domestic practice.
Gingrichs self-confessed unfamiliarity with artistic photography accounts for the
initial neglect. Coronets publisher David Smart believed photographs would attract
a large readership and wanted them to be as distinguished as the reproductions of
paintings he also planned to feature, so he solicited advice from a photographer
friend who said the best photographers could be found in Budapest. Smart then
dispatched Gingrich to Hungary, where he bought stacks of pictures. Ignorance
about photography triggered in them an almost reexive response about the supe-
riority of European art.
Gingrich also edited Esquire and was condent enough in literary judgment to
publish leading American writers. He knew little about photography, however, and
assumed that only a European provenance would provide enough cachet to match
the magazines cultural aspirations. The pictures he brought backsoft-focus genre
studies of peasants in traditional costumes and dreamy landscapes by now-forgotten
photographersresembled American pictorialism in approach and treatment and
were as retrograde to photographys artistic development as they were irrelevant to
contemporary cultural interests. Had they constituted all of Coronets representa-
tion of European practice its portfolios would merit no attention whatsoever.
But they also included the work of a handful of modernist Europeans, a few of
whom resided in the United States. Gingrichs memoirs are silent about how he
secured the work but without its own staff Coronet also bought from picture agen-
cies like Black Star, which represented a number of Europeans. Photographs by
Brassa, Erwin Blumenfeld, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andreas Feininger,
John Guttmann, Florence Henri, and Andr Kertsz thus also featured in the maga-
zine. For Brandt, Feininger, and Guttmann Coronet provided their rst transatlan-
tic exposure. The others had shown in MoMAs exhibition, but the magazine
brought them to a new and larger audience. Henri had studied with Moholy-Nagy,
and Feininger also had close associations with the Bauhaus; Guttmann and Cartier-
Bresson practiced street photography; and Brandt then specialized in dark, brooding
pictures of English high and low life. Kertsz deed classication except as a human-
ist of dazzling visual perception. By no means a unied group, they shared only their
unlikeness to prevailing American ways of seeing. Some favored oblique framing
and unusual shooting angles; legibility mattered less than that a picture express the
photographers sensibility. The formal experiments of Cubism, Surrealism, or the
Bauhaus inuenced others. Of these European modernists, though, Coronet most
favored Blumenfeld and Brassathe former with more than seventy-ve pictures
and the latter more than a hundredbefore it abandoned artistic photography.
Blumenfeld often incorporated surreal motifs in gure studies with an erotic col-
oration, making models more naked than nude. He employed a dialectic of occlusion
and disclosure that evoked voyeurism and sometimes hinted at sadomasochism. In
one picture, a translucent drapery swathes the models torso while an opaque wrap
conceals her head; in another a mesh projected on her body simulates connement
while contrasting with her gures rounded volumes and echoing the images rect-
angle. Black Gloves employs overexposure (or possibly solarization), making the
models body and hair blend into the white background to emphasize the gloves
197
behind which she hides her breasts and face. In the United States only Outerbridges
nudes approached Blumenfelds in openly invoking the psychosexual, most too dar-
198 ing to be exhibited or published. Coronet euphemistically hailed Blumenfeld as a
discloser of the inward phantasy of reality, and for American photographys audi-
ences that psychosexual orientation was an unfamiliar one.5
Brassa contributed more heterogeneously, but views of Paris predominated. His
pictures of its demimonde were considered too gamy for an American periodical,
but his atmospheric studies of the citys well-known sites and obscure byways, usu-
ally seen at night or in rain or fog, were profuse. Ntre Dames towers loom out of
the darkness, a lamplighter extinguishes one of Paris last gas streetlamps, bicycle
ics patrol dark streets, and lovers embrace in a cafe booth. He was all eye the
magazine said, and tells the truth so eloquently that he would be foolish to resort
to trickery. Another commentary instructed readers to apprehend his picture of
a wire chair in the Bois de Boulogne as an abstract rendering of form: The orga-
nized beauty of its elements, its lines and lights elevated the picture above mere
reportage to give it the universal attribute of art, that is, a pleasurable contempla-
tion of pattern, apart from any desire for possession of, or information about, the
objects which make up that pattern.6
If this formulation is a half truthphotographs irreducibly represent something
that has actually existed and viewers cannot help but desire information about itit
nonetheless constructed Brassa as an accessible modernist working in a mode that,
as the magazine liked to point out, could not be found in any other periodical. Aside
from evincing mutual passion for cities, his pictures resembled those of his closest
American counterpart, Abbott, hardly at all. Whereas she strove for maximum clar-
ity and legibility, his chiaroscuro made details indistinct, and he shared none of her
historical or sociological ambition nor she his persona of nocturnal aneur.
With such Europeans Coronet exposed its readership to photographic practices
that otherwise would have remained invisible to those who had not visited MoMAs
exhibition. How Coronets readers responded to these pictures is unknowable, but
a later testimonial by one hints at it. In Robert Forth, then a vice president
of the California College of Arts and Crafts, remembered fondly the portfolios
from more than forty years earlier: I learned the bases of what little I knew about
international photography, he said, from the Coronet mag, of Esquire, Inc., when
I was a teen-age kid in the Midwest and South. In an uncosmopolitan era Coro-
net opened a window through which challenging and heterodox artists might be
glimpsed and in the case of Blumenthal and Brassa more than glimpsed because
their appearances constituted the equivalent of one-person shows, only for a sub-
stantially more sizable audience than such occasions ordinarily attract.7
Almost as novel was Coronets belated attention to American photography, with a
series of proles that ran for two years. Outside camera periodicals such expositions
of the aims and achievements of leading photographers were rare. The author of
the proles was Robert W. Marks, a young Yale graduate and freelance writer who
never again wrote about photography but in the late thirties seized on it as a live
topic. His twenty-two proles, each of about twenty-ve hundred words, consti-
tuted a compact, book-length survey, albeit a partial one, of contemporary Ameri-
can practice, overlapping with Beaumont Newhalls history but with more detail
and for a popular audience.8
The proles encompassed four broad categories within contemporary photog-
raphy: artistic, documentary, commercial, and magazine, mostly fashion. The rst
half-dozen to be published alternated between artistic workers and documentar-
ians, establishing a contrast between photography as a means of personal expres-
sion and as an exploration of contemporary life, but that scheme could not accom-
modate advertising specialists and magazinists, so the rest of the sequence was
random. Stieglitz, Clarence White (the only nonliving prolee), Arnold Genthe,
Strand, George Platt Lynes, and Outerbridge were his artistic photographers;
Abbott, Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, and Eliot Elisofon the documentarians; Rejean
Hiller, Victor Keppler, Paul Hesse, Ivan Dmitri, Alden Weeks, and Hi Williams
the commercial workers; and Alfred Eisenstadt, Nikolas Muray, Martin Munkcsi,
George Hoyningen-Huen, Horst, and Louise Dahl-Wolfe the magazinists. Lacunae
are immediately apparent, Steichen and Sheeler among the senior photographers,
avant-gardeists such as Man Ray or Moholy-Nagy, and any workers from Group
f. or the FSA.
For readers looking to grasp contemporary photographys overall design these
gaps made Markss survey even more partial than Newhalls. As in much popular
journalism, moreover, Markss approach was to stitch disconnected anecdotes to
breezy generalizations, leaving him little opportunity to address visual styles or
strategies. Perhaps he felt the illustrations sufciently disclosed them, or, more likely,
he lacked a vocabulary for addressing these matters. But neglecting them tended
to atten the particularities of a photographers achievement, and the breathless
emphasis on anecdotemeant to signify how fascinating a prolee waslikewise
implied that all were equally distinguished. Marks assured readers of the photogra-
phers importance, but his inability to specify why they were diminished the proles
critical value. Nevertheless, his survey, for all the limitations a more acute writer
might have surmounted, provided a general readership with the most extended dis-
cursive attention to contemporary practice to be found anywhere in the thirties.
Marks valorized photographys social uses and deprecated artiness, as was appar-
ent in Stieglitzs prolethe series rstits tone uctuating between encomium
and exasperation. Presently, he said, sycophants surrounded Stieglitz, and he had
become a garrulousand irrelevantbore as the war to liberate Spirit seems
mighty small fry in the depression. His signicance was strictly historical, as one
199
of the great photographers of all times and because he had so strenuously cham-
pioned photography as art. In the days of Photo-Secession he had been a Walt
200 Whitman in a new eld, and although he continued to soldier on as photographys
champion, with his recent photographsthe Pure Abstraction of his cloud series
notablyStieglitz was selling an outmoded commodity.9
Subsequent proles drew the point less rmly but likewise indicated antipathy to
art for arts sake. After serving as Man Rays assistant when Paris was a little Dada
and his abstractions a little gaga Abbotts discovery of Atget saved her from arty
irrelevance, leading her to develop a way of writing history that embedded a
conscious criticism of life. Marks deprecated Genthe, Lynes, and Outerbridge
by portraying them as bohemians detached from life. Genthe was unblushingly
romantic and escapist, and his photographs sensuous surfaces failed to mask
their lack of depth. Lynes had apprenticed his youth to the Dme rather than
the Automat and had no photographic philosophy or purpose except to escape
boredom and amuse himself. Marks could nd little to say about Outerbridges work
either and centered instead on his acutely sensitive, Poe-like seclusion. His air
for bizarrerie was alluded to but left unexplored, although among the illustrations
was his Eve, the nude model passionately clutching a serpent to her bosom, one
of Outerbridges more restrained erotic photographs of these years.10
Marks admired the socially purposeful documentarians for resisting such self-
indulgence. Abbotts instinctive feeling about cities and sympathy for marginal
people combined to dene her drives, and those qualities made her a Currier
& Ives in modern dress. As with Abbotts Paris years, Bourke-Whites career
also revealed personal reformation represented by the biting social indictment
of You Have Seen Their Faces. While praising her earlier industrial studies and
photojournalism Marks insisted that her recent documentary work indicated she
had altered politically and moved a step apart from the art-for-arts-sakers who
died on the barricades outside the Royal Academy. This was misleading because
Bourke-White had never even glimpsed these barricades, but a proclaimed social
purpose provided Marks with a rmer scaffolding for his anecdotes because artis-
tic agendas did less well.11
Hine was the quintessential documentarian for Marks, and his prole the most
adulatory. It was also the most timely, appearing just as Hine was becoming visible
in photographys art world after his one-person exhibition at New Yorks River-
side Museum, which admiring essays by Newhall and Elizabeth McCausland had
stimulated. Markss prole contributed to Hines discovery as well by reaching a
larger audience than the show and essays combined. Marks narrated a heroic quest
precipitated by Hines empathy with the downtrodden and incorruptible determi-
nation as he staked his eating against his conscience. During the Photo-Secession
he was stepped over, unnoticed, while the masters wrestled at the rear door of the
Metropolitan, but true to his commitment Hine had made the most important
documentary study of American conditions since Mathew Brady. His obscurity
Marks attributed to the man behind the camera [being] lost sight of in the galvanic
shock his pictures gave to the consciousness of the country. If this exaggerated
the magnitude of Hines inuence it left no doubt that recognition was long over-
due. In , Marks said, Hines career and pictures ought to serve as models for
contemporary photographers: This is a day of documentation. A day of realism.
The past ten years have put huge cracks in the ivory towers, and shaken down the
plaster. Markss exhortatory tribute makes more puzzling his neglect of the FSA
because its photographers carried on Hines legacy. Perhaps a lack of propinquity
explains itMarks lived in New York, as did most of his subjectsbut it also may
indicate that the FSA was less in the forefront than commonly assumed.12
The realism Marks admired sanctioned proles of advertising workers, their
work embodying a skill too often neglected todaythe technique of turning out
sharp, clean pictures, well garnished with detail and texture. Contemporary pho-
tography, he sneered, was rife with trained poodles dedicated to beauty or
spirit or life in its moments of change but an advertising photographer like
Victor Keppler works among these like an engineer . . . in the tting room of
Schiaparelli. Markss Babbittish gures indicated that the advertising photogra-
phers workmanlike unpretentiousness appealed most to him. But even more than
the other proles these were anecdotalalmost entirely so. Beyond their profes-
sionalism he could nd little to say about men whose clients determined what and
how they would photograph and for whom personal vision was an irrelevancy. Had
Marks determined to give the proles a more critical edge he might have explored
their strategies for making commodities desirable or how realism belied a careful
manipulation of setting, lighting, and camera craft, but he emphasized instead their
nancial success. The proles of advertising photographers were thus the series
limpest and failed to establish a persuasive argument for these workers artistic or
cultural signicance.13
He succeeded better with fashion photographers. Although they did not choose
their subjects either and made pictures to sell commodities, their pictures disclosed
an individual and consistent approach and style and so could more convincingly
be brought forward as artistic. Exhibitions and gallery showings also supported
Markss claims for their stature. According to a magazine art director whom Marks
quoted with obvious (if dubious) agreement, Munkcsis arrival in the United States
was the most important thing that has happened to American photography in the
past ten years because he transformed fashion photography with action, candor,
spontaneity, drama. Horsts melding of modernist training at the Bauhaus with
a romantic sensibility inspired Marks to a soaring if diffuse rhetoric. In his hands
fashion photography became a plastic medium for the expression of symphonies
201
built on the overtones of related ideas. Dahl-Wolfe expressed skepticism that
fashion work was artistic at all, but Marks disagreed and said she was one of the
202 most interest-making photographers in the United States. Only with Huen, the
most distinctive of fashion photographers, did he betray reservations about the
mtier. After extolling Huens culture and mental caliber Marks regretted that
so much of this spirit and integrity of feeling has to be put into fashion fripperies,
which he ascribed to a quirk of time.14
What produced this quirk Marks avoided saying, probably because it would
have required trying to untangle the confounding question of how photography
differed from the other ne arts, having a more tenuous line between personal and
commissioned work, a stronger reportorial capacity with the artists interventions
less apparent, and an ease of reproduction that not only multiplied the ways it was
disseminated but also, in the thirties at least, meant its audiences were multiply
constituted. Such considerations were beyond Markss purposes and likely his
competence. His impetus was to exploit the heightened public curiosity about con-
temporary photography, and anecdotal proles met that demand efciently, substan-
tiating his premise that American photography was in the midst of an exceptional
renaissance. Not least, the scores of illustrations allowed Coronets readers to judge
for themselves the photographers achievements. They included such landmark pic-
tures as Stieglitzs The Terminal, Hines Ellis Island Madonna, and Strands
Lathe in addition to many strong works by younger artists, among them Abbotts
Snuff Shop, Bourke-Whites black convict from You Have Seen Their Faces, and
Munkcsis spontaneous shot of a model on a beach, a picture that shifted fashion
photographys dominant paradigm. As did Coronets portfolios with the modernist
Europeans, Markss proles brought to a popular and heterogeneous audience some
of American photographys most notable achievements. Moreover, the magazines
enthusiastic embrace indicated artful photographys success in ingratiating itself
into the nations cultural life.
Fashion Photography and the Implements of a New Art

Vogue and Harpers Bazaar ourished during the thirties. After an early dip their
circulations rose steadily, and by the decades end each had about two hundred
thousand readers. The number of photographs zoomed as wellthree times more
in than and during the decade they published an astounding twenty
thousand pictures. Whereas Steichen at Vogue and Baron Adolphe de Meyer at
Harpers Bazaar, both erstwhile Photo-Secessionists, had in the twenties met both
magazines photographic needs, increasing demand required each publication to
augment its staff. At Vogue Steichen was joined by Cecil Beaton, Toni Frissell, Horst,
and, until , Huen. At Harpers Bazaar, after de Meyer was eased out in ,
the mainstays were Dahl-Wolfe, Man Ray, Munkcsi, and after Huen.15
Steichens advent at Vogue revolutionized fashion photography. De Meyer,
who had resigned to work for Harpers Bazar (as it was spelled until ), spe-
cialized in lushly romantic evocations of aristocratic luxury, the ethereal models
statically posed in misty compositions that hinted at his Photo-Secession anteced-
ents. Steichen, however, made straight photographys sharper focus his hallmark;
jettisoned de Meyers fussy props and mannered poses; composed with brisk, geo-
metric elements; and devised dramatic lighting to enhance contrast. All of these
innovations imbued his pictures with an atmosphere of streamlined modernity. Nast
immediately recognized they served Vogues purposes far better than de Meyers
conventions had, not only by revealing the garment with greater clarity but also by
embodying the sleek modishness that was the magazines principal objective. He
thereafter urged new staff members to emulate Steichen, which Huen and Horst
did, and so did Dahl-Wolfe at Harpers Bazaar. Only Beaton persisted in echoing
de Meyers romantic lighting and showy propsabundant sprays of owers became
his signaturealthough with sharper focus and often employing surreal elements
that would have been utterly foreign to de Meyer.16
De Meyers languid photographs did nothing to alleviate Harpers Bazaars air
of mildewed fustiness, and to revive it in William Randolph Hearst, its pub-
lisher, lured Carmel Snow away from Vogue, where she edited its American edition.
Among her rst initiatives was to hire Munkcsi, who had no fashion experience
but whose photojournalism for the German Ullstein magazines Steichen had com-
mended to her. The story of his rst fashion shot has since become legendary. She
asked him to photograph a model in a swimsuit for an upcoming Palm Beach issue
already in what was supposed to be its nal version. The overcast November day
on a Long Island beach was chilly, and the model was shivering. Munkcsi, who
spoke no English, managed to communicate that she should run toward him and,
as Snow recalled, the resulting picture, of a typical American girl in action, with
her cape billowing out behind her, made photographic history.17
Munkcsis spontaneous, kinetic pictures soon supplanted de Meyers static ones
and instantly gave Harpers Bazaar a more contemporary luster. They differed from
Steichens, too, in emphasizing movement and often being shot on city streets or
at posh resorts rather than in a studio. Limpid clarity and textural revelation mat-
tered less to Munkcsi, and rather than highlight strong tonal contrasts he worked
mostly within the range of grays. His oblique shooting angles often differed as well
from the unobtrusive head-on address Steichen favored so compositions were less
classically severe.18
Vogues editor, Edna Woolman Chase, scornfully dismissed Munkcsis pictures
as farm girls jumping over fences, but before long Toni Frissells similarly infor-
203
mal shots began to appear more often in Vogue. Technological, economic, and social
developments fueled the new style. Nast insisted on view cameras that would reveal
204 garments details and taking them outside the studio was impracticable, whereas
the newly available, smaller-format cameras permitted spontaneity and rapidity of
execution. He continued to prefer view cameras but to meet Bazaars competition
permitted smaller ones for location shooting. Because the latter could more convinc-
ingly depict women engaged in informal activities, moreover, they lent themselves to
shooting ready-made sportswear, an increasingly protable segment of the apparel
industry because of leisures growing signicance and the greater participation of
women in it. Both magazines, nally, had enlarged their audience base by laying
less emphasis on elite society in favor of a larger group of afuent readers. Using
debutantes and grande dames as models and featuring accounts of Tuxedo Park
gatherings, both staples earlier, diminished considerably in the thirties. This turn,
too, called for less emphasis on haute couture and more on sportswear that especially
interested these new readers. It is thus likely that the informal photographs pio-
neered by Munkcsi would have emerged even had Snow not discovered him.19
The third broad type of fashion photography was found only in Harpers Bazaar,
with Man Ray its sole practitioner. In Snow hired as Bazaars art director
Alexey Brodovitch and charged him with smartening up the magazines appear-
ance and giving it a modernist stamp. Brodovitch and Man Ray had moved in the
same circles in Paris, and the art director admired him and asked him to contribute.
Unlike the other fashion specialists, for Man Ray fashion photography was a sideline,
an expedient to support his personal work, and he also seized the opportunity to
display more widely some of his experimental approaches. His multiple exposures,
Rayographs, solarizations, negative prints, and montages illustrated avant-garde
applications to Bazaars readers, although he also shot conventional pictures of the
new Paris collections. A triple-exposure of an evening gown at once suggested three-
dimensionality and outed fashion photographys code of realism; a Rayograph
(in which an object is placed directly on the printing paper and exposed, recording
contours and shadows) of a silk stocking was rephotographed and superimposed
on a disembodied leg; a solarization of a womans head that made her hair gray
was tinted to illustrate coloring remedies; similar splashes of color were overlaid
on negative prints of evening dresses; and a photomontage enclosed a swimsuited
Ziegfeld Girl in a glass bottle. Appropriated to illustrate such mundane consumer
items his experimental techniques perhaps lost something of their initial edge, but
at least a sizable American audience had good opportunity to see them.20
Superb production values characterized both magazines. Thick, glossy paper
meant the excellent reproductions showed up well, and full-page images were not
uncommon. When rst Steichen and then Horst and Dahl-Wolfe began to work in
color, its values were cleanly and richly reproduced. M. F. Agha, Vogues art direc-
tor, introduced arresting typography, made dynamic use of white space, and used
imaginative and varied layouts as he had in Vanity Fair, and when Brodovitch came
to Bazaar his design changes likewise enhanced the pictures presentation. No other
periodicals displayed photographs as handsomely and faithfully.
Formal sophistication characterized virtually all the pictures by the fashion spe-
cialists, and with allowances for their differing approaches so did a high degree of
technical nish. Aside from the special case of Man Ray, a personal vision did not
because, as Nast insisted, The prime object of the photograph is to report the
dress accurately and to bring out its distinctive characteristics or its utility. That
purpose required a legibility . . . [that] protects the reader from even momentary
doubt as to the meaning. The overriding requirement to emphasize the garment
also made certain conventions nearly inescapable, notably a focused foreground
with a shallow or out-of-focus background devoid of distractions; the models full-
length pose and a narrow range of permissible facial expressionsoverwhelmingly
a self-absorbed regalityso as not to make the picture too distractingly anecdotal;
and lighting that emphasized the apparel with tonal contrasts that dramatized its
lines. Such expectations prescribed limits on originality if not ingenuity, and the
close collaboration with editors on which magazines insisted eroded further pho-
tographers autonomy. Their photographs, nally, were unswervingly dedicated to
commercial ends. Editorial and advertising matter were distinguishable mostly by
the superior visual quality of the former. If the best visual art encourages viewers
to reorient perception by its surplus of meaning and unexpected modes of seeing,
then fashion photographs were not art at all and the fashion photographers were
professional craftspeople rather than artists, displaying more interest in the dis-
play of virtuosity than in the expression of personal ideas or emotions as Howard
Becker distinguishes between the two types.21
This distinction, however, carried considerably less authority in thirties photog-
raphy than before or later because the line between artistry and craft was less rmly
drawn. In the case of the fashion photographers, who occupied a distinctive corner
of its art world, a number of particular circumstancesand stratagemsfurther
exaggerated this blurring. Perhaps most obvious was that the artistic prestige Stei-
chen brought with him when he joined the Cond Nast organization continued to
project a halo over the entire practice. Even if some like Evans disparaged his slick-
ness, his distinguished career stretching back to the Photo-Secession, his popular
reputation as the worlds greatest photographer, and the unremitting ow of
his crisp, distinctive images in the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair made him the
eras best-known worker. No reckoning of photographys achievement could fail
to include him, nor by association could it exclude his most important colleagues.
Magazines, moreover, contrived to lay emphasis on their photographs artistry.
Although it was rare for advertising work to be signed, every editorial picture car-
205
ried a credit, not only making the photographers names familiar and intimating
their artistic credentials but also allowing viewers to sort out what distinguished the
206 work of each. Sometimes a contents page would direct readers to a portfolio by
Huen or Munkcsi or Man Ray, intimating that it reected a unied expression
of an individual sensibility, or a headline would call attention to the photographers
eminence, as did Steichen Records Six Episodes of Fashion. By so consistently
bringing forward their photographers as artists Vogue and Harpers Bazaar hoped to
dissemble the frankly instrumental nature of their work, to overlay it with a patina
of esthetic distinction that would contribute to the reputation the magazines coveted
for being as smart, chic, and entirely up to date in cultural matters as couture.22
This ambition affected the photographs as well. A striking number referenced
developments in contemporary painting and sculpture by making them integral in
the composition so that models repeatedly posed with works by such modern mas-
ters as Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Lger,
Henri Matisse, Georgia OKeeffe, and Pablo Picasso. Man Ray even photographed
a languid model on a couch beneath his own Observatory Timethe Lovers. Fash-
ion magazines especially favored Surrealism, so much so that one art historian says
they became the chief point of dissemination for Surrealist style. Not only did
paintings by such artists as Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Pavel
Tchelitchew appear in fashion shots, but fashion pictures themselves also sometimes
employed surrealist motifs. These ne arts allusions served a double purpose. Pri-
marily they advertised by association the cutting-edge modernity of the fashions
depicted and also dramatized the magazines claim to be serious about art. In this
sense the photographers and artists whose work they adduced could then both be
seen as occupying parallel realms of aspiration.23
Sometimes magazines advertised photographers artistic credentials more bla-
tantly. When Steichen retired Vogue featured a lavishly illustrated tribute that reca-
pitulated his career from the early Photo-Secession portraits through his recent
fashion work and made it an uninterrupted progress of superior artistic achieve-
ment. Munkcsi opined in Harpers Bazaar that we are living in the golden age
of photography and proffered shooting advice that instructed readers on how to
appreciate his own apparently spontaneous pictures, this piece providing an occasion
for the magazine to laud him as our great Hungarian photographer. In a Camera
Issue Vogue congratulated itself for helping photography attain its high contem-
porary prestige. Early on the magazine saw, encouraged, believed in, and, above all,
used it, hiring artists to make its pictures, and, it said, some of the boot straps by
which photography pulled itself up were of our making. The illustration for this
self-tributeof a Steichen fashion shootemblazoned the magazines conviction
that its photographs were unimpeachably artistic. Superimposed on it in large white
letters was . . . .24
How much these self-advertisements helped stimulate the art world activities of
exhibition, reproduction, and discursive exposition can only be conjecture but that
fashion photographers featured prominently in them is indisputable. They showed
often in U.S. Camera annuals and at MoMAs exhibition; Beaton, Frissell, and Horst
had one-person New York gallery shows; several were proled in Markss Coronet
series; and camera magazines published pieces about most of them. A testimonial
from a reader who went on to become a distinguished photographer himself likely
represented others in their audience, especially inasmuch as he offered it in the rst-
person plural: Fashion magazines, said William Klein, were our art magazines.
Without the commanding authority of Stieglitz earlier to exclude such commercial
workers from arts fellowship, or perhaps that of the staff of MoMAs Department
of Photography later, fashion photographers pictures thus mingled democratically
with the many others that exhibitions, popular journalism, and the photographic
press held out as evidence of the mediums extraordinary thirties renaissance.25
Margaret Bourke-White Photographs America

Margaret Bourke-White was the most admired industrial photographer and pho-
tojournalist of the thirties as well as a participant in its most important exhibitions,
with her pictures also in Vanity Fair and Coronet, camera magazines, and every U.S.
Camera annual. As strenuously as she participated in these characteristic art world
activities, Fortune and Life most frequently brought her photographs to the public,
well over a thousand of them, many subsequently exhibited. The Luce magazines
trumpeted her artistic credentials by prominent credits and biographical sidebars and
sometimes by designating a portfolio by Margaret Bourke-White. Like Coronet and
the fashion photographers her career reveals how blurred the boundary had become
between the usually discrete realms of an art world and popular journalism.26
She was glamorous and famed for derring-do, and those qualities and her artistic
standing made her a celebrity, one of the eras best-known women. She established
her rst New York studio in the Chrysler Building, where Oscar Graubner made a
famous and often-reprinted shot in which she perched with her camera on one of
its stainless steel gargoyles. Marks characterized her as thirtyish, direct, chic, rapid-
re and an amazing combination of daring, dynamo and girl scout, and similarly
energetic diction gured in other proles, virtually always accompanied by a at-
tering portrait of her behind her camera. One such gushing piece has since become
infamous because Agee reprinted it in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where it
was intended to mark the distance between Bourke-Whites exploitative images of
southern tenant farmers and Evanss respectful ones, her fatuousness and his moral
seriousness. For her later standingonce Agee and Evanss book found an admiring
207
audiencethis sarcasm was damaging, but in the thirties she was at the top of a
new artistic medium [that] is still in its infancy as one prole put it.27
208 When Bourke-White was barely out of college she began to specialize in pho-
tographs of heavy industry, emphasizing the spectacle of production and the awe-
some massiveness of its technological apparatus. She had a knack for isolating a
segment of an industrial process that would dramatically connote its monumentality
and complexity and then for composing to use every millimeter of the negative to
imply an industrys dynamism. These pictures in brought her to the attention
of Henry Luce, who hired the twenty-ve-year old as the rst (and for a time the
only) staff photographer for Fortune, the new magazine he planned to launch the
next year to reect Industrial Life in ink and paper and word and picture as the
nest skyscraper reects it in steel and architecture.28
At $ per copy, Fortune sought a high-end readership, and its circulation was never
enormousthirty thousand initially and about a hundred thousand by but
it quickly gained a reputation for its illustrations and, according to Vicki Goldberg,
was seen by everyone interested in photography. Its thick, textured paper com-
plemented the excellent gravure reproductions, with generous white space to set
them off. As the magazines star Bourke-White appeared in most issues with stud-
ies of such divergent enterprises as paper manufacturing, limestone quarrying, and
anthracite mining. Her portfolio of seven pictures depicting the Phelps-Dodge
Corporations vertical integration of copper manufacture was typical. A single
small one of a mining site faintly represented the messy and labor-intensive work
of extraction, while the rest, mostly half- or full-page medium close-ups, centered
on the technology required to transform ore into commodities: a casting wheel
that shaped ingots of molten copper, spinning spools transforming them into wire,
a lathe to make the wire ner, and molds to forge condenser tubes for steamships.
Her compositions gestured toward abstraction by emphasizing the technologys
repetitive geometrical forms but pulled back from it by intimating the machines
dynamism with an exposure long enough to suggest movement. Aside from this
calculated blurring her pictures were crisply legible and tightly organized to exclude
anything that might divert attention from the single process depicted. They mostly
elided human labor to dramatize the ingenuity, efciency, and functional beauty of
machines and thus exalt the corporate enterprise that utilized them.29
For three consecutive summers in the rst years of the thirties she traveled to
the Soviet Union to photograph the initial ve-year plans massive industrializa-
tion projects. Her monumental pictures of the nations largest cement works at
Novorossisk, the new Tractorstroi factory in Stalingrad, and the construction of
the Dnieperstroi Dam resembled much of her American work and appeared as a
Fortune portfolio, but she also photographed ordinary Russians and the settings in
which they lived and worked. The industrial pictures became the basis for Eyes on
Russia, published in , and the more intimate ones appeared in a half-dozen
well-illustrated pieces in the New York Times Magazine, depicting how Soviet com-
munism affected ordinary citizens. These cultural studies forecast a broadening of
her purview to include documentary work relating individuals to their environment.
Her Russian experiences unsettled her former indifference to politics as well, and
in time she began to be involved with left organizations like the Film and Photo
League and the American Artists Congress.30
A Fortune assignment in crystallized Bourke-Whites commitment to social
photography and made her see everything in a new light, or so she later wrote in
her autobiography. Drought in the Plains states had ravaged agriculture, and the
dust storms that followed suffocated livestock and made human existence excruciat-
ingly miserable. Starting in Omaha because, she said, no one at the magazine knew
just where to nd this ecological disaster she chartered an airplane and ew to the
Dakotas where she discovered vast expanses of parched and ruined land. Setting
up her camera, she photographed cracked elds dotted with withered cornstalks,
emaciated livestock and the decomposing skeletons of steers, and bleak, forlorn
farmsteads on featureless land with nothing living on it. The opening shot, ironically
entitled Harvest Home, , revealed a desolate panorama of a farmhouse and
outbuildings with a foreground of deep footprints in the blown dirt and a fence sign
that read, You gave us beer now give us water. One of the sixteen photographs
was a portrait, and another was a decrepit outbuilding with a few indistinguishable
gures alongside, but the remainder betrayed no human presence.31
The drought portfolio lacked the tight compositional organization and tonal con-
trol of Bourke-Whites industrial photographs as well as their synecdochical capac-
ity to suggest the full dimensions of a larger phenomenon. In part that reected the
greater technical challenges of documentary photography in which variables were
more numerous and less under the photographers control. Even more it forecast
an imaginative deciency that she would only occasionally overcome. In this assign-
ment she was unable to devise a strategy to reveal the droughts effects on the human
beings experiencing it. The reason she could not stemmed from her incapacity to
represent human complexity or, put another way, to resist indulging the dramatic
tendentiousness that made her industrial pictures so memorable. In this case she
excluded human beings in favor of repetitive depictions of an appalling natural
catastrophe, and a piece she wrote the next year for the Nation suggests why: The
droughts victims failed to conform to her preconceptions. She had returned to the
region to nd an attitude of despair and an atmosphere of utter hopelessness
even greater than the year before. But she also reported several jokes heard from
localsamong them that an uncle would soon be stopping by because his farm
had just blown past and that a man fainted when struck by a raindrop and it had
then taken two buckets of dust to revive himwithout acknowledging that these
209
wry mordancies might suggest resilience and thus qualify the utter hopelessness
she ascribed to their tellers. Symptomatically, too, she could discover no rhetorical
210 strategy for integrating such stories into her account and thus they were no more
than nugatory asides.32
A Fortune assignment to illustrate an article on a Detroit autoworker revealed
how after her turn toward documentary Bourke-White often wobbled between cli-
che and melodrama. The piece was to inaugurate a series inquiring into the circum-
stances of a number of typical Americans, an initiative that the next year would
send Agee and Evans to Alabama to work up a study of tenant farmers. Bourke-
Whites depictions of Gerald Corkum and his wife were static and hackneyed, atly
lighted and stify posed renditions of such predictable activities as his relaxing in
an easy chair with the newspaper, her hanging out the wash, and both sitting down
to supper in their modest dining room. Corkum was president of his union local,
and another shot woodenly portrayed him concentrating on some papers while two
fellow ofcers awkwardly look on. If these photographs were blandly unexceptional,
the articles rst, The Corkum Family Library, was sensational in the sense that
it greatly magnied one characteristic of the Corkums lifetheir limited reading
farefor the purpose of making it emblematic of their utter cultural impoverish-
ment. Seen in close-up on a neatly arranged tabletop are a copy of the Labor News,
a dictionary, and a tidy stack of the Saturday Evening Post. Although there is no
way of knowing for certain, it seems likely that Bourke-White brought together and
arranged these items, as by her own admission she was in the habit of doing to get
the effect she wanted. Isolating these sparse reading materials attered her edu-
cated audience, whose distance from the Corkums could be measured in the very
fact that they were Fortune readers, and disgured the Corkums by insinuating that
their reading tastes were the only conceivable measure of their cultural vitality.33
When Life commenced publication in Bourke-White also became its main-
stay, her monumental view of the Fort Peck Dam its inaugural cover and her photo-
essay on Wheeler, Montana, its rst feature. She roamed widely for Life, photo-
graphing at such disparate sites as Pittsburgh steel mills, the Supreme Court, Fort
Knox, and the Canadian Arctic on a tour with Lord Tweedsmuir, the Dominions
governor-general. In Louisville to cover the disastrous oods she made one
of her strongest pictures, a documentary shot in which her propensity for con-
centrated drama served her well. Against a backdrop of a National Association of
Manufacturers billboard proclaiming American living standards to be the worlds
highest and illustrating this proposition with an egregiously cheerful white fam-
ily on a motoring expedition, she photographed a stoical line of African American
ood victims waiting for food distribution from a relief agency. By its simultaneous
invocation of both economic inequality and racial discrimination the photograph
transgressed the boundaries that Lifes text attempted to set around it. For the
magazine it represented an incident in a specic natural disaster, but as at least one
Life reader recognized it transcended this illustrative purpose. Bourke-White was
a truly great photographer, he wrote, and, in exhibiting the editorial courage to
print her photographic social comment Life had distinguished itself.34
Her most ambitious Life project was a survey of Muncie, Indiana, the Middle-
town of Robert and Helen Merrell Lynds esteemed community study of ,
just updated in with a new volume measuring the depressions effect on the
city. Bourke-White made a yard-high stack of pictures in Muncie, the magazine
reported, and devoted eleven pages to them in the belief that they are an important
American document. Bourke-White emphasized class divisions, as the Lynds did,
and she (and/or the editors) excluded most other features of Muncie life that the
Lynds identied as symptomatic. Only two photographs depicted work, which the
Lynds said determined more than anything else the broad contours of a citizens
experience; both were of female workers, atypical at the time. She also depicted sev-
eral family groups but not womens work in the home or supervision of child-rearing,
much emphasized by the Lynds. Several photographs portrayed leisure activities,
but none examined the new forms of technology-based mass culturethe movies,
radio, and automobilesthat for the Lynds had fundamentally transformed how
Americans spent their free time. Both volumes devoted long chapters to education
and religion, but schools were entirely absent in Lifes coverage and a Monday min-
isters meeting only weakly intimated religious observance.35
No group of twenty-ve pictures could possibly do justice to the wealth of detail
in the Middletown books, of course, nor to the Lynds theories of cultural continuity
and change over forty years, but except for revealing class divisions Bourke-Whites
distillation avoided their most important observations. Economic distinctions per-
haps lent themselves more readily to photographic treatment. Her four half-page
shots of Muncie families at home made the stratication palpable and emblematic
by contrasting available living space and quality of furnishings and accoutrements.
Studies of leisure activities likewise foregrounded class distinctions. The Sunbeam
Clubs working-class members enjoying a community supper contrasted with tra-
ditionally attired fox hunters from Middletowns most exclusive young set riding
with their hounds.
The Lynds emphasized that Muncies inexible class barriers made social inter-
actions among individuals in the business and working classes rare, but Life belied
that observation with a full-page informal double portrait of a labor union vice
president, Ed Kehrer, and the citys most prominent business and social leader,
William H. Ball. Ball is being shaved in Kehrers barbershop and according to
the text Bourke-White did not know he was the client until after she made the
picture. Although that seems dubious, the specic circumstances hardly matter
because the photograph dramatizes a sentimental view of social relations close to
211
Lifes heart, that American egalitarianism ultimately trumps articial divisions of
class or occupational interest. The shots tight, close-up composition, with only
212 the mens heads and torsos visible, underscores that proposition. Ball is supine as
the standing Kehner caressingly lathers his jaw and looks affectionately down at
him. Bourke-Whites focus is shallow, blurring the background nearly to black and
bringing out Kehners solicitous expression and white shirt and necktie. Although
Ball is patently the client the composition otherwise confounds how class is usu-
ally read. Kehner, white-collar even if a labor leader, is the dominating presence in
the double portrait. If the caption reveals their true class standings the picture
counsels not giving undue weight to such information. Unsurprisingly, Life made
this vital document of U.S. life the articles lead photograph, the portal though
which the other twenty-four would be seen.
Whatever its ideological disingenuousness the photograph was executed skill-
fully with compositional dynamism and a sense of candid spontaneity. A few others
matched its visual air. A trio of elderly, fastidiously dressed clubwomen listen with
varying degrees of interest to a fellow members talk on astronomy. A wide-angle
vista of Minnetrista Boulevard, on which only branches of the Ball family lived,
unies the gently curving street and its leaess trees, pillered mansion, and adjacent
sidewalk and river by composing so that an overarching sky occupies more than
half of it, attractively complicating the neighborhoods orderliness with irregular
patterns of brightness and shadow made by the subdued early spring sunlight. An
obliquely framed shot of four ramshackle homes creates a visual tension between
similarity and difference. The drab houses are identical in design and siting, but
each bears a unique signier of structural deterioration.
Most of the other photographs were unexceptional or marred by woodenness and
sometimes by pandering to stereotype. Three aerial shots, a Bourke-White specialty,
may have provided a novel vantage in an era when few people had own, but they
otherwise contributed little to delineating Muncie. In allegedly candid views taken
in the living rooms of the Balls and the household of a Works Progress Adminis-
tration worker, the families studied disregard of the camera only exaggerates the
articiality of the depictions. A Ball daughters simulation of playing their grand
piano is made ludicrous by her crossed legs and neglect of its pedals, her body canted
toward the camera, while Mr. and Mrs. Ball labor to appear at ease. The simula-
tion of normality is even less credible with the relief workers family. The caption
makes much of his intellectually ambitious reading, and he is portrayed absorbed
in a book while all around him is pandemonium. A child ddles with roller skates,
two more play with an oversized doll, one reads the comics, one twirls a radio dial,
and another inspects some potted plants as his wife uncomfortably perches on his
armchair, yet another child on her lap. All nine family members have their bodies
toward the camera.
Besides their stiltedness these compositions indulged in hoary cliches that cul-
tural ourishes are a concomitant of gracious living and the poor saddle themselves
with too many children. Aside from the relief workers implausible concentration on
his book, neither picture offers a fresh or even distinctive view of the social group-
ing it purports to represent. Bourke-Whites resort to stereotype was even more
apparent in her nine portraits of Middletown citizens. In an elevated view a shirt-
sleeved newspaper editor sits at his predictably cluttered roll-top desk, studying a
front page; a lecturer who teaches personality to Middletown women is a distaff
Babbitt, shot from below with harsh ash lighting to highlight the articiality of her
theatrical smile; and two city fathers sport large cigars and complacent smirks,
the low shooting angle emphasizing the ample paunch of the nearest politico and
the way his hands rest self-satisedly on it.
Possibly Life chose poorly from among Bourke-Whites entire set of pictures, but
that seems unlikely inasmuch as its photography editor, Wilson Hicks, assessed the
Middletown studies as her nest work ever. Nor was Hicks alone in admiring them.
Beaumont Newhall believed them to be the strongest documentary photographs he
knew of, especially gratifying praise in that he along with Steichen was the closest
to an ofcial spokesperson the photography art world then had.36
Luce magazines brought Bourke-Whites photographs into millions of homes,
but three books coauthored with Erskine Caldwell bestowed on her work the special
visibility that book publication confers by artifactual permanence and stimulation
of the discursive activities of explanation and assessment that codify an artists
cultural standing. The rst, You Have Seen Their Faces (), was far and away
the most signicant because of its timely subject mattersouthern agricultural
tenantryand its outstanding critical and commercial success. Both North of the
Danube () and Say, Is This the U.S.A. () received respectful notices, but
neither had the coherence or cultural impact of Faces and Bourke-White was herself
dissatised with them. There was a further difference, too, in the advance public-
ity each of the projects received. Life previewed Faces with ve pages of photo-
graphsas the Atlantic did with an excerpt from Caldwells textbut publication
of the later two books passed without notice in Life even though both had grown
out of assignments for it.37
The esthetic and moral deciencies of Bourke-Whites photographs in Faces
have received much attention since the reissue of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
in , which launched its reputation as the most subtle collaboration between
a writer and photographer during the thirties and the decades most trenchant
book. As Famous Men came to be acknowledged as a landmark of thirties culture
its admirers regularly compared the Caldwell and Bourke-White collaboration
with it, and always invidiously, her contribution especially. For later viewers her
photographs of southern tenantry revealed not only a less penetrating eye than
213
Evans but also a dishonest and hyperdramatic mode of addressing the topic that
betrayed a moral bankruptcy.38
214 According to this critique Bourke-Whites pictures shamelessly trafcked in
melodrama, veering between sentimentality and, more commonly, Grand Guignol
that deformed her subjects and exaggerated their cultural backwardness. In nei-
ther case were her observations credible, and together they revealed an insatiable
appetite for working up sensational effects and wallowing in cliche. Her low-angle
portrait of a stalwart Alabaman that silhouettes her torso and head against the sky
and magnies her hands resting on a plows handle hints at no circumstances that
might allow a viewer to understand her superiority to other individuals portrayed
(), while a middle-distance environmental shot of a blowzy mother holding her
child and seated on a decomposing mattress foregrounds a religious revival pam-
phlet intended to signal her spiritual impoverishment (). A number of portraits
picked out physical deformities for emphasis, whether a poke-bonneted woman
with a massive goiter (), a cross-eyed mother whose curled lip makes her seem
deranged (), or a contorted, emaciated black child in a room insulated by showy
magazine advertisements (). Harsh articial lighting made other subjects gro-
tesque, as in a double portrait of husband and wife in which they are at once ghastly
and supercilious ().
Bourke-Whites and Caldwells method for captioning the photographs has
attracted much scorn, too. Each picture appeared with a place name, although
not the one of where it was made so as to avoid unnecessary individualization.
Beneath the place name is a quotation expressing the authors own conceptions of
the individuals portrayed (). These factitious captions often amplied the photo-
graphs grotesqueries. The cross-eyed mother is made to say snuff is an almighty
help when your teeth ache, and the sinisterly lighted couple that its only right
that the government ought to be run with people like us in mind. Some indulge
in patronizing pseudo-dialect, as in the quotation accompanying a strong close-up
portrait of an elderly black woman, I reckon I forgot to remember how old I is
(). Other captions make subjects ridiculous or absurdly ignorant. A cheerful Mis-
sissippian in front of the exposed half of his jerry-built shack that remained after
a ood took the missing portion says, Doggone if I dont like it better the way it
is now (), and a grizzled man in a close-up view that emphasizes his missing
teeth asserts, I get paid very well. A dollar a day when Im working ().
Of a piece with these spurious and patronizing quotations were Bourke-Whites
working methods, as she outlined them in the books conclusion. She regarded peo-
ple she photographed as puppets to be manipulated until they expressed what she
wanted them to. To get these pictures of our people, she said, she would incon-
spicuously wait with a remote shutter release while Caldwell engaged them in con-
versation. Only when their faces or gestures gave us what we were trying to express,
. . . imprison[ing it] on a sheet of lm before they knew what had happened would
she make the photograph. The pictures thus conrmed her presupposition of how
utterly pitiable and heartbreaking the lives of southern tenants were, and her
task, as she saw it, was to photograph them that way. With a characteristically
totalizing dualism she added that this obligation created both a photographers
paradise and a photographers hell.39
Because Bourke-White had little experience of the South, Caldwells viewpoint
no doubt signicantly inuenced her own. A southerner himself, his best-selling
novel about sharecroppers, Tobacco Road (), had been adapted into an even more
popular play that was still running on Broadway when Faces appeared. His ction
combined indignation about the exploitation of poor southerners with sensational
depiction of their primitivism, not least their lusty sexual mores. His text for Faces
avoided sexuality, but indignation gured largely and so did actual and composite
portraits of degraded sharecroppers. The South, Caldwell believed, was a hell
that could be a living paradise, as he wrote in the nal sentences of Faces.40 But
even if Bourke-White absorbed his view of the South, her propensities for tenden-
tious melodrama and shooting strategies that heightened it had been apparent in
her documentary work for Fortune and Life, and her Faces photographs did little
more than apply them to a new locale.
Alan Trachtenberg has proposed a revaluation of Faces that assesses it as more
documentary ction than strict documentation or sociological analysis, which
would require a gentler assessment of Bourke-Whites contribution and honor her
need to see as close and as rapturously as she [could] and thus engage her audi-
ence viscerally. The details of this generic rehabilitation remain to be worked out,
but even if plausible it will be a strictly twenty-rst century interpretation. In the
thirties, Faces readers believed its photographs revealed an unvarnished docu-
mentary truth if reviews may be taken to represent its larger audience. Aside from
sales gures, reviews are often the only available index of a books reception. The
responses of professional reviewers obviously help shape opinion but may be aslant
of the opinions of ordinary readers. Moreover, reviewers regularly disagree. In the
case of Faces, though, the unanimity of opinion and uniform terminology review-
ers used to express it provide a rmer basis than usual for generalization about its
reception.41
Although a few demurred about Caldwells texton the grounds of its one-
sidednessno one did so about Bourke-Whites photographs. I dont know that
Ive even seen better photography enthused one reviewer, and others proffered
similar encomia. They were superb pictures, almost beyond praise, beauti-
ful photographs, expressions of a wordless eloquence and of a mature pho-
tographic art. Even reviewers who admired the text found the pictures surpass-
ing. Malcolm Cowley in the New Republic and Ralph Thompson in the New York
215
Times agreed that owing to the photographs superiority the roles of text and
illustration are completely reversed, as Cowley said, the prose entirely secondary
216 to the pictures. None doubted their utter delity to truth. The Atlantic reviewer,
who chastised Caldwell for his lordly disdain of facts, counseled readers to look
instead at the photographs to get an accurate picture of the manners and morals
of some hundreds of persons who are representative of hundreds of thousands of
black and white sharecroppers. Robert Van Gelder in the New York Times Book
Review asserted that the pictures show the people as they are, and the Herald Tri-
bune Books reviewer, himself an Alabamian, testied to the authenticity of Bourke-
Whites depictions: I, or any other Southerner who has gone twenty miles from
wherever he lives, he wrote, have seen these faces.42
The characteristics that later commentators would excoriate did not bother con-
temporary reviewers. In fact, they were singled out for special praise. There was
no overdramatization, said one, thereby allowing the subjects to speak for them-
selves. Thompsons review included a gallery of his prose translations of exem-
plary photographs, among them the sturdy farm wife with handsome eyes who
had her hands on the plow and the man who grins as he looks at the camera and
expresses satisfaction that he had lost half of his shack to a ood. Cowley com-
mended Bourke-Whites technique of making herself inconspicuous until subjects
dropped their guard and then snapping them in their characteristic attitudes, and
he also believed the quotations printed beneath the photographs are exactly right.
No review so much as mentioned that the quotations were made up or that many
were patronizing or demeaning, nor did any discuss Bourke-Whites melodramatic
visual style. In fact, comments on her technique were limited to how nearly perfect
[it] has already become, as Thompson said.43
Acknowledging this radical dissonance between thirties enthusiasm for Bourke-
Whites pictures and later derogation of them could easily lead to a sort of esthetic
and moral Whiggery whereby the superior discrimination and standards of the
later twentieth century reveal the primitive state of earlier criticism. And in one
sense such a view would not be inaccurate. Despite the fact that the medium was
a century old, its critical tradition was in its youth, as indicated by the fact that
Faces and Newhalls history appeared in the same year. Moreover, in hardly
any social documentary was yet sufciently visible for comparison with her work.
Hine was still largely unknown, the Photo Leagues most important undertakings
were just beginning, and the results of Abbotts and the FSAs projects as yet only
thinly available.
Just as reviewers of the thirties overlooked the more egregious features of Faces,
later critics have overstated its inferiority if not its deciencies. Bourke-Whites
shooting methods and captioning notwithstanding, a number of the photographs
are strong by any measure, particularly among head-and-shoulders portraits. An
elderly farmer addresses the camera forthrightly, his plaintive but not abject mien
ably counterpointed by a painted representation of a crowing rooster on a sign
behind him (). A Georgia couple are sensitively shown in a tight composition in
which warm natural lighting models their features to bring out the rugged corru-
gations in the husbands face and the wifes tousled blond hair and smoother com-
plexion (). Among the most agrantly exploitative of Bourke-Whites images are
those of worshippers in African American and white Holiness churches, in both
instances employing her most theatrical techniquesharsh ash lighting and seiz-
ing on moments in which individuals appear least lacking in composureto mock
their emotionality (). But she also made several dignied close-up portraits
of black individuals that deed the eras ubiquitous stereotypes, the nest of them
in a setting that could have encouraged a more hackneyed treatment. In a tight
close-up a mature black woman gazes out at the camera from behind bars, which
frame and thus give emphasis to her faces beauty and the dignied sobriety of her
expression ().
Because Faces captions (and its text, except rarely) provide no information about
the persons depicted or their particular circumstances they are perforce brought
forward as types representing some social categorysharecropping farmers, black
prisoners, landlord, and so on. Their anonymity and abstraction from a specic
social context have seemed to later commentators disrespectful of the inviolable
individual integrity they should have been accorded. The FSA photographers, who
most often did not know or specify the names of those they photographed either, at
least usually provided specic information that anchored their subjects in a particu-
lar circumstance. Faces contemporary reviewers, though, expressed no misgivings
about this generalizing. And it would have been surprising had they done so. As
Lawrence W. Levine has pointed out, such abstract typifying was a normal cultural
practice in the Thirties.44
Another now-discredited cultural belief of the thirties may also help account
for the vastly different judgments of Faces over time. Much more than later, many
people then believed that a pictures subject and the photograph itself were identi-
calthat the camera was an unimpeachable witness to an unproblematic reality. It
might be wielded with greater or lesser intrepidity and acumen, but what it cap-
tured was true. That belief did not forbid skepticism about a photographs honesty,
but neither did it encourage it. Bourke-Whites photographs were thus taken to be
eyewitness evidence, as Times reviewer said, the forensic metaphor testifying to
the eras condence in their transparency and authority.
Finally, none of Faces reviewers had expertise in photography, nor did they dis-
cover an adequately supple language to discuss it. All agreed that the photographs
were superior and Bourke-White an artist, but their support for these judgments
consisted almost entirely of superlatives and prosaic iterations of the photographs
217
subjects. While asserting the photographs preeminence, most gave considerably
more attention to the text because they already possessed a vocabulary for analyzing
218 it. The one attemptby Thompsonto create a specically photographic context
spluttered into irrelevancy. He began with a paragraph on old Mathew B. Brady,
but all he could think of to connect Bourke-White with him was to hail her greater
technical facility.
If by later standards audiences of the thirties exaggerated the superiority of
Bourke-Whites photographs, that also had something to do with the uid, unset-
tled state of photographys art world. With gatekeeping and tastemaking authority
widely diffused, standards were from one perspective elastic and lax and generous
and catholic from another.
Pictures like those by Bourke-White and the fashion photographers that popu-
lar magazines brought forward as superior examples of artistic achievement epito-
mized these circumstances. By the more exacting criteria of later eras some would
be judged decient, perhaps even more sternly than is usual as tastes change and
new cultural priorities emerge. But in their own time large claims could plausibly
be made for them because major exhibitions and admiring journalistic treatment
had sanctioned their makers and no sufciently commanding authority was in place
to determine which photographers and what practices should be admitted to or
excluded from the fellowship of art.
The price for this democratic inclusiveness was an uncertain wobble in dening
artistic standards, but that very indeterminacy contributed to sustaining an atmo-
sphere in which photography would seem uncommonly pluralistic and zestful. Pho-
tography in the thirties was a big tent under which could comfortably shelter a pleth-
ora of photographers as well as heterogeneous audiences like those that constituted
the popular readership of Coronet and Life, the more elite purchasers of the quality
magazines and Fortune, and even the arts-minded readers of Creative Art.
12
The Photo League,

Lewis Hine,
and the Harlem Document
A Center for Photography
The Photo League occupied a seedy New York walk-up on East st Street,
where a cardboard sign directed visitors up a rickety stairway to its loft. So
modest was it that the Works Progress Administrations New York City Guide,
otherwise determined to call attention to the citys cultural sites, failed to men-
tion it while pointing out some inconspicuous neighbors, the residences of Ida
Tarbell, Cecilia Beaux, and George Julian Zolnay. The Leagues signicance in
photographys art world, however, exceeded what this public obscurity might
suggest, and in the late thirties it became a vibrant institution for teaching,
debating, exhibiting, and making artful photography unmatched elsewhere.1
It originated in one of the explosive ssions of thirties radical groups when
lmmakers in the Film and Photo League quarreled over whether documentary
lm ought to emphasize political relevance or esthetic values. Photographers who
220 formed the Photo League in , the year after this conict destroyed the Film
and Photo League, sympathized with the artistic lmmakers, but in fact photog-
raphers had played second ddle in the earlier organization. Their ambition for a
photographic group reected equally their resentment of this and a perception of
photographys increasing prominence as an autonomous artistic practice. As one
founder remembered, the new organizations inspiration had been the contempo-
rary movement of photography toward the arts.2
They disagreed as well with how the Film and Photo League dened photo-
graphic work, as an adjunct to verbal agit-prop. Just before expiring it issued an
urgent appeal for more photographic materialshots of social and economic
implication depicting breadlines, labor actions, and demonstrations against fas-
cism. A rebuke to its Los Angeles chapter for failing to cover the violent West
Coast strikes of indicated what it had in mind, news photographs with a left
coloration to illustrate written accounts. The new group rejected that journalistic
rationale. It encouraged instead features, related pictures that explored in depth
broader social conditions, particularly in distinct neighborhoods where they could
uncover interrelationships among people, buildings, institutions, and social activi-
ties. Such photographs, in their view, did not require a text to be effective vehicles
for cultural communication.3
The Photo Leagues founders were Sol Libsohn and Sid Grossman, both pas-
sionate advocates of documentary. Aaron Siskind supported them but declined any
administrative role because he felt burned out from Film and Photo League respon-
sibilities. Over the next few years it enrolled other young photographers who would
eventually develop solid reputations, including Harold Corsini, later a member of
Roy Strykers Standard Oil of New Jersey documentary group (as was Libsohn);
Eliot Elisofon, already a successful freelancer with Life credits; Jack Mendelsohn
(later Manning), subsequently a New York Times staff photographer; and Morris
Engel, whose city images Strand praised in U.S. Camera . By , after the
League was rmly established, erstwhile Farm Security Administration (FSA)
staff members Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Theodor Jung, and Ben Shahn
joined, although only the rst two actively participated. It also brandished a dis-
tinguished advisory board, including at various times Berenice Abbott, Margaret
Bourke-White, Barbara Morgan, Elizabeth McCausland, and Paul Strand.
Membership was never large in , one-fourth with dues in arrearsand
most were young New Yorkers eager to hone their skills and rub shoulders with
the well-known photographers who spoke and exhibited at the League. Dues were
modest, $. a year, $. more to use the darkroom, although in the depressions
atmosphere of sympathy for the impecunious no one was turned away. Open every
evening and on weekends the st Street loft became for its youthful members a
social center as well, especially at fund-raising parties and dances. One member
recalled it being a marvelous lonely hearts club.4
The League undertook an ambitious agenda of activities beyond social events
and encouraging features. Classes taught camera basics to beginning and interme-
diate students, and more experienced members joined its documentary workshop.
Members living in a crowded city especially appreciated access to darkroom facili-
ties. It regularly sponsored lectures and discussions, and its frequent exhibitions
featured leading photographers as well as members, so many of the eras outstanding
achievements could be seen on its walls. A newsletter apprised members of activi-
ties and became a forum for evaluation and criticism. Shabby it may have been, but
the loft was a much-used site and a vital center for photographic activity in a city
that otherwise lacked one.5
Grossman, Libsohn, and occasionally others taught classes on a pro bono basis,
and tuition receipts supported other League activities. Teachers encouraged stu-
dents to take their cameras into the streets and not overly fuss about f/stops and
lenses because they believed other instructional sourceshandbooks and camera
magazinestoo exclusively stressed technical matters at the expense of photogra-
phys social function. They also emphasized photographys history and expected
students to familiarize themselves with contemporary issues. Grossman and Libsohn
preached this with the fervor of the recently converted. Libsohn had not known
of Stieglitz in , and both founders only discovered Edward Weston a bit later.
When the MoMA exhibition gave visibility to a formerly obscure history they
encouraged students to attend and study its catalog. Then they distributed a packet
of readings that critiqued the exhibit for neglecting social documentary and put
forward arguments for straight photographys superiority to the European experi-
mentalism represented at MOMA by Man Ray and Lszl Moholy-Nagy.
No distinguished photographers emerged from the Leagues classes, but they nev-
ertheless educated a group of vitally interested young people about photographys
traditions and techniques, making them more informed members of its audience.
Providing practical training may have been the Leagues principal goal, as Anne
Tucker has suggested, but its public activitieslectures, exhibitions, and news-
lettercontributed more materially to establishing it as a center of photographic
activity. Their audiences may have been modest, but the involvement of some of the
eras most important photographers and critics magnied the events signicance
and suggests how warmly these committed members of photographys art world
felt the need for such a center.6
Regularly the League sponsored lectures, discussions, or debates, often by lead-
ing experts. Abbott spoke three timeson Atget, government-sponsored photog-
raphy, and photographic education. Roy Stryker talked twice about the FSA, and
The Photo League and Lewis Hine
221
Edwin Rosskam, its design specialist, visited on another occasion. Erskine Caldwell
and Bourke-White discussed their recent Czechoslovakia trip and the book North
222 of the Danube that had come from it. Hine reprised his long career as a pioneering
documentarian. On one occasion Ralph Steiners topic was Art and Documentary
Photography, and when in he became photography editor of PM he spoke
again about his ambitions for the new national newspaper. Ansel Adams argued for
more exacting artistic standards in documentary work. Strand lectured, too, as did
Beaumont Newhall, McCausland, and U.S. Cameras editor Thomas Maloney.
Most speakers addressed documentary, but other practices were also represented
Barbara Morgan on photomontage, Alexander Alland his photomurals for the New-
ark Public Library and Rikers Island Penitentiary, and Henry Rothman the Bauhaus
photographers. The League invited refugee photographers, too. Robert Capa led a
discussion of war photography, and Lisette Model talked about her studies of the
French bourgeoisie. Sometimes there were symposia. One coincided with an exhibi-
tion of John Heartelds photomontages at the ACA Gallery on Eighth Street, with
Newhall, Morgan, David Woolf (Ben Maddow), and the painter Louis Lozowick.
Another with Newhall, McCausland, Leo Hurwitz, and Robert Disraeli addressed
Photography Today. It was supposed to inaugurate a continuing examination of
photographys role in modern culture, but the series apparently did not continue.
The League even arranged exchange shows and debates with the Manhattan Cam-
era Club, whose members practiced the pictorialism it loathed, with McCausland
and Elisofon representing the group.
Sadly, except for brief notices in Photo Notes no records of these occasions exist,
but even the fragments suggest some conclusions. Most lecturers set out precepts
for documentary and standards for evaluating it, an essential undertaking for a
mode that seemed new. But the League was not rigidly sectarian: Rothman, for
instance, endorsed Moholy-Nagys certain questioning attitude and maintained
that his attention to design applied to good photography even if his preoccupa-
tion with formal questions was a blind alley. Surprisingly, no one lectured on
photographys history with the exception of Abbott on Atget and Hine on himself,
special cases because the League regarded both as its spiritual forebears. Although
Newhall and McCausland probably alluded to it, the omission is odd because it
was among the eras hottest topics; Libsohn remembered members feeling very
conscious of the history of photography and its usefulness. Likely its curricular
prominence made lectures less needed. Nor did anyone talk about Group f. or
Weston although the League held a Weston exhibition. Alfred Stieglitz, Edward
Steichen, and Walker Evans neither spoke themselvesa personal choice because
the League encouraged all of New Yorks leading photographers to address itnor
were they subjects for others.7
Perhaps the most revealing indication of the Leagues ambition to be more than
a hobbyists club is that no lectures centered on camera technique or new kinds of
equipment. And with the limited exceptions of Elisofons two talks on magazine
photography and Steiners on PM, neither did they address how members might
place their work. Such topics were standard fare in other camera organizations and
many camera magazines, but the League meant to distance itself from utilitarian
preoccupations. It strove to develop a critical vocabulary, with the lectures a key
means to achieve it. An early print competition in which members had difculty
articulating grounds for judgment exercised the Photo Notes editor. The Leagues
essential task, he said, was to formulate critical photographic values, and the
more general absence of a well-established body of principles only made that mis-
sion more imperative.8
An ambitious exhibition schedule complemented the lectures, likewise intended to
encourage discriminating judgment. From the incomplete evidence of Photo Notes it
is impossible to enumerate all the exhibitions, but one or another was nearly continu-
ously up. Perhaps half featured members, one- or multiple-person shows by the likes
of Corsini, Siskind, and Engel or themed ones such as by the feature group working
in Harlem. Especially at intramural exhibitions members were encouraged to hone
their critical skills, sometimes leading to ill-feeling. After a much-praised showing
of the Harlem Document Siskind spent the summer of on Marthas Vineyard
photographing nineteenth-century Methodist buildings, which he believed revealed
a folk spirit. When he exhibited this work early in members received it coolly.
It was too arty, they thought, too distant from the social realities photographs ought
to reveal. Stung by their criticism Siskind withdrew from the organization and later
dated his turn to abstraction from this experience.9
Documentary dominated in exhibitions by outsiders as well with two FSA shows,
a one-person Rothstein exhibition, forty Atget prints from Abbotts collection, and
Bourke-Whites North of the Danube. Lisette Model made her American debut,
and Weegee (Arthur Fellig), not quite a documentarian, also had his rst show.
But as with the lectures the League also invited workers representing other prac-
tices. Moholy-Nagy showed photograms, photomontages, and negative prints, and
Cartier-Bresson his septic photographs. Which pictures Weston exhibited is
unknown; although impeccably straight they were aslant of the documentary the
League favored. At the beginning of the season Photo Notes proclaimed,
Last year, the League exhibition galleries was [sic] the center of the best photogra-
phy in the country. We aim to surpass that mark in our present season.10 Its boast
was only slightly exaggerated. The range of talent exhibited in the loft had been
surpassed only by the Pageant of Photography in San Francisco.
Less impressively than the lectures and exhibitions, Photo Notes also tried to
promulgate sound critical standards. Handicapped by irregular editorship, it never
established a coherent emphasis, wobbling between a journal of opinion and more
223
commonly a skeletal listing of League events. Nominally a monthly, sometimes it
appeared bimonthly and occasionally even less frequently. It was rife with typo-
224 graphical and grammatical errors. Distribution was another problem. The League
sent it to museums, galleries, and camera stores, but that was hit-and-miss. The
major difculty, though, was nancial. The League could only afford to mimeograph
Photo Notes, which forbade illustrations and made it seem ephemeral. In spite of
its inadequacies and insubstantiality, though, Photo Notes did sometimes provide a
useful arena for criticism, and the quality of a handful of features was high enough
for more established publications.11
McCausland most frequently contributed challenging pieces, some reprinted
from the Springeld Republican, for which she was art critic. Not published else-
where, the most ambitious was her lengthy exploration of documentarys histori-
cal antecedents and contemporary cultural signicance. Documentary looked for
inspiration, she said, to the nineteenth centurys great realistsCharles Dickens
and Honor de Balzac in writing, Thodore Gricault in painting, and D. O. Hill,
Mathew Brady, and Julia Margaret Cameron in photographybecause except for
Atget only trivializing art movements had characterized the interval between these
forebears and the present, the false aestheticism of the Photo-Secession, the
self-absorbed abstraction represented by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, and Surreal-
ism. But with the depression exerting the pressure of events on creative work and
demanding a new spirit in art, photography found in documentary its impetus
to reverse the pattern of sterility previously infecting it. In laying out this argu-
ment McCausland amplied her efforts elsewhere to contest photographys his-
tory, specically against Newhalls formalist version of it. Like him, she derogated
European experimentalism but not on his grounds, that it betrayed the cameras
essential properties, but rather because its self-referential esotericism made it cul-
turally irrelevant. She held up the social documentary he had largely excluded at
MoMAof Hine and the government photographersas returning photography
to its destined path. Such an argument would nd favor with League members, but
appearing in a journal of limited circulation it had little chance of making public
headway against Newhalls whereas her introduction to U.S. Camera that fol-
lowed a few months later and made comparable arguments might. The Photo Notes
piece was better, though; its logic was clearer, structure rmer, and writing more
vivid. That McCausland chose to publish it where she did was a touching sign she
believed Photo Notes readership mattered.12
Besides occasionally making space for such broad-gauged pieces Photo Notes
undertook other useful tasks such as reviewing the U.S. Camera annuals, which were
often mentioned but rarely evaluated in mainstream publications. Assessing the
number, Engel commended Steichens FSA feature although not its cluttered design,
which, he said, vitiated the photographs intrinsic excellence. The layout in
was even worse thought Albert Fenn, its pictures crowded and some inexcusably
cropped; the ensemble was redeemed only by the preview of Westons California
and the West. Louis Clyde Stoumens balanced review in noted improvements
in design and reproduction values and especially commended the annuals large
representation of Langes pictures, but it was bad taste, he thought, to include
thirty pages of J. W. McManigals unexceptional agricultural photographs in the
same volume with hers.13
Similar notices of new publications and current exhibitions made Photo Notes
something of a journal of record. Except for a terse listing, however, it entirely
neglected American Photographs, a curious omission in that MoMAs exhibition
endorsed the documentary practice the League championed. In fact, Evans went
virtually unmentioned in Photo Notes, sometimes obviously so. In a piece
Strand extolled the FSA for invigorating thirties photography, hailing Lange and
Shahn as its outstanding contributors; Evans by then had left the agency, but so
had Shahn. The Leagues two FSA shows, moreover, did not include him. He was
friendly with some League supporters but disliked organizations, especially ones
with a political coloration, and he stayed away. Years later Siskind ascribed political
motives to the Leagues studied inattentionhe called it active hostility provoked
by the Leagues radicalismbut another explanation is at least as plausible. Camera
periodicals and magazines like Survey Graphic also neglected Evanss work, as did
most exhibitions except MoMAs. They favored pictures that more manifestly illus-
trated the depressions casualties and implied passionate commitment to relieving
social distress. Because the League also urged members to strive for these qualities
it is unsurprising that Evanss work meant little to it.14
Photo Notes most durable piece was Strands review of An American Exodus by
Paul Taylor and Dorothea Langeand not only because it represented the shock of
recognition, one gifted artists acknowledgement of another. It was also a thought-
ful meditation on why the popular new genre combining photographs with texts
also required a new esthetic. Commending Langes photographs for that concen-
tration of expressiveness which makes the difference between a good record and
a much deeper penetration of reality, Strand nevertheless believed Taylors text
undermined them so that American Exodus never developed a dynamic relationship
between its images and words. Many of her photographs merely illustrated the text,
he said, or the text reiterated what they revealed better. Thus the ensemble did not
heighten and extend [the photographs] individual and total meaning. Documen-
tary lm could serve as a model because it, too, grappled with nding a reciprocal
interplay between separate modes of communication and required inventing a form
that would make a whole of its disparate fragments. A documentary book, he said,
ought not to be merely a record but a new art form, and Lange and Taylor had failed
to discover the unity of expression that would make it so.15
225
Strands and McCauslands essays represented the sort of theorizing photography
needed to provide it with an ideational substructure equivalent to its artistic energy,
226 and they paralleled comparable efforts elsewhere by Abbott, Adams, Newhall, and
a few others. But speculative pieces remained uncommon in Photo Notes, and the
journals ephemeral format, small circulation, and inability to cultivate a stable
of rst-rank writers limited its effectiveness. Nevertheless, with it, as in all of its
activities, the League created a lively corner for itself in photographys art world,
stimulating its small but committed membership to intensify their search for criti-
cal photographic values that would be commensurate with their youthful enthu-
siasm. The eclectic mix of events on st Street created an atmosphere in which
members ceaselessly revolved questions of photographys esthetic traditions and
social utility. Camera publications, MoMA, and exhibitions addressed these mat-
ters, too, but only the League made them virtually everyday fare.
Enshrining Lewis W. Hine

The League had a special relationship with Lewis Hine, although when it was get-
ting underway in none of its members knew his work. His childrens
book Men at Work and his Survey Graphic pictures had been as invisible to the
young documentarians as to Abbott, McCausland, and Newhall, his most energetic
supporters later on. All would only learn of him after Hine took the initiative and
called on Newhall to complain of being excluded from MoMAs exhibition. With
their support Hines recognition thereafter indicated how photographys art world
had coalesced by the late thirties, just as his earlier anonymity illustrates how frag-
mented it had been.
Because of its founders initial unfamiliarity with photographys history the
League at rst oundered in articulating models for itself. After Libsohn and Gross-
man learned of Stieglitz and Weston they were sometimes mentioned, although nei-
thers work was congenial with the Leagues agenda. Strand was mentioned as well,
but his t was not much better. The discovery of Hine thus came with the force of
revelation, and in he almost instantly became the Leagues patron saint. The
events precipitating this included McCauslands and Newhalls appreciative essays,
his retrospective exhibition at the Riverside Museum, and introduction to League
members by Abbott and McCausland, which led to his enshrinement.
Both essays portrayed him as the founder of American documentary photography.
Today, in the new discovery of our immediate American past, wrote McCausland,
Hines early social photographs are recognized as vanguard masterpieces for the
contemporary documentary movement. Although both writers acknowledged his
pictures esthetic sensitivity, Newhall more urgently argued that their signicance
lay in their artistry. Hine made direct and simple records, he said, but the pres-
ence in them of an extraordinary emotional quality raises them to works of art.
McCausland, however, was eager to dissociate him from the tradition of works of
art, implicitly that of Stieglitz and his circle. For Hine, she averred, meaning came
rst and art only in retrospect, and she was thankful there was no false aestheti-
cism about the business, no preciousness or spiritual aloofness. Her views reected
Hines own conviction that Stieglitz and his group inhabited an ivory tower and
were inordinately concerned with technical nish. Newhalls and McCauslands
differences mattered less, though, than both essays celebratory tone, and together
they launched Hines belated recognition.16
His retrospective exhibition at the Riverside Museum early in followed
close on the heels of these appreciations, with Newhall and McCausland among
its forty sponsors along with Abbott, Strand, Steichen, Stryker, and Stieglitz. Oth-
ers came from social work and government, including Secretary of Labor Frances
Perkins and former Agriculture Undersecretary Rexford Tugwell. McCauslands
and Abbotts sponsorship was more than titular. The former wrote the catalog, and
Abbott later said she printed some of the exhibits. Regardless of Newhalls advocacy,
though, Hines pictures did not appear at MoMA until much later, after he left the
museum.
The Riverside exhibition displayed images from all phases of his career, immi-
grants at Ellis Island, prewar child labor, and postwar men at work. McCauslands
catalog essay emphasized his thoroughgoing Americanness, his camera a contem-
porary version of the pioneers ax. It was a sympathetic tool in the hands of men
whose blood remembered the wilderness they had subdued, she wrote, and with
the new frontier of human justice to conquer, Lewis Hine made history, as did the
early inventors and explorers. Her comparison was forcedand to a later genera-
tion more damning than notbut it accorded with a predilection in the late thirties
for uncritical celebration of the national experience.17
Hine entertained great hopes for the exhibition. The thirties had been dif-
cult for him, with little success in securing sponsors or even nding employment.
Stryker deected him on the several occasions when he inquired about working
for the FSA, and his erstwhile champion Survey Graphic had become reluctant to
use his pictures because its art director, Florence Loeb Kellogg, thought them too
old-fashioned. He was sixty-four years old and in danger of having his home repos-
sessed. Not long before he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and believed
the exhibition would advance his applications chances. For six months, moreover,
Life had been sitting on a piece featuring his photographs, and his contact at the
magazine promised to use the show to push along publication.18
It did not revive his career as he hoped. He did not receive the Guggenheim, nor
did the Life feature ever appear (a single shot, Ellis Island Madonna, did months
227
after the show), and before Hine died the next year he lost his home and went on
relief. The Riverside Museum was minor-leaguefar uptown and distant from the
228 citys cultural districtand despite its high-powered sponsors the exhibition did
not attract many visitors or much journalistic attention. Abbott said it was not a
big success. When the exhibition closed in New York it traveled to Albany and
Des Moines and then was disassembled. In time it achieved the status of a signal
event in thirties photography, but in its own era its impact was small.19
It reverberated more loudly at the Photo League, though, for there it marked the
beginning of Hines sanctication. Grossman warmly reviewed it for Photo Notes,
the groups rst notice of him aside from a plug the previous month for McCaus-
lands essay. His pictures, thought Grossman, brilliantly revealed how immigrant
workers had been broken by exploitation as their souls rotted in the slums, but he
also adduced (and reprinted) as Hines credo his introduction to Men at Work, which
invited respect for the men of courage, skill, daring and imagination depicted in
the book. Grossman was muddled in making a coherent argument out of his own
and Hines views, but perhaps that mattered less than the endorsement of one of
the Leagues founders and leading gures.20
Abbott and McCausland then brought Hine to st Street, where he joined the
organization, and by the end of the year it had invited him to lecture and mounted
an exhibition. As tribute to his inspiration it also announced a members Men at
Work exhibition, with Hine himself presiding over Monday evening gatherings
and providing criticism of prints. By his death in November he had become
the Leagues minence grise, his pictures the standard by which all others were
measured. Reviewing Engels photographs in U.S. Camera , Stoumen, edi-
tor of Photo Notes, qualied his praise by noting that Engel had not yet achieved
Hines greatness, whose subjects broke through the medium, emerged as human
beings unobscured by the photographic process. In its obituary, Survey Graphic
quoted his last communication with it on behalf of an unnamed League member,
a younger, better Hine he had said.21
The League became the repository of Hines archive, given by his son the year
after his fathers death. It remained there until McCarthyist witch-hunting forced
the organization to dissolve in , and then his pictures were transferred to the
Eastman House. Abbott much later expressed indignation about the Leagues treat-
ment of Hine as well as its stewardship of his archive. After she brought him there,
she said, they took him up in a very supercial way. His things were absolutely
abandoned; they took no responsibility for [the archive]. But if she were possibly
right about the Leagues careless oversight of the archive she was wrong about the
organizations embrace of Hineit was adulatory and intense. Abbotts memory
is not entirely to be trusted in any case. She claimed she had avoided the League
and certainly never lectured there when in fact she spoke at least three times.22
Making and Exhibiting the Harlem Document
Although Hines unied studies of constructing the Empire State Building did
not inspire the Leagues features its embrace of him retrospectively validated its
emphasis on them. Almost from its founding it encouraged holistic explorations of
some closely dened subject, often a distinct neighborhood, so that individual pic-
tures would build on one another to create a multifaceted but unied totality. This
practice reected the conviction that a related group of documentary photographs
could intimate an argument and be an intellectual as well as visual experience. That
was not a new ideaJacob Riis had a similar one when he photographed lower New
York, as did Frances Benjamin Johnston at the Hampton Institutebut since they
had been forgotten it seemed to be. More novel was the Leagues preference for
collaborative projectsvery much in the spirit of the thirtiesthat would empha-
size process and not just the nished product as colleagues grappled with what to
photograph and why and then criticized each others efforts.
Several League groups undertook features. Most petered out, but a few were
brought to completion. Unquestionably the most important was the Harlem Doc-
ument, begun early in and completed by the end of the next year. Although
it was exhibited seven times, the book its makers planned never appeared, and the
pictures were dispersed. Had its archive remained intact the Harlem Document
almost certainly would have ranked among the most distinguished achievements
of thirties photography. That its acknowledged leader was Aaron Siskind makes
its dissolution even more poignant.23
In Siskind named the Harlem Documents ve collaborators as Corsini,
Engel, Mendelsohn, Richard Lyon, and himself. But at least another dozen League
members also participated with varying degrees of intensity, of whom the most
committed were Beatrice Kosofsky, Lucy Ashjian, and Sol Prom. Michael Carter,
an African American social worker and not a photographer, regularly attended
meetings and wrote the text that was to accompany the books pictures. Early on
Grossman was also involved, but his insistence on evaluating pictures on political
grounds led to ill-feeling. Lyon called him the Commissar, and Grossman and
Corsini almost had a stght after one session, when he was asked to leave.24
The group met weekly at League headquarters or individuals apartments to lay
out assignments for the coming week and criticize each others prints, then either to
accept or reject them by a process of consensus. The assignments served as shooting
scripts similar to Strykers for the FSA staff, designating subjects needing cover-
age and occasionally even dictating how they ought to be photographed. Members
spiritedly criticized one anothers pictures, usually for technical imperfections but
sometimes for erroneous conception, as with Engels shot of an outdoor market at
night in which the human subject was only partially visible. They rejected it because
229
the emphasis was not on the life or character of the subject, but on the contrast of
light values. The picture was melodramatic in feeling, rather than factual. They
230 spurned other photographs for being artistically inert, as they believed Lyons to
be of a lunch counterman in his establishments doorway.25
They tried to mediate between their requirements that a picture reveal signi-
cant information about Harlem and also be esthetically distinguished. Most of
those discussed are now unknown, but one that is notand which instigated the
groups most spirited disagreementreveals how difcult it could be to satisfy
both goals. From a rooftop Corsini made several pictures of boys playing football in
the street, one published two years later in U.S. Camera . It is a striking com-
position for its careful oblique framing, sense of patterned movement as the boys
develop a play, and the elongated shadows they cast in the late-afternoon sunlight.
When the group took up Corsinis pictures they caused so much controversy, that
opinion of [them] was deferred until the reaction of absent members was known,
at the next meeting. The minutes do not say what precipitated the dispute or how
absent members later responded, but Siskind was more circumstantial in a newspa-
per interview the next summer. A documentary picture cannot be overdramatic,
he said, by which he meant stressing too greatly the formal method, and he used
as an example Corsinis football players. The photographers assignment had been
to depict how inadequate recreational facilities forced Harlems children to use its
streets as a playground, Siskind said, and he came back with a beautiful picture.
He had taken it into the light, so each player made long shadows shooting down the
picture. It was a terric thing but . . . we couldnt use it. The picture was so good
that nobody saw the kids. They looked at the picture and whistled.26
Siskind was getting at documentarys unique conundrum, that an esthetically
successful picture may nevertheless fail to achieve its purpose and potentially even
distract viewers from apprehending its social meaning. Although the group worried
about this hazard it also understood how uninspired literalness could also be lethal
to a pictures effectiveness, extinguishing the signicance of the fact or idea, as
Siskind put it, adding that a picture or series of pictures must be informed with
such things as order, rhythm, emphasis, etc., etc.qualities which result from
the perception and feeling of the photographer, and are not necessarily (or appar-
ently) the property of the subject.27 The controversy over Corsinis photograph,
far from indicating a Gradgrindian commitment to transparent facticity, indicates
the groups spirited consideration of social documentarys special characteristics,
preeminently this potential tension between esthetic effect and social affect.
Because the Harlem Document no longer exists it is impossible to describe with
complete accuracy, much less to determine with what success the group negoti-
ated their commitment to revealing Harlems culture in photographs that were also
artistically strong. More than thirty of Siskinds pictures have been subsequently
published, and they permit some tentative inferences although inevitably overstate
his contribution. Two dozen or so pictures appeared in contemporary periodicals,
butas the contretemps over Corsinis shot indicatessome the group may have
rejected. Of ten in The New Masses, none individually credited, two were by Siskind
and more may be. Looks piece, the projects most important surviving artifact, did
not credit individual photographs either although Siskind shot a minimum of four
of its thirteen; other group members made at least ve, but which ones cannot be
determined. Only the tiny number in U.S. Camera carried individual credits.28
They exhibited the Harlem Document seven times between and
although with which pictures is uncertainand the shows marked the Leagues
greatest success in reaching external audiences. Exhibition possibilities regularly
preoccupied the group. They made overtures to MoMA and the Museum of the
City of New York, and Kosofsky took prints to the Brooklyn Museum; there were
hopes as well of an exhibition at Columbia University. None of these panned out.
Popular Photography expressed interest in an article, which Siskind agreed to write,
but it never appeared. Lange tried to persuade Steichen to run a U.S. Camera fea-
ture without success except for the few pictures in the portfolios. His tribute in
to photographers who had developed a keen sense of social understanding,
or in his conviction that photography had gained in stature by coming out
of the studio and darkroom and looking frankly at life, apparently did not extend
to photographs of Harlem. He and Maloney may have felt they comported poorly
with U.S. Cameras increasingly strident chauvinism, a portrait of racial discrimi-
nation that was an embarrassment to the American benisons otherwise hailed.29
If the group failed to crack these prestigious venues their rst exhibition was
distinctive in another way in that it took place in Harlem itself, at its YMCA early
in . Signifying that the project was a work in progress its forty exhibits bore
the title Towards a Harlem Document. By naming it so and exhibiting in Harlem
they hoped to solicit local advice for future directions and encourage cooperation
from potential subjects. They also wanted to convince Harlemites that this is a fair
and unbiased document and by collecting their comments, to convince publishers
that the book will not meet with a hostile reception in Harlem on that score. To
complement its exhibition, a few months later the League held a symposium and
invited seven Negro leaders to talk about the community. Such solicitation of
opinion from documentarys subjects was uncommon, perhaps unique, at the time
and reected sensitivity to how even the best-intended depictions could distort and
even deform their subjects.30
The symposiasts views were not recorded, but visitors to the YMCA exhibit
inscribed theirs in a guest book, some reprinted in Photo Notes. One attendee felt
deeply touched by the pictures, and another was tremendously impressed with
their realism. Several applauded their delity to truth, as did a viewer for whom
231
the unposed pictures have truly captured the spirit of Harlem and another who
was glad that an effort is being made to portray Harlem as it really is. Acknowl-
232 edging that the photographs were true and factual, yet another suggested more
attention to the communitys intellectual and cultural life. Only one visitor was
entirely critical. The pictures lacked artistic value, he complained, and con-
centrated on Harlems worst side; he urged pictures that will show Negroes in a
better light.31
Because most responses were congratulatory the group must have been conrmed
in its direction, although perhaps following up on the suggestion of more emphasis
on cultural activities Ashjian a few weeks later proposed we show the contribution
of the Negro to American music and a few weeks after that Art work appeared
on the list of suggested pictures. The favorable comments also supplied evidence
that the group hoped would convince publishers not to fear a hostile response from
African Americans, and in that sense the exhibition was a success. But it did not
create a large stir in Harlem even though sponsored by the Urban League, one of
the communitys most inuential organizations, and held at one of its most visible
institutions. A local African American newspaper, the New York News, did not
review or even mention it.32
Two months after the uptown show the Harlem Document moved downtown to
the New School for Social Research, noted for its patronage of contemporary art
with murals by Thomas Hart Benton and Jos Clemente Orozco and a sleek mod-
ernist building designed by Joseph Urban. For this occasion the group discarded the
working title and enlarged the number of exhibits by nearly half; the show also ran
longer than in Harlem, for two weeks. Nine photographers participated, Siskinds
ve plus Ashjian, Kosofsky, Prom, and Miller Simon. It also had a catalog of sorts,
a single sheet folded into quarters, one a title page, another listing the photogra-
phers, and the remaining two with Carters text. In addition to giving it to attendees
the group mailed copies to publishers, other photographers, and organizations, the
expenses (about ten dollars) underwritten by passing the hat.33
Carters four-paragraph text is the only surviving artifact of the Harlem Docu-
ment that may with certainty be attributed to him, and it aroused a mild dust-up
among the group. Some thought his language too high-own and others that his
description itself of the Harlem scene was unnecessary, since we were exhibiting
pictures of it. The latter complaint betrayed a tension inherent in collaborations
blending photographs and text. The photographers believed their pictures could
stand on their own and that language irrelevantly duplicated what they had drama-
tized better or even misrepresented them. Although Siskind defended Carterhis
verbal images all were true and lled in the background very well, he said
the issue was probably an inescapable one that would often leave photographers
uneasy.34
The complaint about Carters esoteric language is more puzzling and likely
betrayed another uneasiness the group could not comfortably express. Aside from a
few semi-fancy Latinate wordsineluctable, ecstatic, and despondentthat
would not have puzzled habitus of the New School, his diction was entirely mid-
level. Moreover, what he wrote about Harlem was unexceptionableits magnetiz-
ing inuence on emigrants from the South and the Caribbean that had made it an
international Negro metropolis and the subtle but equally cruel racial intolerance
they found there. And he was both complimentary and accurate about the groups
procedures. Sociologist and photographer, Negro and white, worked in closest
harmony and with unembarrassed frankness, he said, and in this collaboration the
photographers had achieved an empathetic sociological vision of their own. Their
world of physical objects has become animate with relationships: chair, house, shoe,
the kitchen table, informed with the life of the people who know and use them. In
his penultimate paragraph, however, Carter excoriated whites who had discovered
Harlem, nding poetry in its shabbiness and whatever exotic manifestations an
impoverished race can demonstrate. He unmistakably excluded the groups mem-
bers from this condemnation and also made clear that their pictures shared none
of this attitudes egregiousness, in fact, he used the paragraph to set up praise for
their alertness to the real work-a-day Negro and his numerous problems. But it
nevertheless must have discomted the groups members, all white except for him,
because they, too, were trespassing on alien ground. Like the conict between words
and pictures, this one was probably inescapable, if more difcult to articulate.
The New School shows lukewarm reception disappointed the group, which
they ascribed to insufcient publicity. After closing, the exhibition moved to the
League for a month, its last venue. The next year the group exhibited again
in Harlem at the Blyden Book Shop, sponsored by Look to publicize its feature, and
then in the summer for two weeks at Adamss Pageant of Photography in San Fran-
cisco, reprised in at the League. The nal show, a month before Pearl Harbor,
was a joint exhibition with FSA pictures and historical shots of African American
participation in war, part of a Negro Life in America exhibition at the Fur, Floor,
and Shipping Clerks Union, a CIO afliate.
In these seven exhibitions the Harlem Document played to several distinct audi-
encesHarlem residents, Photo League members, liberal-minded folk drawn to the
New School, Worlds Fair attendees, and trade unionists. Aside from the comments
solicited at its rst Harlem showing and Adamss report that it was the Pageants
second-most popular exhibit we cannot know how viewers responded, although
noteworthy are the favorable appraisals of two fellow workers, always gratifying
in any art world. Lange admired it and so did Adams, even if he believed print-
ing and presentation deciencies detracted from its impact. What may be said for
certain is that it was widely seen and by an uncommonly heterogeneous range of
233
viewers. In that sense it lived up to the Leagues ambition to cultivate new audi-
ences for documentary work.35
234 Community studies featuring photographs were not uncommon in the thirties,
although one centering on a minority community was. Strykers shooting scripts
derived from his admiration for Middletown, and perhaps inspired by the books
critical and even popular acclaim on its publication in the Luce magazines
made such studies a journalistic staple, beginning in Fortunes second issue in
with a text by Luce himself and more than a dozen uncredited Bourke-White pho-
tographs that purported to show South Bend, Indiana, as the perfect microcosm,
the living example, the photographable average of American culture. Fortune sub-
sequently gave similar treatment to other small cities and an entire issue to New
York (with three of Siskinds Harlem shots included). Life even more specialized in
these studies, starting with Bourke-Whites of Wheeler, Montana, in its rst issue
and reaching an acme with her photo essay on Muncie/Middletown itself.36
Such a widespread ethnographic impulse conrms Warren Susmans observa-
tion that the anthropological concept of culture had special resonance in the thir-
ties, making people more alert to the inescapable interrelatedness of . . . things,
as he quotes Robert Lynd. The Harlem Document collaborators shared this ten-
dency in their ambition to depict Harlem comprehensivelyits commercial and
nonprot institutions, voluntary associations, political life, and work and leisure
activities as well as its buildings and the domestic arrangements of those who lived
in them. Only such a broad swath would reveal the essentials of Negro existence
that Look said was the projects ambition.37
The group never indicated how they decided to concentrate on Harlem, although
Siskind later said Carter had proposed it. This was misleading because as early as
Siskind photographed there, some pictures later ascribed to the Harlem Doc-
ument. As the groups acknowledged leader his long-standing interest must have
inuenced their decision to focus on Harlem. Siskind also dismissed the notion that
the group had any political agenda, but that, too, was disingenuous. His early con-
tacts in Harlem had come through his work for the Film and Photo League, afli-
ated with the Communist Party and supportive of its effort to organize tenants. His
involvement must have indicated sympathy with that aim. The Photo League had
no political afliation, but it nevertheless saw itself as a progressive organiza-
tion in the loose, Popular Front sense, so that all its features were critical of exist-
ing conditions. That the projects etiology was broadly political seems self-evident,
especially since Harlem offered unmatched opportunities to dramatize the eras
social problems as enumerated by the president in large numbers of citi-
zens ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-fedas well as some he failed to mention, notably
racial discrimination. At the same time, photographers could depict a community
with its own distinctive traditions, some of which represented exemplary forms of
resistance to economic and racial oppression.
Visual ethnographies were in vogue, and Harlem offered rich opportunities to
develop broadly political themes. Another reason likely also encouraged the group
to work there: the cultural belief common among white Americans that Harlems
inhabitants were uncommonly photogenic. As a U.S. Camera feature expressed
it, Put them all together, photogenic, oomph, wow, its there, hold that! and
any other phrases that say the best in modeling and the easiest in photographing
and they all add up to the colored race. The pure abandon of a dance, the sunshine
of a pickaninny, the grandeur of a colored gentleman, the sadness of a peoplethe
peak in pictures is reached when a photographer uses the Negro for his subject.
Although this offensive characterization might be seen as no more than a racist effu-
sion by the annuals editors, similar if more modulated sentiments were expressed
by one of the eras most sensitive recorders of African Americans, Consuela Kanaga,
herself a Photo League member. U.S. Camera extolled her as a frequent pho-
tographic dramatist of the American Negro scene and its relation to the national
picture and quoted her on her methods. She rarely posed her black subjects, she
said, allowing them to express their inner nature which . . . comes from Heaven
and because their natural rhythm and expression make it unnecessary. Although
the Harlem Document group left no such assessment of the expressive possibili-
ties afforded by African American subjects, so commonplace were these ideas that
it seems reasonable to assume they shared them. Early in , just as the group
was getting underway, a League symposium on feature projects was led by Siskind
and Kanaga.38
Siskind later said that the group distorted Harlem, emphasizing poverty and
avoiding more positive signs of its cultural vitality. We didnt have anything good
to say about what was going on. We were critical. Very critical, he remembered. A
focus on hardship would have been difcult to avoid. In , after Harlems worst
riot ever, Mayor Fiorella La Guardias investigatory commission cited as its cause
the communitys appalling economic and social conditions, no surprise to residents
or anyone else who knew Harlem. By every measure of well-being it suffered by
comparison with other New York neighborhoods. Four times as many residents
depended upon relief, its housing stock was poorer and rents higher, the death rate
greatly exceeded that of other areas, and its school buildings were older and more
crowded.39
But of the projects pictures still extant many do not corroborate Siskinds mem-
ory. In Harlem Children, for instance, The New Masses doleful text is at odds
with most of the illustrations. It asserts that for the most part, the children of
this great, foul slum lead hard, choked lives, but only one of the six photographs
235
corroborates this judgment. It mordantly juxtaposes a child with an advertisement
cruelly incommensurate with his opportunities, a small newsboy who gazes up at
236 the massive granite wall of a savings bank that urges him to Save to travel! But
two other pictures depict well-dressed youths playing musical instruments, and in
a third children are engrossed in modeling African artinspired sculptures. Another
shows ve boys sitting in a row, their surroundings eliminated by the frames edges
and shallow depth of focus. One has a hole in his trousers, but otherwise they are
decently dressed. Most noticeable, though, are their different facial expressions; the
middle three are sober in different ways and degrees, and the anking boys smiling,
almost jaunty. This group portrait allows a viewer to imagine various scenarios, but
a singular depiction of choked lives it is not.40
The New Masses nal shotSiskinds and the only one for which a photogra-
pher is identiable, also the Harlem Documents most reprinted image then and
lateris so replete with ambiguities that it likewise belies the texts certitudes. It
portrays two gures at a kitchen table, a mother whose downcast eyes and slumped
posture imply a hard, difcult life, and a child looking toward her and seated on a
milk can in lieu of a highchair. The mothers mien and the makeshift seat bespeak
narrow, impoverished circumstances, as does the drab kitchen. The point of view,
moreover, reinforces the sense of a candid depiction of an appalling social reality.
Siskind shot from just behind the door leading to the kitchen so that the pictures
left edge is the foreground blur of its frame, implying a privileged view of a private
moment. But other details qualify this impression of povertys malaise. A tablecloth
graces the table, and the meal itself appears ample. The childs plate is full even
though a serving dish still brims over, and other containers imply that if they are
poor they are not in dire want. Most noticeably, though, in the upper foreground
between the seated gures and the doorframe is an out-of-focus clothesline with
several drying garments. That a cooking and dining area must serve such makeshift
purposes signies poverty, but the clean clothes themselves (and the camera renders
them luminously so) also imply the mothers determination not to succumb to her
familys narrow circumstances. Another element would have likewise qualied the
scenes somberness had not The New Masses, and later Fortune and Look, cropped
it. Some of the photographs effectiveness as social criticism depends on a sense of
the mothers and daughters vulnerability, which their isolation connotes, but in the
full image a viewer would see another adult female at the table. Whether Siskind or
the magazines editors trimmed the picture cannot be determined, nor is there any
way of knowing how it was exhibited. Probably Siskind cropped it, or approved of
the magazine doing so, because the third gure subtracts from its pictorial unity
and introduces a dissonant note of adult sociability.41
Of Siskinds pictures subsequently reprinted, a few embody the unalloyed criti-
cal perspective of which he spoke: decayed plaster peeling in a tenement stairwell,
a nightclub where well-dressed white patrons distractedly watch black entertain-
ers perform a striptease, and a boarded-up apartment building festooned at street
level with posters advertising Hollywood movies. Children playing in a condemned
building in spite of a crude sign warning them to keep out is only the most pointed
of several photographs that depict Harlems children creating makeshift and inad-
equate play spaces on streets and sidewalks and do so more obviously than Corsinis
football players.
A larger number of photographs, however, express a more upbeat or at least more
complex view of Harlem life. They include several studies of leisure activities, one
of a Savoy Ballroom saxophone player blowing a riff and another of a strenuous
couple jitterbugging to the bands music; a view from the wings of a performer
before a smartly dressed audience that watches from the Apollo Theaters ornate
loges; and a group socializing in a sleek Art Deco bar, one of the women wearing a
handsome fur coat. A backstage shot of a dignied older man in a suit, white shirt,
necktie, and fedora represents the Lafayette Theaters production of William Du
Boiss Haiti (the plays title stenciled on the at against which he leans) by the Fed-
eral Theater Project. It evokes Harlems vitality in the ne arts, as had the photo-
graphs of children playing musical instruments and sculpting.42
The groups attention to Harlems religious, lodge, and commercial activities also
suggests something other than that residents were pitifully in thrall to a monolithic
oppression. Photographs of storefront church services and lodge parades emphasize
the important role of voluntary associations as people join together for common
purposes and mutual benets. Father Divines enormous following and the cults
provision of inexpensive food and lodging to applicants who honored its prohibition
against accepting public relief are represented by an aproned cook holding aloft a
plate of food next to a handmade sign proclaiming Peace and advertising home-
cooked meals at ten and fteen cents. Another picture, an architectural view remi-
niscent of Abbott, depicts the lower oors of two buildings housing a barber shop,
beauty academy, auto school, and ministerial association. Such small, locally run
enterprises were important to Harlems cultural life, and the community supported
some two thousand personal service establishments. Engels Harlem Merchant
in U.S. Camera and also the Pageant of Photographys catalog perhaps has
something of the same implication although the merchants kiosk and inexpensive
merchandise are so modest and his somber expression so enigmatic that the title
also conveys social irony.43
The group also portrayed militant forms of resistance to discrimination. As the
WPAs New York Panorama averred, Harlems social restlessness results in many
street demonstrations, and Siskind photographed at least one of these, of plac-
arded picketers protesting a social service agencys personnel cuts and demanding
restoration of clothing distribution to relief clients. Among Harlems most vibrant
237
political organizations was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters headed by A.
Philip Randolph. Siskind photographed its membership at a union meeting, dozens
238 of dignied, uniformed, beribboned men participating in its deliberations. One of
his strongest, most esthetically distinctive photographs, moreover, depicted Ran-
dolph himself, a picture that unmistakably suggests his authority without any of the
pompous sterility such portraits of leaders often have. Placing his camera nearly at
pavement level, Siskind lled most of the frame with a shiny black open convertible.
Randolph, wearing a cream-colored fedora, sits in its rear seat, only his head and a
bit of his shoulders visible in the upper right corner and given special prominence
by its composition. He looks unswervingly ahead, the rm resolve of his counte-
nance accented by the gesture of the man next to him who deferentially turns his
head to the implacable leader.44
The Harlem Document and Look Magazine

Its surviving photographs suggest that the Harlem Document was less monochro-
matic than Siskind remembered, more attentive to the rich texture of Harlem life
and more successful in realizing the groups ambition to portray holistically the com-
munitys complexity. Perhaps, though, they misrepresent what the project looked
like when it was exhibited. There is no way of knowing for certain, but Looks piece
published in is the fullest contemporary expression of the project that remains,
although it must be approached with caution.
The Harlem Document was not Looks rst choice to illustrate its feature. Early
in an editor at the magazine asked Arthur Rothstein to shoot pictures for it.
Although slated to join Look as a staff photographer he was still at the time on an
FSA assignment in the Nevada desert and he told the editor he could not accept
the commission. The magazine, Rothstein told Stryker, was all steamed up about
illustrating Richard Wrights Native Son, just published to critical acclaim and
large sales.45
When Look then turned to the group they submitted photographs, from
which the editors selected thirteen and determined how they would appear. Besides
deciding size and sequence the magazine cropped some in ways that altered their
meanings. Carter supplied information for captions, and although he may have
written them it is more likely that the editors did, given the usual procedures of
American magazine journalism. Finally, Look intended the pictures to illustrate the
ctional world of Native Son (its headline proposed that they portrayed the kind
of environment that produced Bigger Thomas), a purpose that inuenced the edi-
tors choices. A deciency of the novel, pointed out by many later commentators,
is its failure to render African American cultural experience with any of its actual
richness or complexity.46
Looks photographs portray housing, religious life and voluntary associations,
children, and leisure activities, all otherwise represented in the projects surviv-
ing corpus, as well as ones centering on health care and work except for these pic-
tures absent from it. Missing are representations of Harlem businesses or militancy.
Four photographs had been published previously: the mother and daughter at the
kitchen table, children playing in a condemned building, the group portrait of ve
boys, and the ironic save to travel portrait. Because these constituted nearly half
of those published the year before in The New Masses, Looks choices suggest that
it was not pulling the projects punches even if it excluded Harlem activism. And
by linking its feature to Native Son, which has a Marxist concluding section, Look
also permitted an intertextual political reading of the ensembleat least for those
viewers familiar with the novel.47
In two instances, though, Look made the photographs less complex if more imme-
diately apprehensible to viewers because by cropping it attened their representation
of Harlem life. Siskinds shot of worshippers at a storefront church depicts four
women with four or ve others in the background. Their differences in clothing
and skin tone as well as their individual responses to the service, each other, and
the camera make for a compelling photograph in spite of its apparently careless
composition, the frames top edge cutting off the heads of the background women.
Some of the fully visible group are ebony, and some coffee-colored; two wear mod-
est black suits and white blouses, another a more intricately beaded dress; the fourth,
holding a baby, wears the white uniform of a servant. One woman sits attentively
and reverently, hands demurely folded; another looks at the camera; a third at the
baby; and the mouth of the woman in servants garb is wide open so she can shout
a response to the service. The photograph enumerates the differences among the
women in hue, attire, religious expression, and perhaps even lifestyle, and it implies
a caveat about making facile generalizations about African Americans. Look cropped
it to include only the woman dressed as a servant. It is an alteration that leaches out
the rich multiplicity with which Siskind had invested the photograph. Seen alone,
the shouting woman evokes a stereotype about the ecstatic emotionality of African
American religion, and Looks rendition approaches Bourke-Whites patronizing
view of a black congregation in You Have Seen Their Faces. Black religion, she said,
is a tribal ritual, the very antithesis of religion in which worshippers still answer
to the rhythm of the jungle.48
Look cropped as well Siskinds mother and daughterand not only by erasing
the third diner. Also missing are the drying garments that provided a counterpoint
to the mothers resigned dejection. This simplied the images esthetic organiza-
239
tion, bringing it more in line with the standard of one-point perspective and imme-
diate apprehensibility that photo magazines such as Look strove for. Eliminating
240 this overdetermined signier of both poverty and resolute effort made the picture
more single-minded, a depiction of victimization rather than Siskinds more multi-
faceted original view. The caption further encouraged a one-dimensional response.
Such squalor, it said, was depressingly typical. With that caption, and without
the clothesline, a Look reader was encouraged to overlook the tablecloth and ample
food to concentrate instead on the kitchens shabbiness, the mothers posture, and
the childs makeshift seat.
Any text guides a viewers response, and in their amplitude the Look captions
did so more than simple titles, sometimes even putting forward an argument that
cancelled implications a viewer might otherwise discover in the picture. This ten-
dency is most evident in the caption to the articles largest image, which is spread
over two opening pages. In a panoramic wide-angle shot of several Harlem walk-
ups, scores of residents standing and seated on re escapes watch an Elks parade.
Point of view heightens the sense of a community occasion of some importance, the
camera at street level tilted slightly up toward the buildings and spectators opposite,
thus revealing in the lower foreground the backs and heads of another phalanx of
parade-watchers. The parades invisibility is immaterial. The photograph is not
intended to memorialize a particular event but to dramatize the importance of Har-
lems voluntary organizations and how they bring residents together in moments
of pleasure and solidarity.49
The caption, however, pays no attention to voluntary associations or to solidarity,
not even to pleasure. Instead it informs readers that the photograph dramatizes
the worst housing problem in New York, represented by the multitudes who had
emerged from their packed apartments. Harlems citizens, it says, are aficted
by its incredible density of population, rents one-third to one-half higher than in
other neighborhoods, absentee landlords (mostly white) who scoff at code viola-
tions, low average incomes, and racial discrimination that prevents residents from
moving to better housing. All of these observations were true, of course, if aslant
of the photographs subject, but such is a captions authority that it discouraged
other, more nuanced readings, especially any that tried to imagine Harlem life as
encompassing more than social dysfunction.
The caption of the group portrait of the three sober and two smiling boys has
the same delimiting effect. It announces that they are typical Harlem boys and
ve social problems. Their options are to accept poverty and racial discrimination
and be deeply humiliat[ed] or ght against their lot and therefore court trouble.
The starkness of Looks options left no space for the muddled compromises most
humans make and eliminated any possibility of a creative response to social oppres-
sion. Most of all, the caption negated the possibility that each boy might be seen as
distinctive, which their differing facial expressions would otherwise suggest.
In less obvious ways other captions deform the pictures. The one to Siskinds
shot in the Apollo Theater alludes to Harlems sixteen busy movie houses and the
variety numbers that serve as their entractes. In fact, although lms were some-
times shown the Apollo was more a performance venue, the leading one for African
American artists. By emphasizing movies, most of which featured white actors and
were made in Hollywood, the caption undervalued the vitality of Harlems popu-
lar arts. A portrait of a white-jacketed man alongside a sign marking the ofce of
Dr. Polk, Physician and Surgeon is presumably of Dr. Polk himself, although the
caption emphasizes instead residents patronage of ill-trained druggists, the rst
and last refuge for most sick Harlemites. Look only eetingly refers to the com-
munitys four hundred physicians, who, it says, are too expensive for most poten-
tial patients. This observation may have been trueno doubt was truebut the
caption nonetheless minimized the communitys own medical resources as well as
Harlems middle class that Dr. Polk represented.
Some captions provided factual information difcult or impossible to convey visu-
ally and with a more plausible connection to the images. Two photographs of Harlem
youthsthe boy and mocking advertisement and children playing in the condemned
buildingshared a single caption citing the high rate of juvenile delinquency and
the fact that acute want precipitates most crime, largely petty theft. Less frequently
they enlarged a pictures social implications. The caption to a storefront chapels
modest and tidy altar overarched by electric lights emphasizes such churches social
functions: they provide companionship, dispense charities, are bases for many com-
munity activities. This same text served the cropped version of the shouting wor-
shipper, her ecstasy and the altars dignied stillness meant to play off each other
visually. Other photographs and captions invoke Harlems leisure activities. Among
them are a dance sponsored by one of the areas many clubs; an impressive woman
enjoying a stroll along Seventh Avenue, the Great Black Way; and, perhaps in a
bow to Bigger Thomas, a pool player lining up a shot, a young man who might also
toss off a double rotgut rye, graze your chin with a switchblade knife.
Looks nal photographalmost full-page in size and the largest after the Elks
paradewas a close-up of a woman on hands and knees, scrubbing a oor, a rep-
resentation of jobs held by African Americans. With considerable justication the
caption says such menial work is typical of the vast majority of Negroes; less
defensible is its assertion that for them, there is little joy in life. This scrubwoman
is the only Harlem resident allowed to speak in her own voice. In the articles last
words she says, My knees are hard from prayin and scrubbin. That her religion
might give her joy the magazine refused to acknowledge.
241
The earnestness of Looks piece is beyond dispute. In an era when the mass media
almost entirely neglected African Americans the magazine brought to its nearly two
242 million readers a glimpse of a culture largely invisible to most white citizens. It is a
story, said Look, which every socially minded American must contemplate. For
the creators of the Harlem Document, Looks willingness to publish their photo-
graphs presented an unprecedented opportunity to display them before a national
audience. But Looks rendition nevertheless represented only a fraction of the pic-
tures the group deemed strong enough to publish, numbering at least the the
magazine considered. Perhaps inevitably, important dimensions of their project
were lost, including some represented in its fragmentary later state. The group had
set out to make a community study that would be a nely shaded cultural as well as
political document. In Looks hands it became more an account of joyless lives in
which social pathology is not just the dominant motif but nearly the only one. In
that sense it ironically brought the Harlem Document closer to the spirit of Native
Son, which likewise portrayed African American life as joyless and anomic. Perhaps
when Siskind remembered the project as too unwaveringly critical of Harlem life
he was actually recalling its presentation in Look.
The Politics of the Photo League

The Harlem Document group sometimes had vexed relations with the League,
whose president, Eliot Elisofon, attended one of their meetings early in to try
to ameliorate ill-feeling. Whatever bad blood there had been, he urged, ought to
be forgotten, and the group should try to be better League members. The impu-
tation of disloyalty affronted them, and his visit failed to mollify them. What pre-
cipitated this conict the minutes do not say, but it likely concerned Grossmans
insistence on privileging political judgments over artistic ones and the enmities
that ensued.50
Near the end of the year another are-up involved an apparently similar conict.
The group stored its archive in the League headquarters and someone had removed
pictures from it and used them without permission. The minutes reported that a
batch had been discovered at the Daily Worker ofce and in the Visual Education
Committees les; others had been used to illustrate political circulars and sent
out for exhibition. After discovering these unauthorized uses the group removed the
archive and refused to return it until security could be guaranteed. The miscreants
went unnamed in the minutes and a letter of protest to Elisofon, but it seems likely
they included Grossman because ofcers had access to the archives key. Although
on its face this seemed to be a political dispute, it was more likely a personal one,
given the way the group ended its aggrieved letter: To repeat, we are willing and
even eager for our pictures to be used for liberal and progressive ends, but as these
photographs represent a considerable expenditure of money, time, and energy, they
must be carefully kept. This will facilitate their widest use.51
There has been much speculation about the Leagues politics, some of it tenden-
tious. All commentators agree that it differed from the Film and Photo League in
being an independent organizationspecically without afliation to the Com-
munist Partywith membership open to all. And all condemn as an egregious
McCarthist suppression of civil liberties the Leagues postwar victimization by
anticommunist witch-hunters that forced it to dissolve in . Moreover, all concur
that its aims were progressive and its activities intended to support social reform.
But some reason back from the Photo Leagues suppression after being named on
the attorney generals list of subversive organizations to conclude that in fact it was
one, although as a badge of honor rather than shame.
Fiona M. Dejardin for one argues that her investigation of members activities
and the periodicals in which members published does make a very convincing case
that the League was very left wing and was often afliated with the Communist
Party. In doing so she adopts the premise of the witch-hunters, that any associa-
tion, however tangential, with organizations or periodicals sympathetic with the
Communist Partys program meant that an individual was likely a Communist or
at least a fellow-traveler. Dejardins examples are often dubious, and sometimes she
has her facts wrong. She concedes that although publication in The New Masses did
not necessary mean communist afliation, League members however, could not
have been ignorant of the journals radical leftist leanings and that implies their
agreement with the magazines editorial stance. She also quotes, without correc-
tion, an assertion from the House Un-American Activities Committees Guide to
Subversive Organizations that The New Masses was a nationally circulated weekly
journal of the Communist Party . . . [which] was suppressed by the United States
government for its subversive policies. HUACand Dejardinconfuse The
Masses, suppressed in the war hysteria of before there even was a Communist
Party, and The New Masses, which published uninterruptedly from its founding in
until , when it became Masses and Mainstream. Her view of the Ameri-
can political spectrum also lacks nuancebold chasms separate left and right with
little in-betweenand thus she proposes that Photo League members agreed that
American economic life had failed because of the inherent contradictions of capi-
talism. To any members sympathetic to the New Deal such Marxist terminology
would not be the language they would use, nor would they agree that social injus-
tices were intractable and thus insoluble short of revolutionary change.52
To generalize about the ideological stance of an organization not avowedly politi-
cal is dicey business, especially when its mission is artistic and its tent open to all.
Dejardins evidence is persuasive that some members were likely fellow-travelers.
243
It seems certain that Grossman was one, perhaps even a Party member although
at least two Photo League veterans recalled him as more moderate than the Party
244 wished. Determining the Leagues political stance, insofar as it had one, is made
more difcult because some of its history during the thirties overlaps with the Popu-
lar Front, which blurred distinctions between radicals and liberals and encouraged,
as Michael Denning has argued, a distinctive laboring of American culture. That
mostor probably even allPhoto League members considered themselves pro-
gressive seems beyond question, but whether they were mostly New Deal liberals
or radicals is not so obvious.53
The Leagues most enduring remnant is Photo Notes, and using the method of
Sherlock Holmes, who found revelatory signicance in the dog that did not bark in
the night, identifying what does not appear in the journal indicates that the organi-
zations politics were loosely congruent with those of the New Deals left wing and
not revolutionary. Its canonization of Hine might also suggest such a conclusion
as well as its frequent sponsorship of lecturers who dened themselves as liberals,
including, to take the most obvious, Stryker, Rosskam, Bourke-White and Caldwell,
and Steiner. Even more tellingly, no item in Photo Notes suggests that the Communist
Party and its policies, or even fellow-traveling, played much of a role in the League.
Not a single identiably Marxist analysis appeared in it, nor did it reveal any trace
of the special language of that discourse. Even the capitalist press drew virtually
no attention; there is a single characterization of Life as reactionary but nothing
else despite what must have been members concern about nding outlets for their
pictures. Most revealing, the major events of those years that came with the force
of earthquakes for Communiststhe Non-aggression Pact in August and the
Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June pass unnoticed in Photo Notes,
which certainly would not have been the case had the League been sympathetic to
the Communist Party and its line.
An item from January is in this light especially instructive, the review of
U.S. Camera by Photo Notes editor Louis Clyde Stoumen. This number of
the annual made a great point of being ag-waving American in a bombastic
preface by Maloney. His burst of chauvinism did not bother Stoumen, who in fact
approved of U.S. Cameras emphasis on things American. Although he may have
been thinking mostly of the pictures, his long and thoughtful review never took
issue with Maloneys belligerent nationalism as would have been likely had Stou-
menand other League membersbeen the radicals McCarthyists later said they
were. His approbation seems particularly signicant considering the reviews timing.
It appeared during the interim between the Non-aggression Pact and the Nazi inva-
sion of the Soviet Union, when the Communist Partys line was that the capitalist
nations, the United States included, were as reactionary as Germany and the war
no more than an intramural conict. Maloneys chauvinism provided an irresist-
ible opportunity to reiterate the party line had Stoumen been inclined to do so. It
is usually dangerous to attribute the stance of a single individual to a group, but in
this case the fact that the editorship of Photo Notes was an elective position suggests
Stoumens beliefs did not diverge dramatically from those of other members.54
After December the League immediately began a single-minded concentra-
tion on the warjust as the rest of the United States did. A Photo Notes editorial
four months later asserted that the all inclusive task of the Photo League today,
is to use the photographs it makes as a means of mobilizing the people to a greater
participation in the war effort. Such a commitment followed from the liberal and
antifascist views of the membership, but in practice it meant subordinating the
concerns that had earlier preoccupied the Leagueexploration of photographic
esthetics and their application to social reform. Many of its young members marched
off to war themselves, and the Leagues membership and vitality declined greatly
during the war years. When it was revived after it was less committed to doc-
umentary and soon faced a new challenge to its existence. Its halcyon days were
behind, in those few years before the war when photography, it seemed, could be
an exceptional tool to analyze and even reshape the world.55
245
13
Seeing California
with Edward Weston
New Roads for Those Ready to Travel
Applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the autumn of Edward Weston
described his plan of work in just two sentences: I wish to continue an
epic series of photographs of the West, begun about ; this will include a
range from satires on advertising to ranch life, from beach kelp to mountains.
The publication of the above seems assured. His terseness was surprising
inasmuch as no photographer had ever held a Guggenheim, and so was his
jauntiness about publication which rested on the slender reed of a gallerys
scheme to underwrite it by soliciting subscribers. But he was condent the
thirty-ve prints supporting his application abundantly demonstrated his
qualications and that his many exhibitions since his rst New York show six
years earlier indicated his national standing.1
The next spring he received a Guggenheimalthough not before ampli-
fying his application at the urging of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylorand
embarked on his most productive creative period, making some , photographs
of what in his revised application he called MY Western scene. These pictures
occupy an honored place in photographic history, preeminently for their extraordi-
nary formal excellence, and have also occasioned considerable biographical specu-
lation about whether they intimated his elegiac apprehension of an approaching
mortality. Westons special ambitions for his project have remained obscure, however,
as have its cultural dimensions. Because cultural historians have neglected it, their
accounts of thirties photography have been partial in making documentary seem
to have been the only signicant practice. That is particularly misleading because
Westons Guggenheim photographs enjoyed uncommonly wide dissemination, to
the degree that more likely reached a greater number of viewers than pictures by
other leading photographers except the magazinists. In nding such a popular audi-
ence they achieved one of his ambitions and helped fulll that of photographys art
world to make its nest efforts integral to the nations cultural life.2
Westons projects most enduring memorial is California and the West, published
in and reproducing ninety-six photographs with a text by his wife, Charis
Wilson Weston. The intensied public interest in artful photography made it a
plausible commercial undertaking for a New York publisher, as it would not have
been a decade earlier, and it owed its existence as well to U.S. Camera, which spon-
sored the book. Its handsomely reproduced photographs amply revealed Westons
virtuosity, but inasmuch as Chariss text determined their sequence, glossed their
subjects, and hinted at his intentions, their book needs to be understood as a collab-
orative effort with other valences than solely demonstrating his formal genius. Her
intimate account of their extensive travels and of his making of the photographs
expanded California and the West beyond an art books usual boundaries. Chariss
emphasis on autobiography gave his pictures this coloration as well, and it also
associated the volume with two other genres that ourished in the thirties, the road
book and the guidebook to western travel. And while his photographs formal rigor
often intimated abstract propositions about the natural worlds indivisibility, a sur-
prising number also exhibited temporal preoccupations, especially about the effects
of human interventions on the western landscape and their genesis in American
cultural attitudes. California and the West thus permits a richer understanding of
Westons artistic and cultural ambitions, complicating the standard view of him as
a dedicated formalist who somehow evaded the impress of his culture.3
That this view has been so customary, however, is not surprising because among
the major photographers of the interwar years Weston seemed most disengaged
from the main currents of American life. He had begun as a pictorialist around
but after World War I embraced straight photography and destroyed much of this
earlier work. Alfred Stieglitzs approbation in of his recent images, modernist
in form, conrmed him in his new direction, which he continued to pursue during
Seeing California with Edward Weston
247
two Mexican sojourns in the mid-twenties. Shortly after he returned to California
in he began the sculptural studies of shells, vegetables, kelp, fungi, cypresses,
248 and rocks for which he is still perhaps best known and which preoccupied him into
the early thirties.
He supported himself as a portraitist, work he disliked and tolerated only to buy
time to pursue his art. Aside from his Mexican stays he lived his entire adult life
in California and hardly ever left it, the trip to meet Stieglitz his only eastern visit
until after the Guggenheim years. In California, his preferred residence was remote
Carmel. He was warmly social with other California photographersGroup f.
grew from such associationsbut had only desultory contact with those outside the
state. Unlike Lange, also a professional portraitist, the depression did not inspire
him to turn his lens on its casualties. Working in far-off California with a narrow if
rich range of carefully controlled subject matter he seemed to epitomize the pho-
tographer whose work exemplied art for arts sake.
This was an interpretation he himself sometimes embraced. The idea of beauty
or art as an end needs no defense Weston once insisted. Art is the work of indi-
viduals,it is aristocratic. He was sporadically contemptuous of mass taste and
doubtful it could be reformed, with the artists only option an isolated, unappre-
ciated existence, unless he caters to popular vulgarity. More commonly, he took
an opposite tack and expressed pleasure in how my work has meaning to people
in many walks of life: not only artists and intellectuals respond, but businessmen,
the butcher, the baker, etc.,children too. At such times he would imagine him-
self not as a photographic Rimbaud but leading a vanguard actively transforming
consciousness.4
His daybooks are replete with meditations on the photographers audience, the
state of American culture, and the artists role within it. As the depression deepened
he increasingly puzzled over contemporary developments and began to lay larger
emphasis on the benecial cultural inuence his work might have. He expressed
certainty that a new consciousness then in the making would scrap obsolete social
arrangements and averred his determination to be a spiritual force in this new
world vision as well as his conviction that I am so functioning already. But he
also worried over the political radicalism some acquaintances embraced. He cat-
egorically rejected the attitudes he imputed to themthe class who think art must
be political, evangelistic, who say, What has kelp to do with the revolution? He
believed the real artist was always ahead and alone, he is the leader who clears
the way for revolution with new forms of expression, and he was gratied when a
friend told him that Trotsky had a similar conviction. Art for arts sake is a failure,
Weston concluded. I am not trying to turn the artist into a propagandist, a social
reformer, but I say that art must have a living quality which relates it to present
needs, or future hopes, opens new roads for those ready to travel, those who were
ripe but needed an awakening shock,impregnation.5
Despite a continuing distaste for the Rotarian excesses of American culturea
back-slapping, mob-spirited, intolerant, self-righteous, familiar, evangelistic, regu-
lating, leveling democracyWeston began to embrace a more afrmative view of
American possibilities and stress how he could abet them. In he read Waldo
Franks The Rediscovery of America and vibrated to its oracular pronouncements
about American destiny. Within a sweeping theory of Western history Frank assigned
a chiliastic mission to the United States, to create a spiritual active Whole from
the chaos we feel within us, to tame the machine and supplant commercial values
with those of the symphonic nation. This integration of our wholeness could
be achieved, Frank argued, by a new national leadership in which artists became
central participants, reviving the American mystical tradition that had briey
thrived during the Civil War as represented by Whitman and Lincoln. So exactly
did The Rediscovery of America express his own notions, Weston said, that were he
a writer he would have written just such a book, and Franks ideas matched closely
those he believed his photographs expressed. To one who believes in America,
he exclaimed, this book must give fresh hope, new impetus, desire to carry on, to
see through.6
Subsequently, he claried his belief in a unique American destiny that art could
expedite so long as artists remained unalloyedly American in perception. Too many,
he thought, were not functioning in terms of their racial psyche, the collective
unconscious because they suffered hangovers from European or other native ties,
the reason their work found no audience. Their disturbed condition in no way
resembled his own sense of purposefulness, which he believed his arts indigenous
roots intensied as did his mediums cultural centrality. Photography is peculiarly
adapted to the American psyche, he insisted, it is vital in that it belongs to an
epoch, a race in the making, the becoming.7
Ironically, Weston made these orphic observations in , a year in which his
output reached low ebb. Other activities absorbed his energies and in part accounted
for the trough in his usually strenuous creative schedule. Early in the year he pre-
pared his second New York show for the Delphic Studios and then in the sum-
mer and autumn participated in putting together Group f.s exhibition. He also
agonized over selecting the thirty-nine plates for his rst book, to be published by
Merle Armitage in a limited, signed edition of copies.
But this creative lethargy also reected his need to strike out in a new direction,
his instinct that he had exhausted the possibilities of close-up still lifes. His new
book, with a preponderance of this work, he said, marks the end of a period. At
rst he thought he would concentrate on nudes, and after he and Charis Wilson
249
became lovers she modeled for many gure studies. In them, though, he usually
continued to isolate portions of the models body so that formally they resembled
250 his earlier sculptural close-ups of natural forms.8
But simultaneously and then with increasing frequency he began to make less
meticulously controlled compositions in which organic forms were not isolated,
abstracted, and essentialized but situated within a larger context of natural and
sometimes human history. He called them open landscapes. Their panoramic
spaces and implication that the frame did not circumscribe all that might be worth
seeing signied an important new direction for him, as did their willingness to
incorporate multiple subjects. Such landscapes, he proclaimed in , indicate
the next phase of my work. These pictures presented new and challenging formal
problems, always catnip to Weston, but also foreshadowed a more expansive view of
photographys potential that would serve his ambition to be a staunchly American
artist contributing to the process of cultural regeneration.9
Guggenheims Imprimatur and the Popular Audience

When Westons Guggenheim was announced in March its modest $, sti-
pend spelled salvation, Charis said, because he had been barely scraping by with
portrait sittings and sales of personal work. It enabled him to anticipate a year of
creative activity unimpeded by the exigencies of earning a living, a unique circum-
stance for him. It was not only a personal triumph but a key symbolic moment as
well, putting the Guggenheim Foundations indisputable seal on photographys
artistic standing and foreshadowing its continuing role as patron. His fellowship
would be renewed in , and in the next few years more photographers would
become fellowsWalker Evans in , Lange and Eliot Porter in , and Wright
Morris in .10
Practical matters absorbed the Westons in the days following the announcement,
preeminently nding an appropriate vehicle. They needed freedom to leave Cal-
ifornias main highways, but that required a reliable car, and after other expenses
the fellowship left barely enough for a dubious secondhand one. Their quandary
was solved by Phil Hanna, editor of the Automobile Club of Southern Californias
monthly magazine Westways, who agreed to pay $ per month for ten photographs
and $ for texts about the sites they depicted. This commitment in hand, they
purchased a black Ford V- touring sedan for $ down and twelve $.
monthly installments. Charis dubbed the car Heimy after the fellowship, although
it could more justly have been named Westie.11
Westways published of his new landscapes in twenty-one monthly installments
beginning in August and with a few interruptions continuing until July ,
then reprinted the entire series as a book under the title also used in the magazine,
Seeing California with Edward Weston. The club offered it to subscribers for $
($. before publication) so that one of the most popular features of your maga-
zine would be available in permanent format to take its place as an indispensable
volume in every Californians library. Consonant with Westways editorial aim of
promoting motor touring, each installment brought forward Westons pictures as a
travelog revealing the extraordinary scenic plenitude an observant wayfarer could
discover along Californias highways.12
The Westways arrangement was a practical expedient and did not affect Westons
creative agenda. He offhandedly referred to it as my pot boiler but did not regard
the magazine as a place to dump inferior work. Nineteen of its illustrations also
appeared in California and the West, including some he considered especially strong.
And Westways , subscribers provided the largest audience any photographer
had ever commanded for a sustained body of work. He had long hoped to reach such
a viewership through reproduction. The wider distribution of my work,know-
ing that it was seen by hundreds of thousands, instead of the handful who come in
here [his studio], he once conded to his daybook, would have a ne, strength-
ening effect on me. Addressing such an audience would advance his ambition to
become an inspirational force, opening new roads for those ready to travel.13
Westways was not the only magazine to publish Westons new pictures. A half-
dozen others did, too, giving him a national audience of even more unprecedented
size, beginning with three features in Life in alone. The rst trumpeted the
Guggenheim Foundations wisdom in making its rst photography award to one
of the worlds nest camera technicians, the second recounted his discovery of a
dead man in the Colorado Desert, and the third supplied a progress report on his
fellowship activities. As always in Life, photographs dominated, a dozen examples
of Westons genius. Life usually favored pictures with a distinct narrative, which
Westons lacked, but it also liked celebrities, and its dedication to him testied to
the enlarged public stature the Guggenheim provided.14
New Mexico magazine resembled Westways in emphasizing motor touring, and
his ve appearances comprising twenty-four pictures ran as Camera Touring New
Mexico with Edward Weston. Like its California counterpart New Mexico touted
the photographs practical uses as well as their artistic distinction. They were out-
standing pictures of photographic excellence by Americas leading photographic
genius who had done probably more than any other one man to raise photography
to its present high rank among the arts, while they also served to acquaint the
camera-tourists with the pictorial possibilities in the West and outline rewarding
motoring itineraries.15
As the fellowship was coming to an end early in he began to publish synop-
tic accounts of it, about his goals, equipment, and working procedures. One such
251
piece he addressed to the Magazine of Arts academic readers, and a few months
later it became the preface to the Westways compilation. Camera enthusiasts got
252 an even more detailed discussion in two Camera Craft articles that also outlined
his itineraries, and in Popular Photography he explained how experimenting with
open landscapes taught him to see cypresses anew after believing he had exhausted
their potential. Yet another article appeared as late as in the regional magazine
California Arts and Architecture, written by Charis under a pseudonym that gave her
license to extol the Guggenheim Foundations sagacity. Magazines reprinted some
two hundred of his new landscapes, disseminating them across the nation. Of the
West: A Guggenheim Portrait, a special feature in U.S. Camera , reproduced
yet another twenty-one. In it Charis narrated their travels, a preview of Califor-
nia and the Wests text and the rst hint the book would be jointly authored, while
Edward reiterated his by-then standard account of his project. Because the annual
was regarded by photographers and others as the mediums premier showcase their
piece addressed the most committed participants in its art world.16
In short, an uncommonly large and heterogeneous audience saw generous samples
of Westons Guggenheim work and became informed about his aims and procedures
in making it. Behind these expositions lay a tangle of personal motives, beginning
with his economic one to supplement his fellowship stipend, then to publicize his
forthcoming book, and not least to abet his ambition to be an Emersonian seer. The
publications had their own agendas as well, Westways and New Mexico to encour-
age motor touring, Life to afrm that the medium it specialized in was a respected
artistic discipline, and the others to keep their visual artsminded readers abreast
of the latest developments in its revitalized photographic wing. Westons Guggen-
heim, always prominent in their editorial copy, implicitly authorized such copious
reproduction. Although there is no way of knowing whether his photographs would
have been so widely disseminated without the fellowships imprimatur, it seems
unlikely, and never before (nor after) did he reach such an audience.
Westons Guggenheim both afrmed and heightened the sense that artful pho-
tography had attained a new maturity just as these publications avidity to feature
it reected their conviction that a substantial audience was eager to see his pictures.
Two of his venuesPopular Photography and U.S. Cameraowed their existence
to the reconguration of photographys art world that had brought this larger audi-
ence into its ambit. More generally, his pictures extraordinary dissemination indi-
cated how greatly photography had expanded the boundaries that usually circum-
scribe an artistic disciplines audience, giving one of its most gifted practitioners
an unprecedented popular visibility. Weston was a master because of the work he
executed, but public recognition of it rested on the changes in photographys cul-
tural standing that had taken place during the thirties.17
Narrative and Autobiography
California and the West did not reach as large an audience as the magazinesits ini-
tial press run was less than ten thousand according to Ansel Adamsbut it enjoyed
a permanence and prestige that no periodical could match. Unlike the magazines,
Weston controlled its design and structureillustrations one to a page and set off
by ample white space, six gatherings of sixteen photographs distributed through
the text. The letterpress reproductions were excellent and close in size to his x
negatives. The book was exciting, he thought, and he intended it to be the trium-
phant conclusion to his Guggenheim project and an enduring memorial of it.18
He insisted that he had not merely compiled his best Guggenheim photographs.
Rather, his choices reected three distinct if somewhat competing aims: to represent
his entire project; to provide a full-length portrait of California; and, because he
had not photographed everywhere in it, to indicate what parts he had actually seen.
These goals correlated with the artistic, touristic, and autobiographical dimensions
of the book as a whole.19
Amplifying each of these was Chariss narrative of their travels. Divided into
twelve chapters, it specied itineraries for all but one of their nineteen trips, described
sites they visited, supplied intimate details of their experiences, and spelled out
Edwards working procedures. Her contribution to California and the West impels
three observations. First, the book was not solely a collection of his photographs but
a collaborative undertaking; the title page listed them alphabetically as the preview
in U.S. Camera had not. Second, the pictures cannot be dissociated from her
text. Not only did she recount the making of many of them but also supplied a lens
through which to view them; images and text were symbiotic. And, third, if the
photographs often connoted a timeless natural realm, her texts immediacies added
contemporary resonances. Dialectical is too methodical a term to describe their
relationship, but readers/viewers were encouraged to recognize the photographs
representation of a transcendent realm of enduring form and with the texts help
also to consider their more timely implications.
Chariss tone differed considerably from that of his photographs, which were for-
mal, disinterested, rarely playful, and avoided narrative. She, however, was a gifted
writer of informal prose and possessed a breezy sense of language, a ne grasp of
narrative pace, and an ear for dialogue. Fond of anecdotes, she told them well. She
could also be ironic, often at her own and sometimes Edwards expense. Although
she unmistakably regarded his contribution as of greater importance, she was nei-
ther obsequious nor self-effacing. Their mutual friend Zomah Charlot described
her at the time as a sophisticate, a bohemian, [and] a child of nature, which Cha-
ris later said was how she liked to think of herself. The quality of her writing and
253
her lively intelligence made her a superb collaborator. A less skillful writer, given
the Westons differing emphases and contrasting expressive strategies, would have
254 produced a book divided against itself. A less condent writer would have written
a superuous addendum to the photographs. Instead, text and photographs were
distinct but complementary.20
Charis organized her narrative chronologically, beginning with the letter announc-
ing the fellowship. The publisher wanted it to start differently, presumably because
her account was conventionally incongruous with the awards dignity and the proj-
ects serious purposes. We pinched ourselves and each other, she wrote, executed
calisthenics appropriate to the occasion, and set about translating [our] plans into
fact (). But the Westons insisted on retaining it because her introduction adver-
tised that an intimate account of the projects unfolding would followand by a
narrator who was spontaneous, natural, and enthusiastic, one who would be entirely
collaborative in the work ahead.
The photographs sequence loosely approximates their shooting chronology so
that it mostly parallels her narrative but with enough exceptions to indicate that
other considerations also inuenced it. Geographical unity is one. Sometimes a shot
is included with other views of an area visited more than once, such as Death Valley.
Juxtaposition of particularly arresting formal elements is another concern. Twice in
Weston photographed in Rhyolite, in April and again in December. One picture
of an unkempt graveyard from the December visit is in Group Four, the other two
in Group Five; facing the graveyard pictures prominent unpainted wooden cross is
a decaying saguaro cactus, its stunted arms similarly cruciform. Bookmaking design
is a third reason for disregarding chronology. About ve-sixths of the pictures have
a horizontal format, the shape in which Weston said he instinctively saw. Vertical
images are thus distributed irrespective of chronology to break up a potentially
monotonous horizontality, usually three or so in each group. These deviations are
all triing, their insignicance underlining that Edward and Charis structured their
contributions similarly and intended them to parallel one another.21
One exception is more instructive. Concluding her narrative, Charis intimates that
Edwards nal shot was of a Lake County vineyard, a triumphal conclusion inas-
much as on their rst trip two years earlier he had passed up a similar site where the
light was hazy, assuming a comparable view would soon show up. None did though
until this perfect setting of vineyards we always hoped to nd (). Thus she
brought her narrative full circle and implied that Edward had photographed every-
thing he had aspired to. Amy Conger, however, says the nal shot was of a ower-
ing orchard in Solano County four days later, and she likewise nds biographical
symmetry because he had been dissatised with his rst Guggenheim photograph,
a owering crabapple tree.22
Chariss vineyard nale may be merely literary license, and the facts of only trivial
interest. Of more signicance is that while both photographs appear in California
and the West they are nowhere near its conclusion. The orchard is in Group Three
and the vineyard in Group Four. What replaces them as the books nal pictures
are two made earlier at the MGM Studios in Los Angeles. As with nal words, pho-
tographic conclusions are rhetorically heightened. Had he concluded with either
vineyard or orchard, or both, he would have seconded Chariss triumphalism. That
he did not indicates an uneasiness with narrative, however much he otherwise abided
by its regimen. Even more, this violation of chronology was founded on his need
to foreground his own summary statement about the meaning of his Guggenheim
project, one that distilled both its signicance as a personal undertaking and as a
cultural enterprise.
Chariss narrative is unabashedly autobiographical in contrast with Edwards
disinterestedness. Because she often includes accounts of his working procedures,
though, so a reader/viewer may see a picture and also know of his ardor and often
his difculties in making it, in a sense all the books photographs become reexive.
To take one example from many, her chronicle of his work near Lake Tenaya in
Yosemite emphasizes his zealous determination. Even to begin he must rst wrestle
his bulky equipment, fty pounds of pure unmanagableness, up hazardous moun-
tain slopes. A frustrating day passes as they unsuccessfully try to nd a higher trail
to the beautiful junipers always above us, unreachable. When a way up is nally
discovered he climbs it at dawn for several days, while she stays in their camp. Dur-
ing ve days he photographs all the junipers in reach and everything he could
nd in a radius of ve miles (). Armed with this account, readers then can
appreciate the passionate labor that produced the books four pictures from this
occasion, two each of the elusive junipers and of Lake Tenaya (Group Two), and
see him as Charis does, as an intrepid hero of perception.
A few pictures imbedded more overt autobiographical allusions, often but not
always so subtly as likely to escape some viewers. None would be unaware of the
story of discovering the corpse in the Colorado Desert because even had they missed
it in Life Charis gives a full account (Group One). Those knowledgeable about
photography would recognize that his title for several snow-topped buildings in
Yosemite, Ansel Adams Darkroom, references his erstwhile Group f. colleague,
and particularly well-informed ones might be aware that the picture with which it
is paireda majestic Yosemite peak seen above a scrim of snow-laden r bowsis
the ensembles most Adamsesque picture and an homage to his friend (Group Five).
Viewers who knew even more of Westons career might recognize the self-reex-
ivity in the exterior of a photo studio in Elk, a souvenir of the portrait sittings by
which he supported himself before winning the Guggenheim (Group Five). Only
intimates would know that this establishments proprietor was also the justice of
the peace who married the Westons the year before.23
255
Twice they camped in Death Valleys Texas Spring Camp Grounds, and Charis
provides especially full accounts of those occasions. A photograph of it immediately
256 precedes the nal MGM shots. It brilliantly fuses what a snapshooter would likely
photograph separately, where we stayed and what we saw. In the foreground is the
modern campground with two tents, concrete picnic tables, and sanitary facilities;
bare hummocks, a road passing through them, are in the middle distance; and in
the background is a dramatically striated mesa behind which rise the dark Funeral
Mountains beneath a mottled sky (Group Six). By synthesizing the homely camp-
ground, paved road, and awesome mesa and mountains the photograph fuses the
practicalities of their travels as reported by Charis with his ambition to portray the
Wests inspirational grandeur.24
The most unexpected autobiographical picture is his portrait of Charis. Perhaps
terminology fails here because both Edward and Charis participated in making it,
so that it is both biographical and autobiographical. Charis is one of only three
human gures in the photographs; the other two are the corpse and a young man
in front of a Salinas barn, seen at such a distance his facial features are indistinct.
Her portraits occasion was a Yosemite backpacking trip during which they were
continually assaulted by mosquitoes. To protect herself she wore jeans, sweatshirt,
and thick, calf-length hiking boots and swaddled her head with a scarf. She sits
leaning back against a rock face, her knees bent and her legs splayed. Her gaze is
direct and unabashed but her mien cryptic. She crosses her wrists on her raised
inner thighs so that her hands at once partially mask her pudendum and call atten-
tion to it. The camera is about four feet away and close to the ground, taking in her
whole body in a narrow envelope of rock and earth, its low angle directing equal
attention to her hands and face, her bodys only exposed parts (Group Two).25
It is a remarkable portrait of an attractive young woman (she was twenty-three),
extraordinarily intimate if enigmatic. Several details contribute to its rich compli-
cation. The impression of youthful tenderness is modied by her level gaze and
her expressions inscrutability so that she is at once vulnerable, direct, and opaque.
With her exed knees and spread legs she is relaxed, but this position aunts con-
ventional decorum. Her crossed hands connote modesty but also frame her sex. A
pucker in her stretched jeans simulates her labia. Thick clothing mufes her bodys
outlines and the scarf her hair, but against a background of obdurate stone she is
nonetheless unmistakably female and sexual, even erotic.
His portrait of her enriches and complicates her narratives self-portrait, where
she emphasizes her irrepressibility and droll good humor, as, for instance, in her
account of this very picture. He took it, she says, because failing light made other
subjects impossible, and so incapable was he of easing up that when he could nd
nothing else to do he turned the camera on me, mosquito rigging and all (). Like
her text, his picture suggests her level-eyed candor and disregard for convention
but also overlays something mysterious and sphinxlike on her self-portraits breezy
transparency. Portrait and self-portrait thus become a palimpsest, a more complex
depiction of personality than either alone would be.
As one of only two closely seen persons, her portrait reverberates disproportion-
ately because of its contrast with that of the dead man. Charis represents a manifes-
tation of the life force that Weston usually depicted in naturea mysterious capac-
ity for survival and renewal that, when seen acutely, reveals a holistic perception of
coherence. As she later remarked, he photographed birth, growth, decay, and death
as inseparable parts of the life process. In , by making this portrait, and in
, by publishing it, he made her emblematize the potential for such growth and
integration. Thus, it was not only of his companion and coauthor but also, by its
uniqueness, of a principle of human vitality.26
The picture with which it is juxtaposed also developed autobiographical over-
tones and by contrast strengthened the impression that Charis embodied an lan
vital. In subject the most haphazard of any in the book it portrays a rubbish-strewn
abandoned soda works on the dry bed of Owens Lake. A junked and partially dis-
assembled car, a large tank lying on its side, irregularly spaced electric poles, and
scattered detritus randomly litter it. Even more disorienting is a large trapezoidal
black object dominating the foreground, cutting off the view of the car and tank
and itself bisected by the frames left edge; it is impossible even to imagine what
its original function had been. In this cluttered pictures lower right corner is the
shadow of Westons camera, which, Charis tells readers, he used to complete his
composition. Few if any viewers, however, would have identied its source with-
out her prompting, so fragmented is its shape (). By directing attention to it she
advertises how even confronted with a chaotic setting Edward could call upon a
prodigious capacity for imposing esthetic order and thus meaning on the ux of
visual experience. Simultaneously, she represents the photograph as Edwards self-
portraithis camera the conduit for his genius and the shadow its signso the
facing pages now comprise a joint portrait, each of the collaborators pointing to
the other visually or textually.
Charis makes Edwards voracious creative energy explicit on page after page. In
Death Valley he was so shaky with excitement he could hardly set up his camera
(), and traversing the Colorado Desert he found so much to photograph that
Heimy must be held to a dawdling walk so nothing would be missed (). The abun-
dant photographic opportunities afforded by clouds and land forms in the Sierras
made Edward [whirl] like a dervish to keep up with the action on all fronts ().
In Yosemite after a snowstorm he went berserk. Everywhere he looked there was
something to photograph ().
A leitmotiv of her narrative is a contrast between Edward as the epitome of syn-
thesizing creative vision and the insipid perception of tourists, especially snapshoot-
257
ers, those who Came and Saw and (usually) Clicked (). At popular sites they
would dash up, snap, and dash away, faster than you could keep count (). Such
258 a procession amused them at Donner Lake while he waited between exposures for
the light again to become right as the sun ducked in and out of heavy clouds. A
young man momentarily detached himself from the caravan and approached to show
some of his pictures and admire Edwards view camera. Like other amateurs they
encountered, his next comment was, said Charis, utterly predictable: I bet that
camera of yours takes pretty good pictures. Edwards patient explanationthat
he guessed it was like any other camera, it depended on what you did with itonly
confused his interlocutor, who backed away as if Weston were deranged ().
Readers/viewers of California and the West could see what he achieved on this
occasion and measure its distance from the usual snapshot. Donner Lake sharply
divides foreground and background. The latter is almost saccharine, according
to one viewer, a vista of a r-fringed lake, uffy clouds, and horizon mountains,
the view a snapshooter would favor. But dominating the foreground is a drag lines
bucket, an industrial artifact those who came to click would have elided. Its complex
shape of triangles and curves is visually dynamic, and its left side roughly approxi-
mates the contours of the lakes shoreline and its hoist a mountains peak, uniting
the pictures halves and exploring the universality of form that so interested Weston
(Group Two).27
Its synthesis of foreground and background, however, was not merely the reso-
lution of a formal problem. It also raised cultural questions. Does this synecdoche
for twentieth-century technology and progress represent a violation of the pristine
natural world, an egregious machine in the garden? Or does the pictures integrated
composition indicate a more harmonic union of the natural and the man-made?
Weston was among the most unsentimental of photographers, and facile contrasts
of pure nature and debased human efforts held little appeal for him. The drag
lines purpose, moreover, is road building, and because the Westons depended on
highways, blithely condemning it would seem churlish. Unlike the Owens Lake
shot, furthermore, this one rigorously organizes its disparate elements, making of
them a coherent esthetic whole. Still, the picture insists on no preordained reading.
What it does demonstrate, as Chariss account of its circumstances makes evident,
is the unique vitality of his creative imagination as it negotiated the visible world.
A snapshooters view palely imitated what was seen; Westons remade it into some-
thing new and rich.
The autobiographical complementarities in pictures and text reinforce Califor-
nia and the Wests most apparent ambition, to warrant his preeminence as a hero
of perception. The pictures alone would have intimated it, but the text enlarges
on and claries it. Art usually conceals the artists labor, and photography perhaps
especially seemed effortless at a moment when it was only recently established as
a major art form and when millions practiced it as an avocation. The interpenetra-
tion of Edwards images and Chariss narrative produced a synergetic afrmation
of his superior vision and invited the books readers/viewers to acknowledge the
imaginative genius his photographic work demanded.
Road Books and Western Travel

The Westons collaboration generated other outcomes as well. One was that Cali-
fornia and the West became more explicitly a road book. Because of his photographs
inattention to the depressions upheavals Weston has usually been portrayed as
immune to cultural inuences. But in predicating his project on automobile travel
he was sharing an impulse that encouraged scores of writers and numerous pho-
tographers in the thirties to get behind the wheel to discover the America beyond
their own studios and workrooms. And by combining photographs and text to
reveal the discoveries made on these travels, the Westons book joined a genre that
ourished in the depression.
William Stott says there were hordes of writers and intellectuals on Ameri-
can highways in those years. They included such well-known authors as Sherwood
Anderson and Erskine Caldwell as well as many lesser lights. Nathan Aschs title,
The Road: In Search of America (), could represent the ambitions of most of
them. John Steinbecks incessant travels researching The Grapes of Wrath received
wide publicity when the novel appeared in , and its account of the Joads made
it a special kind of road book, authenticated by his odyssey. Often writers substanti-
ated their observations validity by citing how many miles they had traveled, as the
Westons had in U.S. Camera and Camera Craft (the book has no such tally).
One writer said she logged , miles, another about fteen thousand. The
Westons gave their total as thirty-ve thousand.28
Photographers also took to the highways, often with a writer-companion. For
a month in Berenice Abbott motored through the South and Midwest with
Elizabeth McCausland. They planned to undertake a documentary portrait of
America in words and pictures, and the trip was a preliminary canvass for it. Like
Weston, they applied to the Guggenheim Foundation, but it turned down their
proposal in and again in . Although Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor
omitted their personal experience in An American Exodus they nonetheless felt the
necessity to state that the book represented what we have seen and learned from
many miles of countryside. Following his rst book of reportage from the road
Erskine Caldwell decided he needed a photographer to accompany him for the next.
After Margaret Bourke-White joined him and You Have Seen Their Faces became
a best-seller (and the writer and photographer man and wife), they embarked on
259
further collaborations. Say, Is This the U.S.A. () documented the impres-
sion and feel of America they experienced on their coast-to-coast travels. Let Us
260 Now Praise Famous Men was not a road book but Agee and Evans trip to Alabama
partook of the same cultural imperative to see America anew that lay behind other
motoring collaborations. It had been a Fortune assignment, and that magazine, like
its sister, Life, often dispatched photographers and writers around the nation to
take its pulse.29
The Westons project differed from these in a number of important ways. Unlike
their photographs, his were not documentary, although he wafed a bit about it. In
his Camera Craft article he had given his projects title as
; in the book the next year it became
. His initial formulation reected
his perception of documentarys growing prestige and a wish to associate his work
loosely with it. The revision indicated his recognition that the book he and Charis
produced consorted poorly with the aims usually ascribed to it. His pictures did
not portray people and relate them to their environment, and aside from occasional
encounters with snapshooters and miscellaneous others Chariss narrative did not
deviate from a preoccupation with their private experience. Nor did photographs or
text evince any political or reformist tendencies, as documentary usually does. The
Westons did not aspire to discover America as a socially complex modern civiliza-
tion, and they almost entirely avoided sites where that would be most apparent.30
But the larger similarities California and the West shared with other projects of
the thirties combining words and photographs are more signicant. For all of his
previous condence in the autonomy of photographs, with this project Edward
warmly embraced their textual cohabitation. Four years later, when he looked back
on the Guggenheim years with a nal summarizing entry in his journal, he contin-
ued to feel the book was so well-told that further commentary was superuous.
Like other photographers at the time who worked with writers, he had come to
subscribe to the principle that words and photographs together could create a uni-
ed, synthetic whole. This was, of course, a judgment inected by affection for his
collaborator, but it also conformed to a cultural disposition that ourished in the
thirties. Photographys enhanced prestige as an art form and as a way of knowing
paradoxically increased the desire that it be annotated verbally. Rather than dimin-
ishing the image, expressive language was believed to enhance it, multiplying and
not challenging its inherent potency.31
If California and the West stressed the Westons personal experience more exclu-
sively than other road books, it was a difference only of degree. Such books char-
acteristically pitted an observer against a newly discovered reality, thus proffering
not so much a disinterested report as how it affected the observer. Stott says that
being there was a criterion of authenticity to an unusual degree in these years. Most
commonly, the reality encountered was a social one, which the Westons was not,
but the specicity with which they reported their experiencepictures and text
mutually reinforcingwas of a piece with this strong tendency in the expressive
culture of the decade.32
The Westons also set out, if not precisely with the same emphases as their coevals,
to discover and reveal an unseen America, at least its westernmost parts. Even their
regional stress corresponded to one of the eras cultural preoccupations. Charis
subtitled her rst chapter Initiation because it recounted their initial Guggen-
heim trip and also intimated that their journeys promised to reveal mysteries here-
tofore invisibleand, in fact, Edward had not seen most of the country they would
traverse. Underlying their exploration was the assumption, also shared with other
travelers, that something distinctive, even unique, inhered in the American coun-
tryside and that photographs combined with language constituted a new medium
superbly equipped to reveal it. By any usual reckoning Edward Weston was hardly
a nationalist at all, but his project to concentrate on the Wests extraordinary variety
and impressive grandeur nevertheless accorded with and was perhaps inspired by
the cultural nationalism that characterized the years before World War II. More-
over, he believed in the cultural inuence his work could exercise and that bringing
to the attention of other Americans the transcendent qualities of their own land
presented an admirable opportunity to achieve it.
It was not only writers and photographers who took to the highways to see the
country but also other Americansand by the millions. In the interwar years railroad
ridership decreased while automobile travel increased sixfold. Nor had economic
calamity dampened public enthusiasm for recreational motoring, and much of the
growth occurred during the depression. By the mid-thirties Americans spent half
of their leisure budgets on vacation travel and took percent of their holidays by
car. In visitors to national monuments and parks had risen to sixteen million
from just over six million only four years earlier.33
Motorists particularly favored the West because of its immense variety and many
national parks, and tourist authorities responded by actively cultivating them for
the dollars they could contribute to local economies. One such organization was
the California Tourist Association, which in put together a handbook welcom-
ing visitors to a veritable paradise of scenic beauty, to health-giving sunshine, the
tang of mountain pines, the zest of life in a land where Nature is most alluring. It
urged travelers to keep a diarysketching your routes, noting places of interest
along the wayand make photographs to share with friends at home who per-
haps have not yet had the opportunity and pleasure of your tour, but who may thus
enjoy it vicariously.34
Books supplying vicarious western travel ourished in the thirties. Bert Clarks
sentiment in One Hundred Thousand Miles by Automobile through the West: Wayside
261
Observations was a staple of this literature. On western highways, he wrote, tourists
could adventure away from the hum-drum of affairs and into a realm of delights
262 which the motor car and good roads have opened to all. Not only is there gold
in them thar hills, but better, an abundance of Health and Happiness free as the
winds. Enhancing motor travels therapeutic value were the educational benets
that sightseeing at world-famous attractions provided. Travel authors recommended
Californias popular touring destinations, usually including Death Valley, Yosemite,
the Motherlode country, the redwoods, and the Pacic littoral, all also visited by the
Westons, as well as others they mostly avoided, notably its cities. While these top sites
ought not to be missed, authors cautioned that a rigid itinerary undermined the sense
of exhilarating freedom that travel ought to provide. What a world of excitement
people miss who take their touring seriously, holding to a dull schedule as closely
as any transportation company! warned Charles Finger, one of the most popular
and prolic writers, and he along with others counseled leaving main highways to
wander back roads where the authentic West could be discovered. Lewis Gannett
put their argument succinctly: The wayfaring automobilist in the wide spaces of the
West would experience a real sense of what this country and its people are.35
Californians were especially inveterate motorists, indefatigably exploring the
states nether reaches on its excellent highway system. It had one of the highest
proportions of automobile ownership, and cars with California plates outnumbered
all others in national parks as early as . The Works Progress Administrations
California: A Guide to the Golden State saw their eagerness to get behind the wheel
as an atavism. The restlessness of the men who made the western trek persists
in the unquenchable wanderlust with which their descendents have taken to the
automobile, thronging the highways with never-ending streams of trafc bound
for seashore, deserts, forests and mountains.36
Weston had concluded his revised Guggenheim application by emphasizing that
his project required mobility. For the full realization of the work I hope to do, he
wrote, freedom to travel would be imperative. As travelers he and Charis were
uncommon in their trips duration and scope and in the fact that they were pur-
poseful and not for leisure, but in most other ways their goal of exploring Califor-
nia by car was universally embraced. They not only took in most of its well-known
sites but also wandered off main roads as travel writers had advised. They would
have scoffed at the California Travel Associations purple boosterism, but they, too,
believed that California was a land where Nature is most alluring. And their book
recording their journeys, although vastly superior to other travelers accounts of
California, resembled them in celebrating the states scenic wonders, delineating
worthwhile itineraries, and prescribing especially rewarding modes of travel. In
short, far from being anomalies the Westons journeys echoed well-established cul-
tural practices of the thirties. Like other travel books California and the West framed
these practices as constituting something more signicant than mere recreation.
Pursued self-consciously they could become both therapeutic and educative.37
Perhaps the best-known manifestations of motor tourings ubiquity were the
WPA state guidebooks, although the California Guide, published in , appeared
too late to be of use to the Westons. Its nearly seven hundred pages of informa-
tion-packed text surveyed fourteen cities and outlined fourteen ambitious driving
itineraries, with supplementary sections on Death Valley, Yosemite, Sequoia and
General Grant National Parks, and the San Francisco Worlds Fair. No single travel
writer could ever duplicate its plenitudea team of researchers and writers put it
togetherbut that notwithstanding California and the West resembled California:
A Guide to the Golden State in some noteworthy ways.
Like the Guide, Charis supplied itineraries to the states attractions, less elabo-
rate ones but specic enough. To get to Yosemite quickly take the northern route,
the Big Oak Flat Road (); from the southeast the All Year Highway (U.S. )
is best (). Highway north of Albion was a delight, alternating canyon and
sea views (). The road up to Dantes View in Death Valley is the roughest mile
in creation, but the prospect to which it leads repays the risk (). California and
the Wests structure reinforced its tutelary dimension, each chapter except the last
centering on a discrete touring area. An appended full-page map located the sites
the Westons visited.
She also proffered advice on congenial places to stop and traveling pleasures to
enjoy. A hillside campsite in the Laguna Mountain Recreation Area featured stone
replaces in a pine grove, wooden picnic tables, and best of all, the clearings leveled
for tents have been mattressed a foot deep with dry pine needles (). Cuyamaca
State Park offered acres of campgrounds to choose from, and the one on which
the Westons settled had grass and trees and streams, and deer peering at us from
the thickets (). Desert visitors should try a date milkshake, the perfect concoc-
tion for the region, so ineffable that they must be tasted to be understood ().
Unconstrained by political timidities that kept the Guide sanitized of criticism she
also warned of tourist scams. The in Tracy adver-
tised in signs all along the roadside, but unless a customer
specically requested otherwise it was served sweetened. Dates at roadside stands
in date-growing country were exorbitantly priced, more cheaply gotten at home
(); the Guides description of Date City, however, blandly averred that fresh
dates are on sale at stands lining the road.38
Charis embellished the itineraries with local-color sidelights and sightseeing
advice. Near Olema could be found an ancient Portuguese cemetery with lifelike
portraits on the gravestones (). Crowning the Mendocino Masonic Hall was an
redwood statue of Father Time toying with a young womans braids; the locals
painted it each year, so proud were they of it (). The Vallecito stage station had
263
been admirably restored, unlike mission restorations (). Lake Helen, in Las-
sen Volcanic National Park, was named for the rst white lady to climb Lassen
264 Peak (). In Eureka, the Carson House was a gingerbread masterpiece ().
WPA researchers unaccountably missed the Portuguese cemetery, but other-
wise the Guide included identical information.39 It had illustrations, ninety-
nine contemporary photographs, about the same number as California and the West,
although grouped by subject rather than corresponding to itineraries as in the
Westons book. Many depicted sites Edward did not photograph, including indus-
trial scenes, architectural landmarks, public institutions, and places of recreation;
a few showed migrant workers. One-fourth depicted cities, whereas Weston had a
single urban shot. Famously picturesque locations that he avoidedYosemite Falls,
Montereys Old Whaling Station, and Spanish missionsalso numbered among
its illustrations. The Guides photographs held few surprises, portraying sites and
activities most Californians would have agreed typied the state.
But the two books also have illustrative as well as informational congruences, a
dozen photographs of identical sites. Both include vineyards and orchards, Yosemite
in the snow, Death Valley, and Donner Lake; Mount Shasta appears in both, as do
rocky coastlines, the Owens Valley, the San Francisco waterfront, and a lm stu-
dios sound stage. Unsurprisingly, Westons pictures are strongermore novel in
approach, more rigorously organized, and more visually arresting in every way. The
Guides entirely conventional, postcard-pretty view of Mount Shasta, for instance
its snowy summit reected in a tranquil lakelacks the originality and tonal sub-
tlety of Westons and also his vigorous ecological commentary contrasting its soli-
tary majesty with the foregrounds clear-cut forest (Group Five). But although the
superiority of his views is hardly beside the point, it is not the only conclusion a
comparison invites. If he proffered a distinctive view of the state, one that diverged
considerably from the Guides predictable survey, there was nevertheless enough
duplication to suggest that Westons California shared some overlap with what the
WPA staff regarded as typical. And that congruity reveals two important features
of California and the West, one related to Westons cultural ambition and the other
to his artistic mtier.
Including photographs of well-known sites along with many more of unexpected
ones invited viewers to develop an enlarged and richer understanding of how to see
their environment, familiar and not, and in doing so to hone their spiritual receptiv-
ity to Californias extraordinary plenitude. It put forward an argument for revision
more than a determinedly idiosyncratic revelation, as a book that included only, say,
driftwood stumps, kelp, and tree bark (all in the Westons book) would have. He had
told the Guggenheim Foundation that he wanted to portray MY Western scene
and in that he succeeded, but not without acknowledging as well the Western scene
of others, including his potential viewers/readers, whom he urged to see anew even
these familiar sites through the clarifying lens his pictures supplied.
Although there is no evidence that the Westons ever looked at the WPA Guide
or intended his photographs to be a correction of it, it hardly matters because the
kinds of pictures it featured were so ubiquitous. They could be seen everywhere, in
books and magazines and on postcards. By journeymen professionals, they were a
notch above most snapshots but not by much. Westons Donner Lake shot, assisted
by Chariss text, marked the distance in perception between it and those by snap-
shooters. All of California and the West, especially a dozen or so examples of often-
photographed sites, revealed how thoroughly his work transcended pictures by other
professionals. In such a comparison Westons photographs were distinguished by not
only more masterly technical execution but also by exceptional revelatory power, and
thus they advertised the superiority of artistic photography to its workaday cousin.
Slouching toward MGM

Well-known sites notwithstanding, Weston had no ambition to make his photographs
specically informative for prospective tourists. Aside from the Texas Spring Camp
Grounds he included none of the amenities Charis mentions. Nor, with one excep-
tion, did he illustrate any of the plethora of tourist conveniences a commercial cul-
ture had erected for the motoring publicno gas stations, motor courts, drive-in
restaurants, or even highways. And the one exception is so outlandish as to be sur-
real, a giant cup advertising hot coffee to Mojave Desert travelers (Group Four).
If Chariss contribution provided the personal context in which the pictures were
made, his would illuminate the teleological and cultural meanings immanent in the
California landscape.
For Weston, natural facts were indexes to spiritual facts, although not supernatu-
ral ones, and he intended his photographsas an ensemble as well as individually
to reveal the natural worlds fundamental unity and indivisibility. The American
West provided exemplary opportunities for this kind of revelation because it still
contained numerous pockets where natures immense variety was untrammeled,
and he meant to recall Americans to their historical intimacy with the extraordi-
nary environment they had inherited. He wanted also to demonstrate how human
attempts to manipulate and exploit nature were doomed to failure, with the nota-
ble exception of agricultural husbandry. By revitalizing his audiences perception
of natures inspirational coherence he believed his photographs could serve as an
antidote to social despair and fulll his ambition to be a spiritual force in this new
world vision for which he sensed widespread hunger.
265
About half of California and the Wests plates depict pristine nature. A few resem-
ble Westons earlier close-ups of natural forms by isolating subjects and supplying
266 no horizon line to indicate depth or scale; unlike the earlier work, though, the frame
does not encapsulate them so that they extend beyond it. A driftwood stump against
a dark, ltered sky, its whorls and grooves illuminated by subdued light (it had been
foggy), is treated abstractly (Group Five), as is a gnarled Joshua tree with peeling
and contorted branches (Group One). The ovoid shapes of a swath of Solomons
seal decoratively ll the frame, complicated by overlapping fern fronds (Group
Three). A scorched tree trunks corrugations are likewise closely seen, patterned
by a fantastic network of craters and valleys (Group Four).
But abstraction is modied by their titles, which designate a specic locale and
thus reveal what an observant eye may discover in some of Californias favorite
tourist centersLittle River Beach State Park, Joshua Tree National Monument,
the redwood forest, and the Motherlode country. With the exception of the Joshua
tree, what the pictures depict would not be their sites most noted attractions; they
encourage viewers to enlarge their perception of such well-known places, paradoxi-
cally by narrowing their vision. They propose that everywhere in California innite
manifestations of natures capacious beauty await travelers alert enough to discover
them. Had they appeared without titles, or with less geographically explicit ones,
the photographs formal excellence would have been unchanged but their linkage
with the text reduced and the cultural overtones they accrued from the interpen-
etration of text, title, and image mufed.40
Panoramic landscapes, half from national or state parks, also bore geographi-
cally specic titles. Although a few depicted what snapshooters might character-
istically photographthe vista from Dantes View in Death Valley being a tourist
favorite (Group One)most did not. Among his Death Valley views, for instance,
several center on the parks less visited corners. The Westons considered Evening
Cloud/Panamints the sensation of his rst months work. A brilliant rendition of
tonality, the mountains black outline and a dark-gray mottled sky frame an extraor-
dinary light-gray cloud formation so neatly bisected as to resemble a pair of lips
(Group One). Had he been less adamant about photography not aping painting or
admired the artist more it might have been meant as an homage to Man Rays most
famous painting, Observatory Timethe Lovers. Instead it demonstrates the genius
of Westons vision and his technical virtuosity, exemplifying the unexpected beauty
to be discovered in Death Valley by visitors who learned to turn their eyes from its
best-known features.41
If Evening Cloud/Panamints approaches the theatrical, another of Death Valley
represents a minimalist contrast with it. A stony hills plateau, pitted and stark, forms
the low horizon line. Above it cirrus clouds feather the sky. Their parabolic shapes
suggest motion as they seem to be moving from left to right toward the frames edge,
creating a dynamic tension between unyielding rock and scudding clouds (Group
One). A Time magazine piece that characterized Westons photographs as mirror-
ing static nature exercised him greatly. Anyone who thinks nature static hasnt
taken the trouble to look at it, he retorted. Moreover, its changeability offers the
photographer both difculties and opportunities. Before the shutter may be opened
clouds can dissipate, light change, or wind disarrange a subjectand the picture is
lost. Photographys genius resides in its ability to capture the momentnot just
any moment, but the important one, the one moment out of all time when your
subject is revealed to the fullestthat moment of perfection which comes once
and is not repeated. The Death Valley view epitomized his inspired capacity to
reveal such an evanescent moments perfection and also intimated a philosophical
truth about natures dynamism. Inherent in natural forms was a mysterious dialectic
between permanence and change, and photographs such as this would lead viewers
to a profounder recognition of the vitality and organic wholeness of the world they
represented.42
Two pictures of the junipers Weston labored so hard to reach at Lake Tenaya
invite a similar conclusion. In the rst his camera is near its trunk, about ve feet
distant, the oblique light emphasizing its rough bark and, on a barkless portion,
the woods grain. More than anything else it is a study of texture. In the second he
set up his camera perhaps twenty-ve feet away, making visible the entire tree and
stony ledge on which it clung. This view reveals that there are in fact two trees, a
living and dead one side by side, with the barkless ones gnarled trunk overarched
by the living ones leafy crown. Natures erce tenacity is represented by the appar-
ently inhospitable stone in which the living tree has taken root, and its immutable
regeneracy symbolized by the two trees proximity (Group Two).43
The juniper photographs also illustrate a general proposition about photography,
that a pictures subject counts for less than what the photographer does with it. They
dramatize how differing aims, formal and ideational, require singular approaches,
even to the same subject. And their placement in the book raises an additional
point. They are not paired but separated by a vista of Lake Tenaya. This is among
Westons loveliest shots, the limpid water receding from the picture plane and
faintly reecting the granite hills nestling the lake, but its one-point perspective
also most resembles a postcard view (Group Two). Sequenced between the juniper
photographs it serves a didactic function as a compact lesson in how to approach
natures plenitude in locations like Yosemite where it is so grandly displayed. His
composition exalts the serene and accessible beauty of Lake Tenaya while the nearby
but less conventionally picturesque junipers allow equally rewarding perceptions
of natures enduring qualities.
Weston in his Guggenheim years is most commonly thought of as concentrat-
ing on the innitely interrelated structures of nature. His many public statements
267
encouraged that view, often accompanied by pictures such as those made at Lake
Tenaya. On one occasion, though, he acknowledged that even if humans were
268 mostly absent their artifacts were not, and many of his photographs were pictures
of people as well as life. This observation is borne out by California and the West,
where fully half depict the effect of human culture on the landscape.44
The books near exclusion of Californias cities is its most noticeable omission of
human presence. Although this was consonant with Westons dislike of urban life
and the books emphasis on motor touring, it undermined one of the considerations
he said guided him in organizing it. Even though providing a full length picture
of California was not his only objective it was among them, and it likely accounts
for the single urban view, of the San Francisco waterfront. Seen from a high angle
(Telegraph Hill), the waterfronts complex geometry is its most striking feature.
Contrasting diagonals predominate, of buildings in the foreground, a middle-dis-
tance roadway and quay with two piers angling away, and in the background the
span of the newly built Bay Bridge leading to Yerba Buena Island. Only a ferry, its
wake, and a distant sailboat are parallel to the lens. The photograph encompasses
an extraordinary number of means for transporting people and goodsautomo-
biles, a tugboat, railroad cars, and a docked ship as well as the ferry, sailboat, and
bridgeand thus connotes the citys dynamic spatial and economic organization
(Group Three). But because it uniquely does so its cultural reverberations about
modernization are faint. Its dazzling formal structure keeps its inclusion from seem-
ing pro forma, but it stands distantly apart from the books other photographs.45
Weston preferred to photograph dead or dying places, of which there are a fair
number in California and the West. Charis said that he found some locales more
interesting visually after they had been transformed and reshaped by the environ-
ment, although she did not indicate why citiesrife with time-worn objectswere
not for him inviting places for work. Decay satised a visual preference and also
represented a heterodox cultural attitude. He loathed the commonplace idea that
progress was measured by commercial and technological development and believed
that the transformations wrought by these forces were evanescent. Nature was
durable, the works of humans were not, which suggests why cities attracted him so
little. That proposition could be exemplied by photographing sites where humans
had once labored to transform natures wealth into their own, only then to decline.
The decrepitude was visually arresting at the same time it symbolized the folly of
material ambitions.46
The half-dozen locales illustrating this perception had all once been engaged in
the extractive or timbering industries and were arrayed along a narrow spectrum of
dying to dead. The once booming town of Rhyolite was entirely defunct, its gold
mines abandoned and buildings rotting. Weston called it Nevadas Athens and
was fascinated by it according to Charis, who supplied a potted town history ().
Its ruins, abandoned only a generation earlier, had once been substantial buildings
of adobe and nished stone. His decisions about what to photograph among its
remaining shards intensied its poignancy. In one picture only a facades matched
stonework columns are left standing, and in the other graceful open arches empha-
size the collapsing walls and gullied hills beyond (Group Five). Defunct, too, was
Leadeld eleven miles west of Rhyolite. A decomposing wooden structure and
sidewalk littered with debris reveal the futility of its once-optimistic hopes (Group
One). He shot the Rhyolite and Leadeld structures from a middle distance of eight
to fteen feet, enough to indicate their settings barrenness but also to delineate the
building materials textures. The full sunlight on their facades precluded shadows
that might have romanticized them. A different camera placement in Death Valleys
Twenty Mule Team Canyon, a high and long shot of a decrepit wooden Old Bunk
House, varied his compositional strategies to emphasize the surrounding clay hills
scarred from mining (Group One). Borax mining had been abandoned in Death
Valley a mere ten years earlier when cheaper ways to extract it had been developed
in the Mojave Desert.
Jerome, Arizona, was alive, but barely. Once a copper-mining center built on the
side of a mountain, the mines had closed and only smeltering remained in the valley
below. Its Chamber of Commerce proclaimed it the most unique town in America
for its fty-mile view, as Charis sarcastically reported (). Weston photographed
it from above on the mountain road winding down to the town, its two or three
dozen buildings straggling along the mountains spurs and its streets somnolent.
The smelters smoke blots out most of the fty-mile view but not enough to erase
the sense that this perched town is a dying excrescence in an otherwise awesome
landscape (Group Five).
On northern Californias coast both Albion and Elk, onetime lumber towns ten
miles apart, had been abandoned by their sawmills and thereafter by most of their
citizens. Chariss description of Albion is lugubrious, itemizing the empty shacks,
the discarded machinery, the broken bridges, the peeling paintand over all, the
heavy, silent sadness of the fog (). Edwards picture of houses, mill, and river
connotes a similar melancholic stillness, although her text was needed for view-
ers to know the town was dead (Group Three). Elk was in actuality comparatively
bustlingits business district had a post ofce, two groceries, a bar, and two gas
stations ()but Edwards view includes just an outlying wooden church and
photography studio. Not only does their forlorn setting imply abandonment but
he also set up his camera to emphasize the unkempt and apparently disused verge
fronting them (Group Five).
If these sites implied a slow reversion to their natural state, the Owens Valley
represented a more ominous prospect. In addition to the littered bed of the drained
Owens Lake with its defunct soda works, California and the West includes two more
269
views of the despoliation wrought by withdrawal of the valleys water. Both feature
cottonwoods, their bark peeling or trunks burned black. With one Weston placed
270 his camera so that a trunk would mostly obscure a sizable living bush in order not
to qualify the impression of ruination (Group Two). The other juxtaposes a cot-
tonwoods barkless trunk with a power pylon, the camera tilted upward to outline
both against the dark sky. In processing the negative he brought out tonal contrasts
in tree and pylon to emphasize the power lines spanning the frame. Electric power
was not responsible for the ruination of the Owens Valley, but the pylon and lines
were an unmistakable metonymy for the modern rage to exploit nature. Chariss
summation seconds the pictures dismal judgment: The Owens Valley is a fantas-
tic forest of death and civilization ().
If these pictures imply an irreversible ravishment of the Owens Valley, another
has more hopeful connotations, a panorama in which the sweeping valley oor is
overarched by a rainbows arc. In California and the West it labors to ameliorate the
otherwise bleak view of the regions fate, the rainbow conventionally emblematic
of natures radiant benevolence. But it represented wishful thinking and was the
least visually distinguished of the books photographs. Blurry and indifferently
composed, it was also sentimental as Weston rarely was (Group Three). He never
again allowed it to be reprinted, nor near the end of his life did he include it among
his Project Prints, the images he believed his strongest.
Westons dozen or so pictures of Californias ranches are a more successful
counterpoint to this survey of human malfeasance. Although a few focus on objects
worn by usea spavined fence, an ancient slaughtering wheelmost emphasize a
pastoral tranquility in which human effort harmonizes with the natural world. An
idyllic orderliness is their keynote. Mounded haycocks sinuously line a newly mown
eld near the San Simeon Highway (Group Six); oblique rows of owering plants on
an Orange County bean ranch are punctuated by three feathery trees casting circular
shadows (Group One); les of receding grapevines attractively pattern a hillsides
contours (Group Four); a owering orchard lies below a hill dotted with shade trees
(Group Three); and a farmhouse in a Carmel Valley pear orchard nestles beneath
the Highlands slopes (Group Six). These views all celebrate the earths fecundity,
the human capacity to organize it, and the visual pleasures they afford. A ock of
grazing sheep near Clear Lake is Westons most insistent evocation of pastoralism.
They occupy the foreground hill in a composition that looks down on them from
a higher elevation. Beneath them is a clump of shady oaks, and then squared-off
elds lead to the tree-fringed Clear Lake itself. Beyond its smooth expanse rises an
unbroken line of misty hills (Group Three). In its limpidity and seamless organiza-
tion of so many disparate elements it is one of the books most winning pictures.
Charis has little to say about these photographs and nothing about the nobility of
agriculture, but it hardly matters because his endorsement is so apparent. If he was
disenchanted with much of Californias past and present development, the states
farmsteads were exempt from his displeasure. He composed to emphasize these
sites harmonious adaptation to existing landforms, and by doing so he afrmed
allegiance to the notion that agriculture occupies a special place in American life
because it is in harmony with the natural world rather than antagonistic to it. These
pictures reminded viewers that domesticated nature could be as inspiring as the
more savage variety and that savoring natures benecence need not wait for a visit
to Yosemite or Death Valley. In an agricultural state it is just down the road.
The Westons own neighborhood was Salinas, nationally famous in as Stein-
becks home and the site of violent confrontations four years earlier between strik-
ing lettuce pickers and the states highway patrol. So emblematic had the Salinas
strike become of antipathies between landowners and agricultural labor that in
An American Exodus Lange and Taylor included two photographs of it, neither by
her. Weston photographed a horse dealers barn near the town, its subject and the
compositions orderly symmetry subtly linking it with his studies of agricultural
sites. Its formal structure, titling, and the history of its making all suggest that it
had for him special signicance. Aside from Chariss portrait it is the only picture
with a living human being, a young man holding a pinto horse before the barns open
doors. The barn, moreover, is the books only building still in use seen so closely,
lling nearly the entire frame. Its title, Chief Heggens Barn, Salinas (Group
Six), is also unique, or nearly so, in naming a community of some size. Salinas had
ten thousand residents and was the seat of Monterey County, a considerably larger,
more bustling place than Elk or Albion or Jerome. Finally, although Charis offhand-
edly reports that he made the photograph sometime during the fellowships second
year (), Amy Conger says its negative number indicates a later date, after the
fellowships expiration, making it likely that he shot it especially to compensate for
something otherwise missing from the book then in its planning stage.47
Chief Heggens Barn is unique as well in explicitly evoking western mythol-
ogy. A circular folk painting occupies much of the barns facade and portrays a
cowboyaccoutered in a soft felt hat, bandana, and holstered revolvermaking
pancakes over his campre. The open barn doors divide the paintings lower half
from its upper so the structures dark interior highlights the young man and horse
framed by it. Weston told the Guggenheim Foundation that satires would be part
of his project, and this depiction of a fragmented representation of the Old West
might seem to be one of them. But his decisions in making this carefully posed
photograph suggest otherwise. Had he excluded the young man and horse the naive
painting possibly would have intimated a satire of a ctitious past sentimentally
depicted. Had the young man appeared without the horse the doors open space
would have dwarfed him and drawn a contrast between his unindividuated insig-
nicance and the outsized painting, proposing a pathetic distance between the myth
271
and present reality. Had the camera been further away his lean resemblance to the
idealized cowboys physique would have been minimized, or had he been closer the
272 picture would have become more an individuals portrait. Neither a portraithe is
too distant to make out his features other than his lean muscularitynor a depic-
tion of quaint folk art, the composition insists on the relation between the youth
and painting. Together they represent nodes in the Wests history, a preindustrial
past when self-sufcient individuals lived in its spacious reaches and a present in
which their example continued to have force and relevance (Group Six).
Westons sympathetic evocation of the Wests mythology might seem surprising,
but in it was hardly anomalous and in fact had become ubiquitous. Long rel-
egated to being low-budget quickies for juvenile audiences, in and qual-
ity productions of western lms boomed, and adult audiences ocked to them. In
those two years Hollywood produced a dozen or more prestige westerns, including
such classics as Stagecoach, Destry Rides Again, Union Pacic, and The Westerner. As
hostilities opened in Europe and threatened to involve the United States, Ameri-
cans became ever more preoccupied with the uniqueness of their cultural experience,
and representations of the Wests mythology abundantly satised that need.
If Weston modestly participated in this reinvigoration of western myth it is
doubtful it inspired him to make Chief Heggens Barn, Salinas. Instead, in his
handling of its subject and by his titles specication of locale the picture adduced
a different view of the towns signicance than that associated with it. It implied
that the violent strike and the political advocacy Steinbeck exemplied were only
epiphenomena of the current phase in the Wests history. Salinas was better thought
of as representing something more profoundly historical and more permanent, a
tradition of self-reliant individualism in harmony with nature that an intimate rela-
tionship with the Wests wide spaces bred. In his own way Weston must have felt
he represented those enduring virtues as well.
However uncritically he seems to have accepted the western myth, like most art-
ists and intellectuals he abominated its most inuential contemporary celebrant, the
Hollywood lm industry. In their travels the Westons took in at least one movie, in
Yreka after a day photographing Mt. Shasta. As Charis describes it, the stirring
Class B epic of the deep south was unintentionally risible, with noble sharecrop-
pers, a tyrannical straw boss with an equally villainous sister, and a wholesome
young newspaperman dedicated to justice and who is saved from lynching only by
the intercession of a sharecroppers attractive daughter. Charis provides no title,
nor did she need to; for the Westons this was the standard Hollywood product,
melodramatic, addicted to absurd stereotypes, and fundamentally irrelevant. The
grand and solitary Mt. Shasta was innitely more inspiring ().
Her account of the movie experience thus anticipates California and the Wests
nal two photographs, made on the back lot of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio
in Culver City. One, Rubber Dummies, shows two mannequins in front of shelves
of props; the other, Ghost Set, depicts a movie lot that includes a steamboat,
harbor, and painted city backdrop (Group Six). MGM was the movie industrys
largest, most successful enterprise, and the Westons gained access through friends
in its art department. He had long wanted to photograph thereshe says since the
Guggenheim projects outsetbut permission was difcult and nally obtained
only near the end of the fellowship.
That Weston wanted to photograph at MGM at all is a singular fact, even more
so that he passionately wanted to. A Hollywood studio was almost innitely distant
from his usual beat. Many of his pictures examine the natural world, its irreduc-
ible reality meticulously rendered, but nothing on a movie set is genuine. Weston
abominated Hollywood products; if the movies were art, they were a vulgar and
debased brand of it. Filmmaking, moreover, was irritatingly Californias best-known
creative activity, an industrial process that subordinated art to the values of a cash-
nexus society. Not only was the industry an unworthy representative of the states
artistic life but it also exercised deleterious inuence in shaping the consciousness
of people everywhere. In virtually every way Hollywood as an economic, social, and
artistic institution represented everything Weston despised.
This detestation lay behind his desire to photograph at MGM and accounts for
why these are California and the Wests nal images. None of his other decisions
about which pictures to include and how to sequence them reveals so nakedly his
ambition to be a cultural force. The MGM photographs are perhaps the books
only satires, and in deriding Hollywood he was taking on the nations most popu-
lar cultural institution and one of its most inuential. The pictures have the same
clarity and rigorous composition as his othersthey reward formal analysis as
readilybut they represent something more than an unexpected setting in which
he exemplied his genius. They sum up the books underlying principles by rep-
resenting their opposite, by implicitly foregrounding what Weston believed to be
Hollywoods assumptions and procedures as a negative benchmark against which
could be measured his own and those of the book he and Charis had created.
The Westons worked collaboratively but without sacricing the individuality
of their perceptions whereas committees made movies that leached out personal
vision. Both his photographs and her narrative particularized individual experience,
in contrast to the homogenized stereotypes and hackneyed situations Hollywood
trafcked in. They bent their efforts toward enlightening their audience, his photo-
graphs by enlarging its perception and her narrative by revealing how art was created.
The mindless diversion offered to the movie audience, however, merely distracted
it. In her narrative explicitly, and his pictures implicitly, the true artist is fashioned
as an impassioned seer who reveals the worlds complex, innite loveliness and its
organic unity, with an ambition to transform the consciousness of viewers. Those
273
who made movies employed artice to simulate pieces of the world, and they did
so cynically with the sole aim of proting from it.
274 Both MGM pictures underline these contrasts by virtue of the distance that
separates them from the books preceding photographs. Everything on the movie
lots is counterfeit, and their elements register no discernable relationship to one
another. Neither is it possible to imagine what lies beyond the frames edges, a her-
meticism his compositions emphasize by interior framing devices. Vertical and hori-
zontal planking and a wooden ladder encapsulate the rubber dummies, and on the
ghost set vision is narrowly squeezed by the steamboats angled stern and a curved
concrete jetty. The pictures are literally staged, inevitably so because of MGMs
unswerving dedication to the articial.48
Rubber Dummies was staged in another sense as well, one with a private sig-
nicance although made manifest to readers of California and the West by Chariss
circumstantial account of the day at MGM. She had discovered the shelf on which
the dummies lay, and he then shot it. When Edward had made a negative, she
writes, I pulled one of the dummies out and next I pulled out a greenish-yellow
one. Then she set them up as they would be seen in the book. Rubber Dummies
was the nal exposure of the twenty he made at MGM; Ghost Set had been the
rst (). There are autobiographical and thematic reasons why their sequence
is reversed in California and the West. The only shot on which Charis so materi-
ally collaborated is Rubber Dummies in that she found the site and arranged it.
In addition to its other meanings, then, the picture reafrmed the collaborative
nature of their work. Sequencing it second-to-last meant it could be paired with
his Texas Spring Camp Grounds, which likewise emphasized the jointness of
their enterprise.49
Charis is also explicit about what movies had been lmed on the ghost setthe
boat featured in The Great Waltz, a biography of Johann Strauss, and the painted
backdrop of Marseilles in Port of the Seven Seas, a version of Marcel Pagnols Fanny.
Both lms attempted to adapt European culture for an American audience and did
so to make a prot and not serve art. Neither, however, had been a distinguished lm,
even by Hollywoods commercial standards. In virtually every way the Hollywood
products evoked by Ghost Set represented the antithesis of what Weston strove
to achieve. The movies were trite and betrayed their nominal inspiration, while the
photographs were dazzlingly original and faithful to his purpose to reveal natures
transcendent truths. The Great Waltz and Port of the Seven Seas put forward, how-
ever lamely, a notion that art was preeminently European; he, however, was dedi-
cated to an indigenous art in a medium he believed to be quintessentially American.
Movies relied on legerdemain for their effects; he needed only his imagination, eyes,
and command of his tools. They trafcked in illusion, he revealed reality. Both he
and the lmmakers essentially employed the same technology but for utterly dif-
ferent ends. Whereas they used it to overlay a sense of life on what was contrived
and articial, in Ghost Set his camera exposed their falsity and revealed the
imaginative poverty of their deceits. By thus striking through the pasteboard mask
of Hollywoods pretensions and exposing by implication the deciencies of a mass
culture that so adored its products, he asserted the superiority of his vision, amply
represented by the ninety-ve images preceding this one, and so closed Califor-
nia and the West with a challenge to his audience to discover a more authentic and
transformative vision of the world.
275
14
Photography
at High Tide
Vigorous and Rowdy Shows
Beginning in a new kind of exhibition made artful photography accessible
to unprecedented numbers of viewers. Polyglot extravaganzas composed of
many hundreds and in one case thousands of exhibits, they attracted enormous
crowds to spaces dissimilar to the galleries and museums where art is ordinarily
displayedin New York to Rockefeller Center and the giant exposition hall
of the Grand Central Palace, to department stores and cultural institutions
in provincial cities, and to the Worlds Fair in San Francisco. Every year of
the latter half of the thirties witnessed at least one huge show, most traveling
to scores of locations. Underwritten by ad hoc organizations or frankly com-
mercial ones, their sponsorship also differed from the usual auspices for the
ne arts. These exhibitions further democratized photographys art world,
enlarging its spectatorship and continental reach, and their frequency and
popularity marked a uniqueand as it turned out, transitorymoment in the
reinvigorated mediums relationship with its audience.
U.S. Camera annually sponsored a massive exhibition, opening in the autumn
for two weeks at Rockefeller Center and then traveling to some seventy-ve cit-
ies across the nation. The publications two hundred or so pictures composed its
nucleus, augmented by ve hundred seminalists identied by Thomas Maloney
and Edward Steichen as meritorious but not published for want of space. Amateurs
constituted perhaps percent of the additions, giving them the gratifying experi-
ence of showing alongside the professionals dominating the annual. The mingling
of amateur and professional work also reected photographys democratic basis and
the buoyant but yet unsettled nature of its art world, loosed from the tight controls
of its past but not yet fully professionalized nor dominated by a few tastemakers
and institutions.
Just one year after the rst U.S. Camera exhibition Literary Digest would unequiv-
ocally declare its annual editions to be the show all photographers aspire to. Nor
were they important only to amateurs; most leading workers participated because,
as Dorothea Lange put it, U.S. Camera was the most important photography
show we have. They were much anticipated events for audiences, too, and drew
an immense crush of attendees. Fifty thousand thronged to Rockefeller Center to
see the version, and it then attracted enthusiastic crowds in the hinterlands.
They were vigorous and rowdy events, marveled one visitor. You shove and
elbow your way in. None of the muted art gallery whisper here. These pictures are
to be enjoyed and shouted over.1
Their uninhibited atmosphere militated against the intimidated awe that more
hallowed exhibition spaces could induce, and attendees unabashedly assumed their
prerogative to make judgments. Eavesdropping at Rockefeller Center, a journalist
overheard spirited debates about the exhibits virtues and failings, so lively he made
snapshots of animated disputants to illustrate his piece. Snooping allowed him to
assess favorites. It is generally conceded that Steichen is the master of them all,
he reported, but at least a half-dozen other exhibitors also awed visitors, Bourke-
Whites black stevedore resting against bags of coffee on a wharf a particular favorite.
Better than any photographer in America, [she] has the capacity to dramatize the
ordinary, he exclaimed. But the shows technical and artistic sensation, he said,
was Paul Outerbridges color work, especially his gure studies. A subsequent vote
ratied this impressionistic assessment, attendees denominating his pictures their
favorites. The poll was yet another way U.S. Cameras differed from traditional
exhibitions, which rarely solicit visitors opinions.2
Newspapers brought the shows to an even wider audience. Hungry for pictures,
they regularly reproduced exhibits and editorially assessed their signicance. The
Photography at High Tide
277
Kansas City Star believed that the version revealed a year of photographic
plenty and predicted that viewers would feel curiosity and awe; the Buffalo News
278 encouraged readers to see its wire-sharp, dynamic pictures of life; and the New
Haven Register observed that it proved the medium has reached a point where
it may be called an art.3 More enthusiastic than acute, these notices nonetheless
fostered the perception that something extraordinary was going on in American
photography and U.S. Camera shows provided an unparalleled opportunity to par-
ticipate in it.
More ambitious to assert critical authority were two New York Times Magazine
pieces by H. I. Brock, whose at-footedness and cottony abstractions belied the
authority he claimed. In he managed to discuss several pictures without revealing
who made them, including Berenice Abbotts Hoboken Ferry and Edward Westons
Lettuce Ranch. It was his maladroit opinion that Abbotts would be better in color,
when if fact it depended on tonal contrasts between ferry-riders crisp white sum-
mer clothing and the long shadows they and the terminal cast. The next year Brock
did no better, generalizing about the photographs objectivity that preserv[ed]
the realities of the mechanistic world unclouded by their makers romantic asso-
ciations. Just what that cloudy formulation purported is uncertain, but neither of
its possible meanings is crediblethat photographers were no more than operatives
or that their pictures transcribed reality without any trace of individual sensibil-
ity. Brocks inept pieces would merit no attention except that they appeared in the
nations most distinguished newspaper, which prided itself on its cultural coverage.
Two conclusions follow from his sorry efforts. One is that the U.S. Camera exhibi-
tions had made artful photography newsworthy enough to merit special, ongoing
attention, and, second, that even a newspaper of the stature of the Times could yet
nd no one knowledgeable to write about it intelligently. But already this deciency
was in sight of improvement. Beaumont Newhalls history, camera magazines, and
a livelier discourse about photography were just over the horizon.4
Beginning around the same time, the makers of Leica cameras, E. Leitz, Inc.,
sponsored exhibitions that likewise premiered at Rockefeller Center before travel-
ing. With about the same number of exhibits as U.S. Cameras they included only
pictures made with thirty-ve-millimeter minicams and attracted fewer distin-
guished exhibitors. Amateurs constituted about halfsome otherwise well known
such as the publisher Alfred Knopf with portraits of his authorsbut government,
press, commercial, and some artistic photographers also participated. Exhibits
included such strong efforts as Carl Van Vechtens portraits and Barbara Morgans
New York studies, but the Leica shows were most notable for their attention to
documentary. When the edition came to Washington, Roy Stryker boasted
that its Resettlement Administration contingent was the outstanding thing there,
both in quantity and quality, and with its next version Leica established a special
documentary section. Its exhibits, said the catalog, concentrated on some of the
economic conditions of our present day, and although perhaps lacking artistic pho-
tographs compositional rigor they were nonetheless really very vital and should
stimulate a new trend of thinking and also encourage many new photographers to
use the Leica in this fascinating eld which is to be found wherever people live.5
As this clumsy formulation unabashedly avers, Leicasand U.S. Cameras
motive for sponsoring the exhibitions was to promote their products. And yet this
mingling of art and commerce did not deter leading photographers enthusiasm for
U.S. Cameras shows nor Strykers pride in Leicas. Nor did it dampen the enthu-
siasm of the hundreds of thousands who ocked to them. Such undertakings and
audiences were perhaps only possible at a moment when photography was vibrant
but its artistic status still uid enough not yet to have become institutionalized.
Outside of this special atmosphere of the thirties, exhibitions that so blatantly con-
ated commercial motives with claims for esthetic distinction would be regarded
as debased and vulgar. That these annual events were not indicates the unique cir-
cumstances that for a few years allowed photography to ourish as simultaneously
a popular and an artistic enterprise.
The Vulgar Tongue for which Art has been Looking

In April an even larger turnout crowded into New Yorks Grand Central Palace
for the First International Photographic Exposition. It, too, was a commercial ven-
ture, underwritten by manufacturers and retailers of photographic equipment
whose booths encircled the display area. Similar to the U.S. Camera and Leica shows
in its heterogeneity, except with four times as many exhibits, it succeeded in appeal-
ing to the general public as well as amateurs. During its one-week run it attracted
more than , visitors; so many clamorously waited to enter the rst morning
that police asked the managers to open early. Special trains brought attendees from
New Haven, Washington, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.6
It was an immense gathering of photographic achievement, past and present, with
three thousand pictures of nearly every kindjournalistic, scientic, artistic, picto-
rial, commercial, and documentary. The plentitude reected the shows ambition
to enlarge the scope of a photography show beyond previous limits and present
a balanced and representative impression of all the channels through which it was
nding expression. Just whom the catalogs italicized adjectives were meant to sen-
sitize is unclearpossibly to prevent an outbreak of hostilities between modern-
ists and pictorialists because the show amply represented bothbut its conspec-
tus advertised the proposition that photographys vitality depended on embracing
catholicity and avoiding sectarianism. In sheer numbers amateurs dominated, with
279
hundreds of individual exhibitors in juried sections, hundreds more representing
camera clubs, and ninety from the Oval Table Society, a New York pictorialist
280 group. Commercial workers also had their own sections. But several leading pho-
tographers also had substantial displays, and like the other omnibus exhibitions the
Exposition proceeded on the assumption that photographys art world was com-
posed of both its nest practitioners and its legions of rank-and-le enthusiasts.7
The show carried forward the educational mission of MoMAs show the previ-
ous yearonly for four times as many visitorswith a display of nineteenth-cen-
tury masters that included Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, Albert S.
Southworth and Josiah J. Hawes, D. O. Hill, Henri Le Secq, Alexander Gardner,
Nadar pre et ls, and Eadweard Muybridge. Mathew Brady and Eugne Atget had
special sections, too, bringing to an enormous public their historical photographs
that a few years earlier only a few would have seen in specialized magazines like
Hound and Horn or Creative Art. Among contemporaries, Weston exhibited in the
Special category and Bourke-White, Carl Mydans, and Peter Stackpole in Publi-
cations, which also included selections from Coronets portfolios. Abbott, Barbara
Morgan, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) had photographic murals,
and Anton Bruehl and Outerbridge showed in the color section. Documentary was
especially well represented, with individual sections of pictures by Horace Bristol,
Eliot Elisofon, the FSA, and Abbott, as well as by her New York colleagues in the
Works Progress Administrations Federal Art Project. The catalog declared that
photography was the livest [sic] of the arts and that pictures like these had made
America a picture-minded people.
The government-sponsored photographs by Abbott and the FSA were the Expo-
sitions highlight said a reporter, who also remarked that the pictorialists exhibits
could easily have been dropped in the incinerator without real loss to the show. . . .
You will never beat these pictures anywhere, she breathlessly enthused. They show
American buildings. American homes. American life. American people. Working,
ghting, starving, conqueringyou and me, our fathers and mothers, our children
and grandchildrenAmerican history rolled before your eyes.8
The FSA took U.S. Cameras poll a step further and invited viewers to comment
on the pictures, and nearly ve hundred did. A few condemned them for partiality
or technical deciencies, but most applauded their esthetic distinction and revelation
of social distress, a substantial number remarking that they were the Expositions
highlight. Russell Lee and Arthur Rothstein came in for special mention, but most
visitors commended the entire ensemble as a culturally integrated form of art, as
one of them, Walter Abell of the Brooklyn Museum, put it. Especially gratifying
was praise by fellow artists. Mydans, by then on Lifes staff, hailed the FSA as by
far the winner of the show; Richard Lyon of the Photo League and a member of
the Harlem Document group commended the real pictures of real people that
added up to a very ne study of American life; and Abbott proposed throw[ing]
out all the oval tables and hav[ing] a million more photographs like these. Here
photography is nding its real medium and expression. More and more power to
the Farm Security Administration! Buoyed by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic
appraisals Stryker exulted that we scooped the show, and Rexford Tugwell sug-
gested sending the comments to President Roosevelt.9
The endorsements of fellow workers were unsurprising, but the overall warmth
of visitors responses indicated documentarys growing prestige among the rank and
le in photographys art world and the FSAs success in cultivating this audience.
But the exhibition fostered consequential material outcomes as well for the FSA and
documentary generally. Among the visitors was Steichen, who, according to Stryker,
came in a perfunctory manner but got a surprise when he ran into our section.
Another was Newhall, and a third was Rosa Reilly, the journalist who enthused over
government documentary. The opportunity to view a substantial number of the
FSAs pictures stimulated their efforts to disseminate them more widely. Steichen
would showcase them in the next U.S. Camera annual, and Reilly would contribute
an admiring essay to Popular Photographythese two pieces the rst appraisals of
the Section. Newhall would organize MoMAs touring exhibition that brought the
FSAs Exposition pictures to art-minded viewers across the nation.10
These outcomes illustrate the partiality of adducing only gallery and museum
exhibitions and even published reproductions for understanding thirties photo-
graphic culture. The Grand Central Palace show was an unabashedly commercial
enterprise, its underwriters prominently hawking their wares to visitors. Its tone
was middlebrow or even lower; among its most popular attractions was a specially
lighted stage where attendeestwo-thirds of whom brought camerascould pho-
tograph female models in bathing suits. The carnivalesque atmosphere profoundly
offended Walker Evans, who told Stryker, I must say the whole thing is so com-
mercial it made me sick.11 Nevertheless, in its historical and contemporary sections
it provided the decades richest opportunity to see a broad swath of documentary
pictures, and it did so for an audience of unprecedented size.
The Exposition and its aftermath reveal as well how diffused the nodes of activity
and authority had become in photographys art world. Beyond the photographers
themselves, the network participating included at least Willard Morgan, the shows
chief organizer; federal employees who prepared the WPAs and FSAs exhibits;
those who loaned the historical photographs, Abbott the Atgets, Frederick Meserve
the Bradys, and MoMA the others; the ve hundred visitors who took time to make
known their responses to the FSA exhibit; and journalists like Reilly and impresa-
rios like Steichen and Newhall. Not all of these participants played equal or similar
roles, but each contributed in a perceptible way to the Expositions outcome.
On the day the Exposition closed Elizabeth McCausland speculated on its signi-
281
cance for her Springeld Sunday Union and Republican readers. MoMA, she said, had
been circulating an exhibition of Van Goghs paintings, seen by , persons in
282 a year of extensive travel. But in just a week the Expositions attendance numbered
one-sixth of the Van Gogh shows total. She calculated the ratio per diem to be
nine to one in favor of the Exposition, indicating that photography is nine times
as much a popular medium for art as painting. These gures, she averred, revealed
that photography is on its way to becoming the great popular channel of commu-
nication of our time, as Drers engravings had been in the fteenth century. For
McCausland, unlike Evans, the manufacturers booths encircling the displays testi-
ed to photographys vitality. No art museum would allow such commercialism to
sully it, but she believed the Expositions marriage of art and commerce was one of
the surest proofs that here is the vulgar tongue for which art has been looking.12
Ansel Adams at An American Place

Unlike the boisterous atmosphere at Rockefeller Center and the Grand Central
Palace, the New York gallery scene remained tepid after the false promise of the
early thirties. Westons exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery at the same time as
MoMAs Photography, across the street attracted only desultory press
comment, and subscriptions for the book that Nierendorf hoped to publish were
insufcient to go ahead with it. Abbott showed several times, but perhaps those
occasions most reected local interest in her subject matter, as the headline to a
Times notice of one hinted, New York Pictured for Future in Show. Galleries
in the decades waning years did include several fashion workers, and Julien Levy
continued intermittently to sponsor shows, one or two a season, although in some
years none at all. But New York galleries only dimly represented photographys
robust vitality, no doubt because it could not be made sufciently protable but also
because other modes of display had usurped their function.13
Alfred Stieglitzs sponsorship of an Ansel Adams exhibition at An American
Place in is a special case, though, because it attempted to reassert his role as
an arbiter, something that had been greatly diminished by photographys expansive-
ness in the thirties. Not for twenty-ve years had he shown anyone but himself and
Strand. In fact, the Adams exhibition did not have much impact, nor did it mark a
resurgence of Stieglitzs authority. Even for Adams its outcomes were mixed.
When Adams rst went to New York in he did so to make my fortune, as
he later said. Group f. provided moral support and local visibility, but for wider
recognition he needed to cultivate a New York network, so he laid plans to call on
Steichen and Stieglitz and to negotiate with Alma Reed for a Delphic Studios show.
His attempts to see Steichen were a bust. Late for the appointment Adams had made,
Steichen breezed into his ofce, said he was too busy to see him, and told Adams
to come back the next week. When Adams arrived the second time he was again
put off, and these airy dismissals of the provincial petitioner by the metropolitan
panjandrum still rankled fty years later. I felt his arrogance, Adams wrote in his
autobiography, not because he was too busy to see me, but because of the manner
of disdain and his abiding sense of power and prestige.14 Stieglitzs brusqueness
at their rst meeting promised similar humiliation, and only the persuasiveness of
Adamss wife, Virginia, made him attempt a second visit. To his surprise and delight
Stieglitz pronounced favorably on his photographs, and the two men struck up the
relationship for which Adams had been ambitious. He succeeded as well with Reed,
who scheduled his rst New York exhibition later in the year.
But his Delphic Studios show dissatised him, or so he wrote to Stieglitz follow-
ing it. Reed had not paid him for the eight prints sold nor sent any of the reviews,
and Adams felt she had inadequately presented his work. What he wanted was
a decent, simple dignied exhibit, and in addition to another Delphic Studios
appearance he also ruled out Levys gallery, which he said depressed him. Although
disingenuously assuring Stieglitz that he was not suggesting An American Place
show, he was clearly angling for just that. He continued to atter in subsequent
correspondenceStieglitz was heroic to keep his gallery going in the midst of the
depression; Adamss visits to An American Place were his greatest experiences in
art; and he wished he could come and be your janitor! In early Stieglitz
nally promised him a show, a triumph that made Adams jubilant.15
Through ingenious detective work Andrea Gray has reconstructed the exhibi-
tion, most of its forty-ve exhibits typical of Adams during Group f.s heyday,
close-ups of natural or man-made objects rather than the dramatic landscapes for
which he later became known. His statement in the yer given to attendees was also
redolent of Group f., stressing the cameras capacity to make sharply focused
images of clarity, depth, rich tonality, and textural detail. But after Adams
would not again exhibit most of these prints. Some, such as the quasi-Cubist Fac-
tory Buildings, he would not allow to be reprinted, nor would he again formulate
his esthetic principles in quite the same way. His An American Place exhibition
was more retrospective than prospective, a conclusion rather than a forecast of the
direction his career would follow.16
Adams felt his photographs had been perfectly displayed and that Stieglitzs
sequencing actually psychoanalyzed me, although what intimacies it revealed he
did not say. Gray plausibly conjectures from the rst threea close-up of a pine-
cone and eucalyptus leaves, a landscape of Yosemites Half Dome, and a skiers por-
traitthat the arrangement revealed the major axes of his work (the rst inuenced
by Group f., the second by his Sierra Club efforts, and the third his advertising
commissions) and implied tensions among them.17
283
There was considerable tension as well in Adamss response. From New York
he exulted to his wife that the show was a once in a lifetime event and crowed
284 that I am now denitely one of the Stieglitz group. You can imagine what this
means to me. Its effect had been to revitalize him, he told Stieglitz, making him
see his work as new, and exciting as never before. Once at home, however, Adams
had something close to a nervous breakdown, the causes for which are mysteri-
ous although almost certainly overdetermined. Among them may have been the
westerners continuing resentment of eastern authority and a barely conscious feel-
ing of having been co-opted by it. Returning to California from the trip earlier in
that secured Stieglitzs commitment he penciled a note to Weston expressing
relief in being home after such a dose of intellectualism, cynicism, and didacti-
cism received by me in the east. An emotional letdown after his initial exaltation
seems likely to have been another cause. In a despairing letter to Cedric Wright a
month later he said, I have had my say in photography and have reached the top
with Stieglitz. Only the emotional stimulus that you know about enabled me to get
that Stieglitz show ready; I could not do another one now if my life depended on
it.18 This letter hinted as well at an ongoing personal crisis that straddled the show,
almost certainly in his marital life.
The exhibitions tangible results were also mixed. Marking his greatest commer-
cial success, Adams sold at least nine prints, possibly more, eight to David McAlpin,
photographys benefactor at MoMA. Press attention was cursory although favor-
able, and what there was laid special emphasis on Stieglitzs imprimatur as did two
brief Times notices. The rst ran under the subheading Sponsored by Stieglitz,
and the seconds only remark was that Adamss photographs were appearing under
Stieglitzs aegis and that is perhaps sufcient commentary on the caliber of the
exhibition. Attendance was spotty. Stieglitz wrote that there had not been numer-
ous visitors, although his acolyte Dorothy Norman remembered that those who
came liked it.19
After a regimen of rest and a move from San Francisco to Berkeley Adams recov-
ered sufciently enough to want to show again at An American Place. But over the
next few years Stieglitz resisted. He expressed doubts to McAlpin about whether
Adams would again be able to assemble an exhibition of the same quality, and if
not Stieglitz would not sponsor a second show. Years later Georgia OKeeffe said
this was the reason there was not another.
Although Stieglitzs sponsorship was important to Adamss self-esteemhis near-
breakdown notwithstandingit did not mean what it had a generation earlier for
Strand because Stieglitz no longer was the mediums only, or even most important,
impresario and arbiter. His endorsement did not result in a whirlwind of public-
ity or crush of visitors to see Adamss work nor even in his instant elevation to the
status of a leading photographer. Becoming part of Stieglitzs circle, as Adams rst
thought himself to be, did not mean what it once had, and his subsequent stature
did not much depend on his exhibition as he turned away from the kind of
photographs shown at An American Place.
Perhaps inuenced by a perception of Stieglitzs coolness, Adams in time devel-
oped a less worshipful attitude toward his erstwhile champion. He honored Stieg-
litzs battles on behalf of photography and was grateful for his support, but he
began to feel that Stieglitzs imperiousness and self-regard were disabling limita-
tions. Stieglitzs nancial security made him insensitive to those who needed to earn
a living, Adams told McAlpin in , and he fetishized negativity, nding all work
but his own unsatisfactory. His belief, moreover, that contemporary photography
suffered from a lack of leadership was utter nonsense, Adams thought. He wants
to climb down in his cyclone cellar with photography under his arm and close the
door after him.20
But if this were actually Stieglitzs desire, by the late thirties the door was unclose-
able. In his halcyon days at the Gallery Stieglitz could never have imagined (nor
would he have desired) that many competing versions would constitute photogra-
phys achievement and attract a wide public. The massive crowds attending the
polyglot shows in New York and across the nation, and the thousands perusing the
U.S. Camera annuals and the camera magazines, were a new kind of audiencemore
catholic in taste and more willing to embrace divergent styles and usesthan the
select urban circle Stieglitz had cultivated. This new audiences patronage testied
not so much to deference toward an arbiters superior judgment as an omnivorous
desire to experience a broad range of pictures. Those such as Steichen and Malo-
ney who served as gatekeepers for such shows and publications did so with a fairly
light hand. If they held up straight photography as the mediums standard it was
nonetheless an esthetic that permitted a wide range of variation in subject matter
and approach. Ironically, Adams would be the animating force behind the decades
nal massive exhibition, which was as catholic in its way as any of the others and
the best-attended of all.
Ansel Adams at the Worlds Fair

As the polyglot exhibitions atmospheredense crowds, manufacturers ogging
their products, and cheesecakecontrasted with the usual dignied settings in
which art was viewed, so, too, did the ambience of A Pageant of Photography in
at the Golden Gate International Exposition, the San Francisco Worlds Fair.
Its galleries were sober and tasteful enough, so much so that Nancy Newhall thought
the installation monotonous, with endless immaculately installed rectangles on pale
walls, but the atmosphere just outside was unrestrained and boisterous. The Pageant
285
turned out to be photographys last such extravaganza in the thirties, culminating
the decade-long campaign to win for its nest efforts a more conspicuous place in
286 American cultural life and make it a truly popular art form.21
More than six million persons came to the fair in , its second year, dividing
their visits among a welter of tantalizingly diverse attractions. In addition to the
Palace of Fine Arts, where the Pageant was installed, they included exhibition halls
for homes and gardens, foods and beverages, and electricity; Vacationland; a U.S.
government pavilion, ten more pavilions for California, and thirteen for other states
and territories; twenty buildings sponsored by foreign nations; and commercial
displays by the nations leading corporations, one featuring Westinghouses talking
robot Willie Vocalite and his mechanical dog Sparko. Special events were routine,
as on Public Wedding Day when twelve couples exchanged vows in the Court
of Flowers. Visitors fatigued by informative displays could repair to the forty-acre
Gayway to be amused by Ferris wheels, Hindu fakirs, shooting galleries, and the
Headless Girl. At Billy Roses Aquacade lissome synchronized swimmers performed
to tunes like Yours for a Song crooned by Morton Downey; Sally Rands Nude
Ranch featured cowgirls who wore only artfully placed gunbelts and bandannas
while performing western routines.22
A Pageant of Photography shared the Palace of Fine Arts with paintings from
American museums, Thomas Eakins portrait of Walt Whitman, an Auguste Renoir
nude, Jean-Franois Millets Man with a Hoe, and Giovanni Tiepolos The Building
of the Trojan Horse, and another gallery housing canvases from Latin American art-
ists. Also occupying the airplane hanger the building was destined to become was
Art in Action, an activities center where painters, sculptors, weavers, and potters
demonstrated their work. Visitors could see, for instance, Diego Rivera executing
a mural. Because the pavilions had open admission reliable attendance gures are
lacking, but percent of the fairs attendees visited even the least popular ones,
a minimum of some two million persons in the four-month run. One observers
estimate that the Palace and Rands Nude Ranch attracted about the same number
of viewers suggests that the ne arts held their own in popular appeal.23
As the Pageants chief organizer Adams was assisted by Maloney from U.S. Cam-
era and Grace McCann Morley, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Adams had worried since the exhibition at An American Place over what he called
the idea of photography, which he feared the terric mass of photography pour-
ing out of the darkrooms today threatened to submerge. Stieglitz, he believed, no
longer adequately represented this idea. In any case, he felt, the problems facing
photography had changed since Stieglitzs heyday, when its audience had been
more esoteric and the number of workers much smaller. With so much activity
afoot something like Greshams Law threatened photography, and to counter that
danger its vast audience needed to be educated. Somebody has to gather the good
things together, he wrote to McAlpin in , not just in a museum way, but in
a way that is emotionally stimulating and which will elevate, on a clear-cut basis,
the powers of the medium. The Worlds Fair provided an exceptional occasion to
assemble such a didactic gathering for a much larger audience than any museum
could muster. It was an opportunity that Adams eagerly grasped.24
Although with many fewer exhibits than MoMAs exhibition three years earlier
about in its permanent installation, one-third of New Yorksthe Pageant nev-
ertheless bore a strong resemblance to it. The exhibitors overlapped considerably,
some represented by identical photographs. Both shows featured the heterogeneous
blend of practicesartistic, commercial, documentary, and photojournaliststan-
dard in other omnibus exhibitions, although probably owing to the intervening rise
of the picture magazines Adams included more photojournalism than in New York,
and he segregated commercial work in the color section. As at MoMA, the Pag-
eant had a section demonstrating the cameras technological versatility for making
x-rays, microphotographs, and high-speed, stop-action pictures, and both events
included news photographs and movie stills. Finally, as Newhall did in the book
version of the catalog, Adams dedicated the Pageant to Stieglitz, whose portrait by
Imogen Cunningham greeted visitors and readers alike. By this time it mattered
not at all that Stieglitz roundly disapproved of such eclectic exhibitions; he had
become photographys merely honoric talisman.25
The exhibitions most apparent similarity lay in a shared pedagogical ambition, to
instruct visitors in photographys history, although the Pageant undertook this edu-
cative mission for a far larger and more heterogeneous audience than the art-minded
one to which MoMA catered and was more methodical than the Exposition had
been. At the Pageant as in New York attendees began their tour with daguerreotypes,
ambrotypes, and portraits by such early masters as Southworth and Hawes, then they
moved on to Bradys Civil War pictures and Muybridges animal locomotion series,
and nally to contemporary workers, most straight photographers, thus reafrm-
ing Newhalls efforts to supply a distinguished tradition for the dominant modern
practice. Stieglitz and Some Photo-Secessionists had a discrete section in San
Francisco, but even more than in New York their mostly impressionistic pictures
seemed aslant of the main line of photographys development. This was especially
apparent because they were bracketed by the predominantly straight workers who
succeeded them and a lavish display of predecessors, twenty-ve pellucid western
landscapes and two albums by William Henry Jackson, Timothy OSullivan, Car-
leton Watkins, and others. Adams believed this display of Early Western American
Photography would be the Pageants most important contribution to a history that
had only recently begun to crystallize. These landscapes had hardly been exhibited
nor their achievement recognized. They represented, he said, one of the great tra-
ditions of photography, indicating the beauty and effectiveness of the straight
287
photographic approach. They thus supplied contemporary practice with a dis-
tinguished heritage, heretofore unacknowledged, that connected the early work of
288 daguerreotypists and Brady with the present. Put another way, their achievement
diminished the signicance of Victorian photography and its turn-of-the-century
offshoot, the Photo-Secession.26
The two exhibitions had some signicant differences in format and emphasis as
well. In an annex to its permanent historical survey the Pageant featured two dozen
rotating, one-person and group shows, each up for two or three weeks, which per-
mitted a greater representation of leading contemporaries work. The California
exhibition was even less cosmopolitan than MoMAs had been; in fact, Adams made
its Americanness into a patriotic virtue. It is encouraging to observe concrete evi-
dence that America has brought forth such superior photography, he wrote in the
catalog. Photography is, in fact, a decisive American art. He qualied the inclusion
of two Europeans, Hill and Atget, with information that Americans, Alvin Lang-
don Coburn and Abbott, had printed their pictures. He also failed to mention that
another exhibitor, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, was a European, even if the catalog listed
his residence as Chicago, and that Man Ray had lived outside the United States for
many years.27
The nineteenth-century western photographers also supplied a distinctive his-
torical justication for this resolutely American bent. Because their pictures were
superior to any being done abroad and predictive of contemporary American prac-
tice, and because American photography was a decisive art, what need was there
for European work, past or present? In addition to the aim of reconguring pho-
tographys history and providing an enlarged pedigree for straight photography,
this celebration served Adams himself, whose work around was beginning to
center on similarly large-scale landscapes. The early westerners achievement ret-
rospectively validated his own ambitions and challenged viewers to see his photo-
graphs in the light of his predecessors genius.
The prominence he accorded them also justied the Pageants greater emphasis
than in New York on contemporary western photography, its vitality anticipated
by its nineteenth-century forbears. Most of Group f. and its associates were rep-
resented. Along with himself Adams included Cunningham, Stackpole, Willard
Van Dyke, and Weston in the permanent section; he, Stackpole, Brett Weston, and
Edward Weston had one-person shows; and Cunningham, Alma Lavenson, and
Sonia Noskowiak exhibited in a group show of six California women photographers.
Adamss local chauvinism was unsurprising given his loyalties and the Pageants
locale. The Worlds Fair provided an unparalleled opportunity to reiterate the Cali-
fornians claim to national recognition.
The Pageants contemporary section was considerably smaller than MoMAs, with
Europeans excluded, many lesser workers eliminated, and fewer exhibits allotted
to leading ones although several of the latter showed many more pictures than in
New York because of the complementary one-person and group shows. Adamss
designation of modern masters mostly echoed Newhalls. Prominent at both sites
were Abbott, Adams, Bourke-White, Moholy-Nagy, Outerbridge, Man Ray, Charles
Sheeler, Strand, and Edward Weston, as well as the magazine photographers Bruehl
and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, although Abbott and Bourke-White appeared only in one-
person shows. Among this entire leading group only Man Ray and the two maga-
zinists did not have one-person shows. Absent from the Pageant, as at MoMA and
the Exposition, was Lewis Hine, with less excuse in San Francisco because in the
interim Hine had been discovered.
As had MoMA, Adams gestured toward sanctioning experimentalism by includ-
ing abstract images by Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy and also by giving the latter
a one-person show and asking him to contribute to the catalog. Unlike Newhall,
Adams refrained from denominating abstraction aslant of photographys true genius.
These gestures notwithstanding, visitors would be unlikely to see it as anything but
a peripheral practice, and an un-American one at that, so otherwise dominant was
straight photography.
For all the correspondence in the exhibitions contemporary sections, however,
there were noteworthy differences other than the Pageants greater western empha-
sis. In both, Steichens early work prominently gured among the Photo-Seces-
sion exhibits, but no recent pictures were in San Francisco even though theyand
Steichens enormous public prestigewould have strengthened Adamss case for
straight photographys priority. His humiliating encounters seven years earlier must
have made him reluctant to approach Steichen again. Perhaps the most notable
absence, though, was Evans, who had been well represented in Newhalls show. As
early as Adams had expressed distaste for Evanss work, writing to Weston
that his peppers would be remembered long after Evanss picture of two destitutes
in a doorway was forgotten. With American Photographs his antipathy escalated to
new heights. At white heat he fulminated to McAlpin about its deciencies, which
included an inauthentic political perspective, the confusion of propaganda with art,
an unearned universalizing title, arty pretentiousness, and a glibly inated catalog
appreciation by Lincoln Kirstein. Some of its pictures were ne, he conceded, but
most were not good photographs in any qualication.28
Even given the ferocity of these private opinions it is still surprising Adams
excluded Evans. His avowed goal was, after all, to suggest the scope of photogra-
phy and its applications in the year , and Evanss work by some reckonings
ranked as the decades most important. And Adams did exhibit pictures for which
he had little personal affection, as with the abstractions. The show as a whole,
Nancy Newhall marveled, . . . represented a breadth of mind and heart unusual
among creative artists with such strong personal dedications as Adams. Maria
289
Morris Hambourg has shrewdly suggested why his sympathies stopped with Evans,
whose fatalism, love of irony, and Baudelairean spleen offended Adamss romantic
290 and basically optimistic nature. Another explanation also seems plausible. Despite
his stature at MoMA, Evanss work had been barely or not at all noticed elsewhere,
even when documentary was being otherwise celebrated. Thus ample precedent
existed for Adams to exclude him in favor of other adepts of documentary.29
If Adams experienced any qualms of curatorial conscience perhaps he salved
them by inviting an FSA show in which Evans might be included. Following his
Group f. days, when he had cast a gimlet eye on documentary as mischief-mak-
ing propaganda, he had become warily tolerant of it. An earnest of this shiftand
of the breadth he wanted the Pageant to havewas that he also invited the Photo
League, even though their documentary work had less public visibility than the
FSAs and was more overtly political. Documentary gured more prominently in
San Francisco than at MoMA, with Lange and Rothstein in the permanent sec-
tion; the two group shows; and one-person shows by Abbott, Atget, and Bourke-
White. The contrast between the two catalogs was even sharper. Newhall had little
to say about social documentary whereas the Pageant catalog highlighted it with
Langes essay extolling its validity as art as well as cultural analysis, her piece keep-
ing prestigious company with contributions by Adams, Newhall, Moholy-Nagy, and
Weston. By honoring documentary had become the standard in most corners
of photographys art world, as witnessed by its representation in omnibus exhibi-
tions and camera periodicals. Because the Pageant was a more self-evidently selec-
tive enterprise than they, and curated by an important photographer not himself a
documentarian, it ratied documentarys standing as a major photographic practice
for anyone who might consider it insufciently artistic.
Given the prominence Langes catalog piece gave her, the fact that she was a
Californian, and her friendship with Adams, it is surprising that she had no one-
person show, especially since a few local lesser lightsBob Churchill, Rex Hardy,
and Cedric Wrightdid. Probably Adams expected the FSA exhibit to feature her
sufciently to complement her two photographs in the permanent section. If so,
that expectation was disappointed. Pictures by Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Roth-
stein, and Ben Shahn dominated, and of the more than one hundred exhibits Lange
had only six and Evans seven, by far the fewest of any of the photographers except
Mydans and Edwin Rosskam, fewer even than John Vachon, who had only been
on the staff full time for a little over a year. Her characteristic subjects tted only
occasionally with the exhibitions theme of the American small town, also the focus
of a forthcoming book.
If the FSAs exhibit thus failed to give priority to the two photographers whom
posterity would honor as the Sections nest, visitors were unconcerned. Adams
reported that it was the Pageants best-liked annex show, followed by the Photo
Leagues. Documentarys popularity, which these audience preferences indicated,
was all the more striking because in addition to the one-person shows the compe-
tition included a special display from U.S. Camera annuals and another from Life,
then a still fairly new and extraordinarily successful publishing sensation.30
The Pageant epitomized artful photographys greatly enlarged visibility in thir-
ties America and its extraordinary success in expanding its audience, a Worlds Fair
symbolizing these triumphs as nothing else could. Adamss exhibition carried for-
ward the pedagogical mission that earlier activists in photographys art world had
adopted as essential for making this new popular audience knowledgably responsive
to its contemporary renaissance. The permanent exhibition instructed visitors in
photographys history and urged them to understand current practice as develop-
ing out of a rich tradition of accomplishment. The one-person and group shows
dramatized the pluralistic and ebullient vitality of contemporary practice. The
strength of the ensemble as a whole provided unimpeachable evidence of the merit
of photographys claim to equality with the other ne arts represented in the Palace,
just as the enormous numbers of visitors who came to see it testied to the cultural
centrality it had achieved.
Looked at one way, the Pageants inuence could never match MoMAs, at least
over the long term. Although its catalog was handsomely produced with nearly sixty
reproductions, its textual features were brief and the ensemble was fragmented
by virtue of their separate authorships, unlike Newhalls comprehensive, unied
survey. His revision of the catalog into a book, moreover, gave it a durability the
Pageants catalog could not match, although U.S. Camera Magazine enlarged the
pageants audience the next year by reprinting some of the catalog and illustrating
it with exhibits. The Pageant, however, attracted hundreds of thousands, possibly
millions, of visitors, its attendance far outstripping MoMAsindeed, any photog-
raphy exhibition ever. It was an audience not only larger but also perforce differently
constituted than a museums. A worlds fair setting made the Pageant eminently
accessible to visitors for whom a museum might be intimidating or unavailable
but whose appetite for pictures had nonetheless been stimulated by photographys
profuse visibility in the thirties and who were curious to acquaint themselves with
its nest achievements. Adams believed there had never been a collection more
effective for so many people.31
What these visitors thought as they walked through the Pageants galleries can-
not now be known. Adams conducted no poll, nor did he solicit written comments.
We do know, however, how Adams imagined this audience. He had the modern
artists usual misgivings about the average spectators taste but professed an even
stronger conviction that he or she was educable. When he negotiated with the Photo
League about its group show he requested that texts accompany the pictures so
viewers might better understand what they were seeing. You have to remember
291
that the average spectator is basically Salon minded, he said. He likes pretty pic-
tures, cant quite grasp ones that are not pretty, swears like hell when some print
292 reveals something he is subconsciously ashamed of in himself or in his class. But
he seems to come around when an incontrovertible logic and sequence of thought
is presented to him. I think that contemporary expressionespecially expression
related to social qualitiesis mistrusted by the average spectator about as much as
a spinster in extremis distrusts Dali.32
That assessment of the average spectator had wider application than merely
to the Photo Leagues exhibit or even social documentary. Viewers thought they
wanted pretty pictures that did not unsettle them or try to force them to see, feel,
and think in unexpected ways, which was precisely what most of the contempo-
rary expression that Adams had assembled was ambitious to do. Fairgoers who
visited the Palace of Fine Arts might unthinkingly want no more edication than
that provided elsewhere on the grounds by Westinghouses Willie Vocalitesooth-
ing bromides about progressor desire only a cultural equivalent of the titillat-
ing stimulation of Sally Rands Nude Ranch, but Adams was condent that the
incontrovertible logic and sequence of thought he had embedded in the Pageant
would lay hold of them, educate them, and thus transform them into an informed
audience worthy of the artistic achievement represented by contemporary pho-
tography. His sentiments reect, perhaps, his eras more characteristic optimism
about the mass audiences potential for rened esthetic experience than would be
the case later in the century, but even more they indicate the prevailing conviction
that photographys art world ought to be a democratically inclusive one in which
a popular audience would have a signicant role to play. For all its gaudiness, and
perhaps because of it, a worlds fair provided an ideal setting in which to exemplify
that principle.
Afterword
The Cultural Establishment of Photography
Just two weeks after the Pageant closed, Ansel Adams hurried to New York
to participate in inaugurating MoMAs new Department of Photography and,
with Beaumont Newhall, put together its rst exhibition. Both opened on the
last day of . Plans for persuading the museum to establish the department
had been percolating for nearly two years between Adams and David McAlpin,
underwriter of the show and prepared to contribute again to set pho-
tography on a more permanent footing. By this date the trustees of MoMA
no longer needed so much to be persuaded that photography deserved to be
represented as to be reassured that sanctioning it would not blow up in their
faces. Theyve been so abused by S. [Stieglitz], McAlpin wrote to Adams
early in , they are gunshy and ready to escape because he has ayed them
alive & they dont like it, naturally. A few weeks later he again wrote about the
Stieglitz problem. Newhall had conceived the idea of a Stieglitz retrospective
to open the museums new building in the fall and wanted to broach it with
him. But Stieglitz caught sight of Newhall as he entered An American Place
and began to curse the museum to another visitor he was showing around,
leaving Newhall, McAlpin said, to wander uncomfortably around the gallery for a
half hour without Stieglitz ever acknowledging him.1
294 Instead of the Stieglitz retrospective the new buildings rst exhibition included
a considerably less conspicuous photography section composed of pictures by seven
younger workers. Hopes for the department were put on hold. Between the autumns
of and , though, someoneperhaps McAlpin, who had a long associa-
tion with Stieglitz, or Adams, or bothmanaged to mollify Stieglitz and secure
more than his merely tacit acquiescence to a photography department. He nally
permitted his postwar work to be shown in its inaugural exhibition, reversing his
earlier adamancy against doing so.
The trustees formally approved the new department in September with
Newhall as curator, and McAlpin agreed to chair its advisory committee if Adams
would become the vice chair. Adams quickly accepted because, as he told McAlpin,
What you are doing is perhaps the most important step towards the cultural estab-
lishment of photography that has taken place in Americaor anywhere, for that
matter. Adamss doubts about Newhalls inability had disappeared, and he had
come to regard him as the most valuable force photography has had in our imme-
diate time. Adams saw his own role as mediating between photographers and the
museum, complementing McAlpins as instigator and Newhalls as integrator.
In this troika he would correlate photography in the creative aspects; McAlpin
would develop it as a formand important form, of art; and Newhall would
place it as an art-form.2
The departments inaugural show, Sixty Photographs, reciprocally advertised
Stieglitzs blessing of the new enterprise and MoMAs endorsement of his preemi-
nence by including eight of his picturestwice as many as any other exhibitorand
dedicating the catalog to him, apostrophizing Stieglitzs heroic struggle to establish
photography as a medium of artistic expression, the expressiveness of his images,
and his profound inuence on photographers and the taste and discernment of the
public. Yet the show only weakly supported the claim of inuence because just a
handful of the more than thirty exhibitors had received Stieglitzs imprimatur: fel-
low Photo-Secessionists Clarence White and Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Adams,
and Eliot Porter, a newcomer to whom he had given a show two years earlier. His
assistant Dorothy Norman also exhibited her portrait of him. More amply repre-
sented were those whose practices diverged signicantly from his example. Among
them were the experimentalists Man Ray and Lszl Moholy-Nagy; documentar-
ians including Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Walker Evans, the latter two
active in the effort to disestablish his authority, and Mathew Brady and Eugne
Atget, whom they held up as counter-inspirations; Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose
septic photographs Julien Levy had shown to tweak the Great Ss; and Edward
Weston, whose mature work Stieglitz had dismissed as not a part of today.3
Afterword
MoMAs testimonial to Stieglitz as the mediums presiding muse differed from
earlier ones by Steichen, Newhall, and Adams. Whereas their obeisances had been
merely honoric and as such connoted the toothlessness of Stieglitzs authority,
MoMAby tightly linking its tribute to his ongoing work and making him Sixty
Photographs dominating presenceessentially reinscribed him as contemporary
photographys most distinguished practitioner and judicious arbiter by virtue of, in
the catalogs words, his uncompromising demands [on photographers] to achieve
the nest quality of craftsmanship and perception. No one could actually expect
a seventy-six-year-old man suffering from heart disease to reassume the preemi-
nent position he once held, butwithout anyone at the museum putting it quite
so baldlythe new department itself would step into the breach and apply the
discriminating standard he had once enforced.
In addition to the dissonance caused by the gap between the Stieglitz encomium
and the roster of exhibitors Sixty Photographs seemed curiously uncentered as
well in generously featuring nineteenth-century picturesnearly one-fourth of the
totalbut without any historical context, either photographic or cultural, and by a
gathering of contemporary work so eclectic as to seem almost fortuitous. Its purpose,
said the catalog, was to suggest the possibilities of photographic vision irrespec-
tive of chronology. The catalog then proposed that in the exhibition the vision of
different ages can be grasped and that among photographys most distinctive char-
acteristics was its capacity to evoke an epoch. These avowals of a photographs
interdependence with its historical and cultural setting, however, dissolved before
the catalogs summarizing formulation, that although each picture was an individ-
ual expression they were united by an understanding of the qualities, limitations,
and possibilities of photography. As Christopher Phillips has suggested, the rst
of these concluding propositions comfortably tted the exhibitions self-conscious
modernists such as Stieglitz or Weston but less so its historical exhibits or some
of its contemporary ones like Langes Migrant Mother. The second, although
unexceptionable, nevertheless intimated that photographs were best apprehended
within an enclosed, self-referential technical and esthetic system without reference
to what they depicted or the circumstances of their making.4
Perhaps it is unfair to make too much of ceremonial statements greeting a new
enterprise, but those in the catalogby Alfred Barr, McAlpin, and Newhallunmis-
takably indicated the role the department intended to assume in photographys art
world. McAlpin stressed systematic conservation, assembl[ing], correlat[ing] and
apprais[ing] the monuments of past achievement, whereas Barr emphasized expert
discrimination, the opinion of the Curator and the Committee being marshalled
so that the best of the present and the past might be [brought] before the public.
Newhall was slightly less anodyne, articulating publicly what Adams had privately
felt earlier. Newhall warned of the danger in photography having become truly an
Afterword
295
art of the people in that because of its amazing growth . . . its quality may become
submerged. From its entire output over the past century only relatively few great
296 pictures have survived, he said, ones in the fullest meaning of the term, works
of art. Although he then couched in the passive voice the procedures required
to identify which photographs from this great mass would be designated works
of art, that rhetorical ploy was merely a g leaf covering his assumption that the
department would play the leading role in the triage.5
None of this was surprising. Conservation, enlistment of expert opinion, pre-
scription of standards, and certication of masterpieces are what museums do. The
department would extend those gatekeeping activities to a medium in which muse-
ums had been only intermittently, if at all, active. Photographys creative vitality in
the thirties, and the tremendous public interest it generated, had nally created an
atmosphere in which it could be incorporated into a ne arts institution without
apology, and MoMA, as the evangel of the modern, was the most plausible one to
embrace it.
By virtue of MoMAs substantial cultural prestige and the material resources it
commanded the new department instantly put itself at the center of photographys
art world and warranted to assume the functions of evaluation, education, and exhi-
bition that mediated between artists and audience. It also conferred unmistakable
legitimacy on photography as an artistic practice, providing the stamp of ofcial
recognition for the place [photography] has earned for itself in modern civilization
as the Cincinnati Times-Star put it.6
Almost simultaneously with the departments inauguration the formations that
had previously sustained photographys art world began to withdraw from it. Cam-
era magazines reduced their attention to the work of leading photographers; general
interest magazines like Coronet and Westways, once hospitable to artful photography,
no longer were; government support for ambitious photography projects dried up
as early as for Abbott and by for the FSA; and the era of noninstitutional
popular exhibitions ended when Adamss Pageant closed. Books featuring leading
workers pictures slowed to a trickle, then disappeared during the war and were
infrequent for many years thereafter. Although the heterodoxy and difculty of
Agees text in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men no doubt accounted for much of its
dismal reception, it is tempting to see its invisibility as owing to a shrinking audi-
ence for photography.7
The coincidence of these events with the Department of Photographys found-
ing was largely fortuitous, and certainly MoMA did not conspire to diminish public
interest in photography or tyrannize its art world. Still other events, notably the all-
consuming attention to the war and the subsequent arrival of television, would have
made artful photography a less central cultural enterprise than it had been in the thir-
ties. Nevertheless, as the museum assumed its well-publicized institutional oversight
Afterword
the more popular means by which photography had formerly reached its audience
began to dry up. The pulsating energy that had made thirties photography such a
vital artistic practice and popular preoccupation also began to ebb. Two of MoMAs
wartime photography shows made a considerable splash, both of them curated by
Steichen: Road to Victory in and Power in the Pacic in . Their audiences,
however, were considerably smaller than at the Grand Central Palace or the Pageant,
and attendance at other photography exhibitions in the museum lagged far behind.
In the perceptible decline in public interest led MoMA to appoint Steichen to
direct the department, whereupon Newhall resigned. Even as the department was
getting underway in Nancy Newhall had warned Adams that it faced a formi-
dable challenge in attracting audiences. The prevalent opinion, she said, is that
the museum devitalizes creative work, puts it in a setting of grandeur and expense.
Then she added, Many people are actually afraid of the place.8
Pierre Bourdieus tripartite division of the hierarchy of legitimacies among the
expressive arts helps sort out how photographys art world changed after MoMAs
intervention. At Bourdieus lowest level is the sphere of the arbitrary with rela-
tion to legitimacy in which esthetic choices are made in such everyday activities as
clothing, domestic decoration, and cuisine. It is presided over by non-legitimate
authorities of legitimation such as fashion designers, advertising rms, and food
authorities. At this hierarchys apex is the sphere of legitimacy with universal
claims, the consecrated arts of music, literature, painting, and sculpture. It is
sustained by legitimate authorities of legitimation that include academies, muse-
ums, and universities. Bourdieu also calls this sphere scholarly culture, although
that usage rings tinny on the ears of English speakers accustomed to thinking of
scholarship in more narrowly specialized terms. Between is the sphere of the
legitimizable characterized by competing authorities of legitimation, claiming
legitimacy, among them impresarios, critics, and voluntary associations with a par-
ticular stake in an esthetic activity. Photography, he says, is located in this middle
sphere along with other such popular arts as jazz and cinema.9
Bourdieus mapping of the hierarchy of legitimacies is especially pertinent to
American photographys circumstances in the rst half of the twentieth century
when the uctuations of its cultural standing were so evident. As artful photogra-
phys impresario just after the turn of the century Stieglitz had labored to lift it from
the sphere of the arbitrary in which practical applications and the wide diffusion
of cameras after the introduction of Kodak Number One had located it. By means
of the Photo-Secession and its exhibition, the gallery, and Camera Work
he appeared initially to have succeeded in propelling it to the uppermost rung of
consecrated culture as he also constructed himself as its legitimating authority. But
the momentum of this leap upward was not sustained, and by the twenties Ameri-
can photography was in the doldrums, at least in terms of public visibility. Stieglitz
Afterword
297
retained his standing as an authority of legitimation, but it was increasingly a titular
rather than an active designation. Moreover, even in the oughts and early teens seri-
298 ous photographys audience was concentrated primarily in the urban Northeast and
further limited by Stieglitzs uninterest in cultivating a broader viewership for it.
If he did not succeed over the long run in sustaining photography at the highest
level of cultural prestige, his efforts did lift it to the half-way house of the sphere
of the legitimizable because it was no longer dened solely by the cameras pedes-
trian uses. Its still-middling status as the thirties began was apparent in how the
Harvard Society formulated its exhibitions purpose. Acknowledging the photo-
graphs debatative stature, it nevertheless intended to prove that . . . [they were]
equal in importance to original effort in painting and sculpture. As photographys
art world re-created itself and expanded others took up this mission as well, with
a more inclusive sense than Stieglitz of what practices might constitute its genius
and more solicitude about bringing into its orbit a popular audience whose numbers
would be one means to ratify its centrality as an artistic and cultural endeavor. The
instrumentalities new impresarios invented or adapted to interest and educate that
audienceomnibus exhibitions in unconventional spaces, books of artful photo-
graphs, camera annuals and magazines, even radio broadcasts and cartoon histo-
riesfrequently lacked the institutional support that consecrated artistic culture
customarily enjoyed and gave them an uncommonly populist cast.
Bourdieu comments on how an expressive forms perceived location in the hier-
archy of legitimacies affects the nature of the audiences participation. Faced
with meanings situated outside the sphere of legitimate culture, he says, its mem-
bers feel they have the right to remain pure consumers and judge freely; on the
other hand, within the eld of consecrated culture, they feel measured according
to objective norms, and forced to adopt a dedicated, ceremonial and ritualized atti-
tude. That formulation explains such features of thirties photographic culture
as the vigorous and rowdy atmosphere of exhibitions and the unabashed judg-
ments expressed by U.S. Camera readers, but its binary rigidity fails to theorize
adequately the special conditions that characterized American photography during
the thirties. Erudite knowledge of the history of these arts [like photography],
Bourdieu maintains, and familiarity with the technical or theoretical rules that
characterize them are only encountered in exceptional cases because people do not
feel as forced as they do in other areas to make the effort to acquire, preserve and
communicate this body of knowledge which is part of the obligatory preliminar-
ies and ritualized accompaniments of scholarly consumption. There is no way of
empirically measuring the erudite knowledge of photographys audience, but
if it were not at least competent it was not for lack of effort. Bourdieu assumes
that only established institutions can provide such an education, but that was not
entirely so in photographys art world. While gallery and museum exhibitions and
Afterword
Newhalls history were important educative activities, so, too, were the efforts of
many others, including Lincoln Kirstein, Thomas Maloney, Steichen, Robert W.
Marks, members of the Photo League, and Adams, all competing authorities of
legitimation, claiming legitimacy. One reason these manifold pedagogical efforts
ourished is precisely because institutional oversight had not yet been established
to monopolize this function.10
Educative activities provided a vocabulary for apprehending photographs that
viewers saw in exhibitions and publications, frequently supplying insight into an
artists specic intentions and procedures as well. Moreover, commentators almost
unanimously hailed the virtues of straight photography, often by invidiously con-
trasting it with European experimentation. These reiterative ratications of straight
photographys superiority provide another clue to why photography could command
such a large popular audience, which is that no substantial esthetic divergence existed
between legitimating authorities and ordinary viewers. In the popular aesthetic,
says Bourdieu, the legibility of the picture itself is a function of the legibility of
its intention (or of its function), and the aesthetic judgment to which it gives rise is
more favorable the more total the expressive adequacy of the signier to the signi-
ed. The supreme value of this esthetic is the tangible, informative, or moral
interest to be discovered in a photograph. However much as the intentions and
procedures might differ in, say, a Lange or a Weston picture, both emphasized these
interests in a mode audiences and impresarios found supremely suitable.11
Bourdieus model also suggests what changed when MoMA established its depart-
ment and began to aggrandize the authority to dene what constituted photographic
excellence. When Sixty Photographs asserted that what united and distinguished
its disparate exhibits was their superiority as artfully wrought creations conditioned
by the cameras inherent properties, it implicitly promised that the museum would
continue to hold up this self-referential criterion as paramount. In other words,
assessing a photographs formal inventiveness and sophistication would be the pri-
mary grounds for judgment. Such an elaboration of pure forms, generally con-
sidered the most noble, observed Bourdieu, presupposes the disappearance of all
functional characteristics and all reference to [the] practical or ethical goals that a
popular audience prizes, and the aesthetes who attempt to liberate photographic
practice from them are seeking to make photography undergo a transformation
analogous to that which affected popular dances, the boure, allemande, sarabande,
or courante, when they were integrated into the scholarly form of the suite. This
transformation sacralized photography, not only in Lawrence W. Levines sense of
the quasi-religious atmosphere of the sites where it would be displayed but also in
the pure terms by which the pictures ought to be understood.12
But an empowerment of audiences, the development of new means to serve them,
and a widely shared esthetic that emphasized a pictures social functions were not
Afterword
299
the only reasons artful photography achieved such public prominence. The tributary
streams that swelled its broadened current to oodtide were many, and most were
300 also channeled by its intermediate hierarchical location. The absence of established
authority made for a concomitant atmosphere of ux and contributed to the sense
of photographys dynamism as disagreements broke out about the exemplary value
of Stieglitzs or Atgets work, the virtues of purism versus pictorialism, or the artis-
tic validity of documentary. It also enabled expressions of dissidence. Resentment
of eastern sectarianism led California photographers to organize Group f., and
the Photo Leagues impetus was its conviction that documentary deserved a more
prominent place in the republic of photography. Although the federal government
had long employed photographers, new in the thirties was public dissemination of
their pictures; the atmosphere of tolerant eclecticism in photographys art world
bid them welcome and made equivocation about whether they were art or informa-
tion less problematic. Commercial considerations underpinned much of the vastly
increased opportunities for artful photographers of all kinds to get their pictures
before audiencesnotably via camera periodicals and omnibus exhibitionsas
manufacturers and retailers sought customers among the dedicated amateurs who
constituted a substantial fraction of photographys art world. Such an unembar-
rassed and promiscuous intermingling of commercial and esthetic motives was only
possible with an art that was not yet consecrated.
However otherwise revealing, Bourdieus theory of cultural hierarchy and Levines
of sacralization do not account for the startling irruptions of creativity that may
characterize an art medium at some particular moment when a host of powerful
talents come to the fore, as in the Elizabethan theater or American literature in the
years before the Civil War. Probably no explanation of such moments can ever be
entirely satisfactory, the mysteries of human genius resisting attempts to schematize
it. That the thirties was such a period for photography is indisputable, with Abbott,
Evans, Lange, and Weston doing their nest work, among the centurys best, and
the achievements of numerous other workers not far behind. The special social
conditions of the depression played a signicant role in educing such an impressive
body of photographs, most obviously with documentarians and also with others
such as Weston, whose perception of cultural turmoil encouraged him to reimagine
the role his photographs might play in revitalizing American life. Another signi-
cant factor was the eras insatiable picture hunger, which was a necessary but not
sufcient prerequisite for such a substantial number of gifted workers to emerge
almost simultaneously. A third was the tremendous expansion of venues to feed
that hunger. And that leads to a fourth reason, which Bourdieus and Levines theo-
ries of cultural hierarchy imply. During the thirties serious photographers worked
for an audience of an unprecedented sizeone not duplicated latermade pos-
sible by the expansion of their art world to include an uncommonly heterogeneous
Afterword
group of participants, from freelance impresarios and writers to art professionals to
amateur enthusiasts and even the proverbial man in the street. Knowing that such
an alert and interested popular audience existed to receive their work encouraged
photographers to produce for it. As Weston put it in , The artist must have
an audience, must give. I am happy in my work because I am giving, changing the
lives, the viewpoint of hundreds. So does any ne photographer.13 By the end of
the thirties, Westons hundreds had become hundreds of thousands.
Afterword
301
[blank page 302]
Photographs
[blank page B]
Boards and Thistles, San Francisco, 1932
Photograph by Ansel Adams. Collection Center for
Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson.
(Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust)
Walter Winchell, 1930
Photograph by Edward Steichen, originally published in
Vanity Fair. (Courtesy of Corbis, Inc.)
Anna May Wong, 1931
Photograph by Edward Steichen, originally published in
Vanity Fair. (Courtesy of Corbis, Inc.)
Anna May Wong, 1932
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. (Courtesy of the
Library of Congress)
Hell Gate Bridge, from Astoria
Photograph by Berenice Abbott, May , , originally
published in Changing New York. (Abbott le #
Museum of the City of New York)
Washington Square, Looking North
Photograph by Berenice Abbott, April , , originally
Downtown Skyport
Photograph by Berenice Abbott, August , , originally
Newsstand
Photograph be Berenice Abbott, November , ,
originally published in Changing New York. (Abbott le
# Museum of the City of New York)
El Station: Sixth and Ninth Avenue Lines,
Downtown Side
Photograph by Berenice Abbott, February , ,
originally published in Changing New York. (Abbott le
# Museum of the City of New York)
Farm Security Administration exhibition, First International
Photographic Exposition, Grand Central Palace, New York,
. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Title panel, FSAs In the Image of America exhibition,
Rockefeller Center, New York, . (Courtesy of the
Library of Congress)
The State That Covers All States
FSAs In the Image of America exhibition, Rockefeller
Center, New York, . (Courtesy of the Library
of Congress)
Two women and a man in front of La danse by Matisse, Museum of
Modern Art, New York, ca. . Photograph by Louise Dahl-Wolfe,
originally published in Harpers Bazaar. (Louise Dahl-Wolfe Archive,
Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona ,
Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents)
Ed Kehrer and William H. Ball, 1937
Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, originally
published in Muncie, Ind. Is the Great U.S. Middletown,
in Life. (Courtesy of Getty Images, Inc.)
I think its only right that the government ought to be
run with people like us in mind, 1937
Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, originally published in
You Have Seen Their Faces. (Courtesy of Jonathan [Toby] White
and the Syracuse University Library)
Ive only been misbehaving, 1937
Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, originally published in
You Have Seen Their Faces. (Courtesy of Jonathan [Toby] White
and the Syracuse University Library)
Playing Football, 1939
Photograph by Harold Corsini for the Harlem
Document. (Courtesy of Harold Corsini and the
George Eastman House)
Mother and child at kitchen table, ca. 1939
Photograph by Aaron Siskind for the Harlem Document,
this cropped version published in , Native Sons
in Look Magazine. (Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind
Foundation and the George Eastman House)
Storefront church, ca. 1939
Photograph by Aaron Siskind for the Harlem Document, a
cropped version published in , Native Sons
in Look Magazine. (Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind
Foundation and the George Eastman House)
Donner Lake, 1937
Photograph by Edward Weston, originally published in
California and the West. (Collection Center for Creative
Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson
Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937
Salinas Barn, Horses for Sale, 1939
[Chief Heggens Barn, Salinas]
Photography, The University of Arizona, Tuscon
Texas Spring Camp Grounds, Death Valley, 1939
Photography, The University of Arizona, Tuscon
Ghost Set, 1939
Notes
Abbreviations
AAA Archives of American Art

CCP Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
HSTR Historical Section Textual Records, Farm Security Administration, Library of
Congress
MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York
MHD Minutes of the Photo League Harlem Document Feature Group, Aaron Siskind
Archive, Center for Creative Photography
PN Photo Notes, The Photo League, New York, reprinted in Photo Notes, edited by
Nathan Lyons (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, )
PP Popular Photography (magazine)
RSP Roy Stryker Papers, the University of Louisville Photographic Archive and
Chadwyck-Healy microlm
USC U.S. Camera annual
USCM U.S. Camera Magazine
Chapter 1: The Rebirth of Photography in the Thirties
304 . Edward Weston, Photographic Art, Encyclopedia Britannica, th ed., , reprinted

in Weston, Edward Weston on Photography, edited by Peter C. Bunnell (Salt Lake City: Peregrine
Smith Books, ), .
. Orbis Pictus, The Nation, Oct. , ; Herald Tribune editorial quoted in Beaumont
Newhall, This Was , in The Best of Popular Photography, edited by Harvey V. Fondiller
(New York: Ziff-Davis, ), ; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:
Three Tenant Families (, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifin, ; reprint with a foreword by
John Hersey, ), .
. Photographys cousin, the movies, had an even larger popular audience, but an oligopoly
controlled lm production and distribution and exercised tight control over exhibition.
. Photo-Secession, founded by Stieglitz in , was an informal group dedicated to advanc-
ing the cause of photography as a ne art; other key members included Frank Eugene, Ger-
trude Ksebier, Edward Steichen, and Clarence White. Most Photo-Secessionistsalthough not
Stieglitzpracticed pictorial photography, in which soft focus and darkroom manipulation of
negatives and prints gave pictures a painterly appearance. When in the teens Stieglitz renounced
support for this brand of photography the group dissolved. Beginning in , he did champion
the straight photographic work of Paul Strand, but artful photographys torpor as late as is
hinted at in a review of a Strand show in Stieglitzs gallery. Painters come and go, the reviewer
observed, but the gentle art of photography maintains the even tenor of its ways. Photo Art,
New York Times, March , x, .
. Here and elsewhere I refer to artful photography more often than to artistic photogra-
phy because that term more comfortably embraces the variety of pictures made and seen in the
thirties. Plumbing artists intentions is a dicey business yet it seems clear that designating work-
ers such as the FSAs Lange or the Luce publications Bourke-White as artistic photographers
only partially describes their motives. They wanted to make esthetically coherent compositions
and infuse them with their best perceptions, but their other instrumental goals did not preclude
their being designated as leading workers. This usage also better reects the democratic ethos that
pervaded photography in this era because it does not imply an invidious distinction between per-
sonal work and that which was commissioned, a distinction Stieglitz rmly honored but which
the art world mostly jettisoned.
. Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
. Becker, Art Worlds, .
. Steiner to Stryker, June , RSP.
. James McCamy, Government Publicity: Its Practices in Federal Administration (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, ), ; Catherine Bauer, Photography: Man Ray and Paul Strand,
Arts Weekly, May , .
. Such theories are advanced in Pete Daniel and Sally Stein, Introduction to Daniel et al.,
Ofcial Images: New Deal Photography (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), viii;
David P. Peeler, Hope among Us Yet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ); and Paul Hen-
drickson, Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (New York: Knopf,
), .
Notes to Pages 27
. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), , , , passim.
. Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow, , .
. Ibid., .
. M. F. Aghas gures for camera ownership and annual expenditures are in Raphaels without
Hands, Vogue, June , . Don Dixon discusses New Yorks camera clubs in Snapshots
Speeded Up, New York Times, Nov. , xi, . And Paul Hendrickson estimates the number
of mm cameras in use in Looking for the Light, .
. Thanks, U.S. Camera Readers, USCM (Oct. ): ; F. Anthony Saunders, Fifty
Thousand People Saw the Show, PP (Feb. ): .
. Adams to McAlpin, Feb. , in Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , edited
by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, ), .
. Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New York: Atheneum, ), . For the Hollywood studio
photographers, see John Kobal, The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers (New York:
Knopf, ). Kobal says that at Paramount alone, six photographers averaged negatives per
day (portraits and stills) and that in the studio distributed some one million pictures to maga-
zines and newspapers.
. One member of this vast audience became one of the next generations most admired pho-
tographers. For W. Eugene Smith, exposure to Munkcsis work made him for the rst time real-
ize how tremendously deep, rhythmic, and powerful photography could be; interview with W.
Eugene Smith in Dialogue with Photography, edited by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), .
. John Kabel, I Do Landscapes, USCM (JuneJuly ): (the travel issue was April
May ); Mark Adams, Our Town in East Texas, Travel (March ): ; Americas
Hot-Iron Heraldry, Travel (April ).
. Willard Van Dyke, The Work of Ben Glaha, Camera Craft (April ): .
. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The History of Art in America (New York: Knopf, ),
.
. By at least fteen state-based collections of FSA photographs had been published.
. An excellent collection of the work of African American photographers is Visual Journal:
Harlem and D.C. in the Thirties and Forties, edited by Deborah Willis and Jane Lusaka (Washing-
ton: Center for African American History and Culture and Smithsonian Institution Press, ),
which also includes ve informative essays on individual workers. Gordon Parks, the one Afri-
can American with the FSA, did not join itas an intern sponsored by the Rosenwald Founda-
tionuntil , and his work remained mostly unseen until later. Eleven of Robert H. McNeills
documentary photographs appeared in the WPAs The Negro in Virginia in (and one in the
Virginia state guide the same year), but this was the only instance in which an African American
photographers work reached a broader national audience.
. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, xlvii.
. The modernist tendency in the visual arts to move away from representation and toward
abstraction nevertheless affected American photographers too, although less overtly than some
of their European counterparts and usually without compromising their adherence to straight
seeing. Stieglitz and Strand made pictures that evoked Cubisms experiments with geometry and
two-dimensionality, and a number of workers employed close-up compositions and cropping
Notes to Pages 817
305
to highlight an otherwise legible subjects abstract qualities. A ne, succinct discussion of these
developments is Miles Orvell, American Photography (New York: Oxford University Press, ),
.
306
. Thomas C. Linn, U.S. Photography Is Best, Former Vienna Curator Says, New York
Times, Feb. , ii, .
. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (, repr. with a new introduction, New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, ), .
Chapter 2: Disestablishing Stieglitz
. Berenice Abbott, Eugne Atget, Creative Art (Sept. ): ; Photographer as

Artist, Art Front (Sept.Oct. ): reprinted in Berenice Abbott: Photographer (New York: New
York Public Library, ), . Levy was a silent partner in the ownership of the Atget archive,
and the degree of his ownership was in dispute. He remembered sending $, to Abbott in Paris
after receiving her telegram that the archive would be lost if money were not forthcoming. Her
recollection was that he gave her the $, only after she returned to the United States, but he
said he had then given her an additional $,. David Travis, Photographs from the Julien Levy
Collection, Starting with Atget (Chicago: Chicago Institute of Art, ), .
. Walker Evans, Photography, Massachusetts Review (Dec. ): , reprinted from
Quality: Its Image in the Arts, edited by Louis Kronenberger (New York: Atheneum, ). The
Weyhe exhibition was up twice, in November and again the next summer.
. Walker Evans, The Reappearance of Photography, Hound and Horn (Oct.Dec. ):
.
. Edwin Alden Jewell, Art: Old French Photographs Shown, New York Times, Dec. ,
.
. Jewells Times review StieglitzMaster of the Lens, appeared on February ().
The reprise ran on February under the headline This Week in New York: A Roster of Recently
Opened Shows (viii, ). Stieglitzs and Seligmanns letters as well as Jewells response to them
appeared the next Sunday, February (viii, ).
. Harvard Society for Contemporary Art scrapbook, MoMA Archives.
. Steiner appeared in Hound and Horn (Fall ); Abbott in Hound and Horn (Summer
); Sheeler in Hound and Horn (Spring ); and Evans in Hound and Horn (Fall )
(New York scenes), Hound and Horn (Spring ) (architecture), Hound and Horn (Autumn
) (a street scene of derelicts), and Hound and Horn (Summer ) (Cuban photographs
and a portrait of Hart Crane). Evanss nal appearance, oddly, is not listed in the contents or the
volumes index, although it is heralded on the magazines cover. Hound and Horn ceased publication
with this issue. The magazine also published a portfolio of Harry Crosbys still lifes of over-the-
counter medical devices in its winter number, the only appearance by someone who would
not have a photographic reputation. Crosby had killed himself and his mistress the previous year,
and Malcolm Cowley would use his life and death as a case study of the twenties in Exiles Return
().
. Charles Flato, Mathew B. Brady, , Hound and Horn (Oct.Dec. ): .
Bonnie Yochelson says Abbott also about this time began to study Bradys work and in con-
tributed a piece on it to a German publication. Yochelson, ed., Berenice Abbott: Changing New
Notes to Pages 1723

York (New York: New Press, Museum of the City of New York, ), unpaginated introduction
and n.
. International Photography pamphlet catalog, Harvard Society for Contemporary Art scrapbook,
MoMA Archives; unsigned review, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. ; Albert Fritz Cochran,
review, Boston Transcript, Nov. .
. International Photography pamphlet catalog.
. The catalogs cover gave the exhibitions title as Photography, but it was called International
Photography in other Harvard Society materials such as the annual report.
. Not included in MoMAs exhibition were Gerlach, Huen, MacDonald, Modotti, Schell,
and Ulmann.
. Lincoln Kirstein, Exhibition Notes: Photography, Arts Weekly, March , .
. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to
Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .
. Kirsteins broadcast, Photography in the United States, was included in a compilation
of the series edited by Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr, Art in America in Modern Times (New
York: Reynal and Hitchcock, ), . Listeners could also obtain illustrated manuals of the
talks. The Carnegie Corporation underwrote the series, which was organized by the American
Federation of Arts.
Chapter 3: Group f.64 and the Problem of California Photography
. Edmund Wilson, The Boys in the Back Room, in Classics and Commercials (, repr. New
York: Vintage, ), .
. Strangled, Art Digest, May , .
. Preston Holder quoted in Jim Alinder, The Preston Holder Story, Exposure (Feb. ):
. Nor was Holders sense of isolation uncommon. After his rst New York show in Adams
plaintively asked the gallerys director to send news of its reception by other photographers and
opinion-makers as well as the press. We are so far away from things out there, he said, that
some placement of ones work in the world of Art is of great importance as a condence-tonic
and regulator. Adams to Alma Reed, Dec. , Adams Correspondence, CCP.
. Quoted in Milton Melzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographers Life (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, ), . She had apparently not yet met Weston. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images,
, edited by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, ),
.
. Van Dykes unpublished autobiography, quoted in Seeing Straight: The f. Revolution in
Photography, edited by Therese Thau Heyman (Oakland: Oakland Museum, ), .
. Adams later said that Annie Brigman was the only western photographer of whom Stieglitz
approved, at least until he sponsored Adamss work later in the thirties. Adams, Conversations with
Ansel Adams: An Interview Conducted by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun in , , and
(Berkeley: Regents of the University of California, ), ; Edward Weston, The Daybooks of
Edward Weston, vols., edited by Nancy Newhall [Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, ], : .
. Weston, Daybooks, : .
. Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs (Boston: New York Graphic Soci-
ety, ), . Group f.s manifesto is reprinted in Seeing Straight, ed. Heyman, .
Notes to Pages 2433
307
. There are numerous accounts of the groups formation and subsequent activities, some mildly
contradictory. Among them are John Paul Edwards, Group F:, Camera Craft (March ):
; Willard Van Dyke, Group f., Scribners Magazine (March ): ; Weston,
308
Daybooks, : ; Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, ), ; and
Jean S. Tucker, ed., Group f. (St. Louis: University of MissouriSt. Louis, ). The fullest
accounts are in Seeing Straight, ed. Heyman, and Michael Oren, On the Impurity of Group
f/ Photography, History of Photography (Summer ): .
. The de Youngs other photography exhibitions in were one-person Atget and
Moholy-Nagy shows and thematic ones of California trees and portraits of hands.
. Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight, .
. Adams quoted in Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light: His Photographs and
the Classic Biography, rev. ed. (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, ), . Adams could be booster-
ish at home, too. A San Francisco reporter reporting on the New York show quoted him as saying
that California offers more beauty than any other state in the Union. San Francisco Chronicle,
March , Adams Clippings, CCP.
. California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, ), .
. Adams believed Boards and Thistles to be his most gratifying image from this period,
and fty years later provided an account of its making (Examples, ). See also Clement Green-
berg, The Cameras Glass Eye, The Nation, April , .
. Ansel Adams, An Exposition of My Photographic Technique, Camera Craft (April
): . Cunningham is quoted in Group f., ed. Tucker, .
. Albert Jourdan, Sidelight #, The Impurities of Purism, American Photography (June
), reprinted in Seeing Straight, ed. Heyman, (see also ); Edward Weston, The Letters
between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke, edited by Leslie Squyres Calmes (Tucson: CCP,
the University of Arizona, ), , nn, , . Heyman mentions a Los Angeles show
although not the San Diego one but provides no information about it. F: Group Offers Trav-
eling Show, Camera Craft (Dec. ): . There may have been additional venues in ,
however. A letter from Lloyd Rollins, who had become director of the Dallas Museum of Fine
Arts, to Weston early in was meant to clarify a request he had made for some prints. Weston
apparently believed they were to be part of a Group f. show at the museum, but in fact Rollins
wanted them for another exhibition, Modern Photographs from the Collection of Lloyd LePage
Rollins. He added that a Group f. show was scheduled in Houston and then Dallas toward the
end of the year, although nothing else in the record indicates these were actually held. Rollins to
Weston, March , Weston Correspondence, CCP.
. Adams, Conversations with Ansel Adams, ; Sigismund Blumann, The Group F. Exhibi-
tion, Camera Craft (May ): ; Katharine Morrison Kahle, review, San Diego Sun,
Aug. , .
. Tallyho, Art Digest, Dec. , ; Strangled, Art Digest, May , .
. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , , , , . Adams also
unsuccessfully tried to persuade Sheeler to exhibit, who said he had given up photography and
had no new work to show. But Adams persisted, without success, by telling Sheeler that any work
he had would be new to western audiences, and many people here . . . would welcome the chance
to see your work because none had been exhibited in San Francisco, and the west should see
Notes to Pages 3341

what has been done by workers of your caliber. Sheeler to Adams, Sept. , and Adams to
Sheeler, Sept. , Adams Correspondence, CCP.
. Weston, The Letters between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke, . After Adams
withdrew and the gallery became known as the Adams-Danysh Galleries it showed work by both
Evans and Abbott, their rst West Coast appearances. Camera Craft (Feb. ): .
. Camera Club Notes, Camera Craft (Sept. ): .
. Ansel Adams, An Exposition of My Photographic Technique, in Camera Craft (Jan.
): ; Camera Craft (Feb. ): ; Camera Craft (March ): ; and
Camera Craft (April ): .
. Adams, An Exposition, April , .
. William Mortensen, Venus and Vulcan: An Essay on Creative Photography,in Camera
Craft (March ): ; Camera Craft (April ): ; Camera Craft (May
): ; Camera Craft (June ): ; and Camera Craft (July ): .
A. D. Coleman sees this debate in Camera Craft as precipitating Mortensens unjust exclusion
from histories of photography, notably Newhalls, an erasure grounded in partisanship for the
purism Adams espoused. Coleman thinks it is time for a reassessment of Mortensen, especially
inasmuch as symbolist allegories are again much in evidence. A. D. Coleman, Depth of Field:
Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, ), .
. Ansel Adams, letter, Camera Craft (April ): , .
. Willard Van Dyke, letter, Camera Craft (July ): .
. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , , .
. Joyce Minick, Possessions and the Dispossessed: Dorothea Langes Early Years (
), in Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange, edited by Therese Thau Heyman
(Oakland: Oakland Museum, ), ; Adams, Conversations with Ansel Adams, .
. John Paul Edwards, Group F:, Camera Craft (March ): .
. Adams quoted in Edwards, Group F:, .
. Weston, The Letters between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke, , .
. Van Dyke, Group f., .
. Beaumont Newhall, publicity materials for The California Group traveling show, ,
MoMA Archives, emphasis added.
. In spite of Group f.s dissolution, as late as Adams was still revolving a project that
would bring national attention to California photographers. This would be, he wrote to Lange,
an inexpensive but well-produced book on the scenic aspects of California that will embody the
best contemporary photography, providing a splendid opportunity for the leading California
photographers to appear as a group. Nothing came of it, perhaps because book publication of
Westons California photographs preempted it. Adams to Lange, [late ], included with Lange
to Stryker, Dec. , RSP.
. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , .
Chapter 4: An Eastern Beachhead
. The emissary was Consuela Kanaga, who warned Weston that Stieglitz would want to keep
him in his place. His power in New York is tremendous, she cautioned. Westons own conclusion
Notes to Pages 4149
309
from this incident was that Stieglitz would tolerate only second-rate imitators and becoming one
would be the only way to win his support. Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, edited
by Nancy Newhall, vols. [Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, ], : , : . Weston expressed
310
euphoria about the Delphic Studios show and his desire for a larger audience in Daybooks (: ,
: , : , : ).
. Ibid., : , . The catalog was a sign of how underdeveloped discourse about photog-
raphy was at this date. Its introduction by Lawrence Bass-Becking, a Stanford biology professor,
described Westons work as like an inspiring scientic treatise that was both nave and appeal-
ing. Weston Scrapbook A, CCP.
. Weston, Daybooks, : . Such national visibility seemed to be in the ofng when Reed
wrote to Weston that Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fairs editor, had been thrilled by the show
and told her he would publish two of the kelp pictures. I think this is very important she said,
and after this pioneering work is done here, which depends so largely on the press response, it
will be easier, and we shall begin to make good nancially as well as artistically, I am sure. Reed
to Weston, Nov. , Weston Correspondence, CCP. The pictures did not appear in Vanity
Fair, perhaps because the New York Times Magazine scooped it, but Vanity Fairs publication a
few years later of his portraits of Orozco and Robinson Jeffers may have been a belated outcome
of the exhibition.
. Ruth Green Harris, News of Exhibitions, New York Times, Oct. , ix, .
. Frances D. McMullen, Lowly Things That Yield Strange, Stark Beauty, New York Times
Magazine, Nov. , , .
. Reed made her comments about the effect of the Times piece in letters to Weston, Oct.,
Nov. , Weston Correspondence, CCP. K.G.S., New Photography Shows, New York Times,
March , . The show also traveled to galleries outside New York, although to which
ones is unclear. Originally it was to go to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Boston, and Chicago, but Reed
told Weston that worsening economic conditions made two of the galleries ask to reschedule for
. Reed to Weston, April, June , Weston Correspondence, CCP. She included twenty
of his photographs in a show of Mexican artists and artists of the Mexican school that opened
on the heels of his one-person exhibition. Weston Scrapbook A, CCP.
. Weston portfolio, Theatre Arts Monthly (Dec. ): . He disliked the egg slicer
because he believed it pandered to a facile fashion for the modern in centering on a manufactured
device; his natural forms were, in his judgment, at least as modern. Weston, Daybooks, : .
. Interview with Henry Holmes Smith in Dialogue with Photography, edited by Paul Hill and
Thomas Cooper (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), . Also impressed by the pepper
was Christopher Morley, who told readers of his The Bowling Green column in the Saturday
Review of Literature on January that it held as many surprises as Goethes Faust. Readers
who wanted to keep an eye on American art ought to acquaint themselves with Westons pho-
tographs like the ones at the Delphic Studios, but only if they were willing not to only see Art
in what they have been taught to believe is Artistic.
. Julien Levy interview with Paul Cummings, May , AAA. Time on November
reported prices asked at Levys opening exhibition. In an appendix to Photographs from the
Julien Levy Collection, Starting with Atget (Chicago: Chicago Institute of Art, ), David Travis
includes a list of New York gallery shows that is not entirely accurate or complete. Walter Ben-
jamin seminally explores the implications of reproducibility for art and its aura in The Work of
Notes to Pages 4952

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken, ), . Benjamin is not interested, however, in how it affects an artifacts
commercial worth.
. Omnibus review, New York Times, March .
. Reed to Weston, Oct. Nov. Dec. , May , Oct. Dec. , Weston Cor-
respondence, CCP; Weston, Daybooks, : .
. Edwin Alden Jewell, Synthetic View on Photography, New York Times, Nov. , .
Levys catalog is quoted in Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Pho-
tography between the World Wars, the Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, ), n.
. Art News, Nov. , quoted in Travis, Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection, ;
Jewell, Synthetic View on Photography, ; Walter Knowlton, Around the Galleries, Creative
Art (Dec. ): . Edith Halpert, the director of the Downtown Gallery that represented
Sheeler, was uninterested in photography and urged him not to show it. She feared his paintings
would be dismissed as merely photographic. His photographic commissions had dried up in any
case and he determined to concentrate on painting. His photographs would continue to be seen in
exhibitions and publications, but for the rest of the decade he would be detached from involvement
in photographys art world. Just before the Levy show, Creative Art had run a sensitive apprecia-
tion of Sheelers River Rouge photographs, which proposed that they might best be understood
by trac[ing] them through the painting history of the artist, just the conation Halpert feared.
Samuel M. Kootz, Ford Plant Photos of Charles Sheeler, Creative Art (April ): .
A ne discussion of his photographic career is Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and Norman Keyes Jr.,
Charles Sheeler: The Photographs (Boston: Little, Brown, ).
. K.G.S., Photographs That Interest, New York Times, Feb. , . Evanss Levy
appearance was his second in New York; the previous spring he had shown with Bourke-White
and Steiner at the John Becker Gallery, its only photography exhibition. Lynes would follow the
Levy show with one at the Leggett Gallery, also its only one. He would have a one-person show
at Levys gallery in .
. K.G.S., European Photographs on View, New York Times, Feb. , . A show of
the work of fty Europeans emphasizing experimental modes as used in advertising had appeared
the previous year at The Art Center, which was begun in the twenties to encourage photographys
commercial applications.
. Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, ), ; Levy
interview with Paul Cummings, AAA.
. It is likely that a refusal of experimental modes would have happened anyway, given the
antipathy of some leading American workers. After seeing a Moholy-Nagy show at the de Young
Museum in Adams characterized it as the greatest perversion of serious photography,
and Weston believed Man Ray was the Worlds Worst Photographer. Adams quoted in Edward
Weston, The Letters between Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke, edited by Leslie Squyres Calmes
(Tucson: CCP, the University of Arizona, ), n; Weston quoted in Amy Conger, Edward
Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson: CCP, the
University of Arizona, ), note to g. . In the late twenties and early thirties Evans experi-
mented with montage and extreme camera angles but soon abandoned them in favor of a documen-
tary style. Sally Stein explains American resistance to experimentalism as stemming from a rather
Notes to Pages 5355
311
nostalgic, agrarian view of private property and bourgeois individualism. Stein, Good Fences
Make Good Neighbors: American Resistance to Photomontage between the Wars, in Montage
and Modern Life, edited by Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
312
. Fragmentary documentation exists for most of these exhibitions but not for the Cleveland
one in , aside from the names of contributors. William Milliken, its director, reported to
Weston that it generated strong public response, but no catalog was printed because the museum
could not afford it. Milliken to Weston, Jan. , Weston Correspondence, CCP.
. Modern Photography at Home and Abroad catalog, Albright Art Gallery, , , Weston
Scrapbook A, CCP; Hambourg and Phillips, The New Vision, nn, , . Man Ray was
listed as an American, too, technically correct but misleading.
. Elisabeth Luther Cary, Photography the Modernist, New York Times, April , viii,
.
. Katharine Grant Stern, American vs. European Photography, Parnassus (March ):
. Kirstein made a similar argument reviewing the same exhibition, upholding the primacy of
the photograph as document. European works at their best could be interesting, he said, but
at their worst they were pointless convolutions, like crossword puzzles. Exhibition Notes: Pho-
tography, Arts Weekly, March , .
. Barr quoted in Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Mod-
ern Art (New York: Atheneum, ), .
. Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery, .
. The other veterans were Maurice Brattner, Arthur Gerlach, George Platt Lynes, William
Rittase, Stella Simon, and Luke Swank; newcomers were Thurman Rotan, joint creators Hendrick
V. Duryea and Robert E. Lochner and Joella Levy (Julien Levys wife) and Emma H. Little.
. Kirstein quoted in the Chicago Evening Post, April ; Berenice Abbott, My Favorite
Picture, PP (Feb. ): .
. Henry McBride, review, New York Sun, May .
. Barr to John S. Ankeney, May , MoMA Archives.
. Lincoln Kirstein, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses, MoMA
Bulletin, Dec. . Other details about the show are from the MoMA Archive. It traveled for
the next seven years to thirteen locations, among them Buffalo, Rochester, Hanover, New Haven,
and twice to Baltimore. At least one recipient, a professor at Oberlin College, was disappointed
by the commonplace architecture depicted, and he declined to use the pictures for an important
exhibition I had planned. MoMA Archives.
. Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Little, Brown, ),
, , .
Chapter 5: Edward Steichen and Celebrity Photography
. Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York: Doubleday, ), unpaginated (chapter

). Agha became art director with the October issue although his name would not appear on
the masthead until . Among the rst photographs seen in Aghas new format was Steichens
informal but audacious self-portrait. In it he crouches on his haunches and extends his arms,
sleeves rolled to his elbows, to direct an unseen sitter. Silhouetted behind him is a view camera
and pair of key lights. He thus advertised how he wanted readers to regard him, as a sophisticated
Notes to Pages 5562

artist whose equipment served his genius but was subordinate to it. He was also unpretentious
(the crouch), warmly sympathetic (his smile), and hard-working (the rolled-up sleeves), qualities
he possibly wished to stress because they were not always associated with artists. Carl Sandburgs
forthcoming biography was Vanity Fairs excuse for running the self-portrait, but for Steichen it
likely had an additional signicance, appearing in the rst issue Agha designed. Its combination of
modern stylishness with bold counterpoints of light and shadow and dramatic informality echoed
Aghas makeover and signied how welcome it was to the photographer; Edward SteichenSelf-
Portrait, Vanity Fair (Oct. ): , reprinted in Steichen, A Life in Photography.
. Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Photography between
the World Wars, the Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, ), n. The consultant
was Ralph Steiner.
. Advertisement, Vanity Fair (Dec. ): .
. Carl Sandburg, Steichen the Photographer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), , .
. Advertisement, Vanity Fair (Dec. ): ; The Editors Uneasy Chair, Vanity Fair
(April ): ; Clare Booth Brokaw, Edward Steichen, Photographer, Vanity Fair (June
): ; The Editors Uneasy Chair, Vanity Fair (Nov. ): .
. Walter Davenport, Whose Picture Do You Want? Colliers, July , ; Irving
Browning, Making the Movie of Steichen at Work, PP (July ): ; Career, Camera,
Corn, Time, Jan. , . Other proles repeating the legendary stories include Brokaws in
Vanity Fair in , and Rosa Reilly, Steichenthe Living Legend, PP (March ): ,
.
. Armitage to Crowninshield, May , Weston Correspondence, CCP; Walker Evans,
The Reappearance of Photography, Hound and Horn (Oct.Dec. ): .
. Beaumont Newhall reported Stieglitzs comment in a letter to Ansel Adams, Jan. ,
reprinted in Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , edited by Mary Street Alinder
and Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, ), . A contemporary assessment of
Steichens achievement is Samuel M. Kootz, Edward J. Steichen, Creative Art (May ):
, which criticizes the abuse of the romantic attitude in his advertising work and argues
that Steichen is at his best in his portraits of people.
. Nast quoted in Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, ), . Vanity Fair advertisers during the thirties included Cadil-
lac, Lincoln, Dusenberg, Pierce Arrow, and Packard automobiles; the Cunard, White Star, French,
and Matson steamship lines; the Plaza, Pierre, Carlyle, Savoy-Plaza, and Waldorf-Astoria hotels
in New York and the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs; and Dewers White Label Scotch,
Mercier Champagne, and Hennessy Cognac. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and
Listerine antiseptic advertised, too, but in general advertisers were a high-end group.
. There has never been a period when the best thing we had was not commercial art, Stei-
chen declared in . If my technic, imagination and vision is any good I ought to be able to put
the best values of my non-commercial and experimental photographs into commissioned work.
He believed his Vanity Fair portraits to be as strong as those he had made in his Photo-Secession
phase. Pure art for arts sake did not interest him, he added; I know what there is to know about
itand Im through with it. Quoted in Sandburg, Steichen the Photographer, .
. Steichen quoted in Illustration, USC (New York: William Morrow, ), .
Notes to Pages 6265
313
. Helen Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party (New York: Random House, ), , ;
Crowninshield quoted in Vanity Fair, edited by Cleveland Amory and Frederick Bradlee (New
York: Viking, ), .
314
. Crowninshield quoted in Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed., ; Stei-
chen, A Life in Photography, chs. and .
. Vanity Fair (May ): ; Vanity Fair (Feb. ): .
. Vanity Fair (Jan. ): .
. Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History since to the Present (New
York: Abrams, ), .
. Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conicts
(New York: Harcourt Brace, ). Chapter explores leisure in depression-era Muncie. Roland
Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, ), .
. Vanity Fair (April ): ; Vanity Fair (July ): .
. Steichen quoted in Davenport, Whose Picture Do You Want? .
. Vanity Fair (Jan. ): ; Vanity Fair (July ): ; Vanity Fair (Sept. ):
.
. Vanity Fair (Jan ): ; Vanity Fair (Sept. ): ; Vanity Fair (Sept. ):
.
. Vanity Fair (June ): ; Vanity Fair (April ): ; Vanity Fair (Jan. ):
.
. The costumed divas included Lucrezia Bori in Peter Ibbetson, Lotte Lenya in Der Rosenka-
vilier, Gladys Swartout in Romeo and Juliet, and Rosa Ponselle in Carmen. Laurence Tibbett was
the male singer.
. Vanity Fair (March ): ; Vanity Fair (July ): ; Vanity Fair (Jan. ):
; Vanity Fair (June ): .
. Vanity Fair (Aug. ): ; Vanity Fair (Feb. ): ; Vanity Fair (Jan. ):
; Vanity Fair (Aug. ): ; Vanity Fair (Oct. ): ; Vanity Fair (Nov. ): .
Subdued lighting also characterized portraits of the most distinguished stage actors, such as The
First Lady of the Theater Katharine Cornell, George Arliss, and Lionel Barrymore.
. Vanity Fair (Jan. ): ; Vanity Fair (Oct. ): .
. Lawrenson, Stranger at the Party, . A portrait of Baruch is included in Steichens auto-
biography but not the one from Vanity Fair.
. Vanity Fair (March ): .
. Sixty-ve percent of the entertainment portraits were of individual women, and percent
of men and women together, either married couples like Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg or
performing duos.
. Vanity Fair (June ): ; Vanity Fair (June ): .
. Vanity Fair (Aug. ): ; Vanity Fair (Aug. ): . Steichen discussed his
making of these portraits in an instructional piece about portraiture, illustrating it with twenty-
six shots of Robeson. Steichen, Photographing Paul Robeson as Emperor Jones, USCM (Oct.
): .
. Vanity Fair (Jan. ): ; Vanity Fair (Sept. ): ; Vanity Fair (March
): .
Notes to Pages 6574

. Vanity Fair (June ): .
. Vanity Fair (Nov. ): ; Vanity Fair (July ): .
. Edward G. Leuders, Carl Van Vechten (New York: Twayne, ); also see Keith F. Davis,
The Passionate Observer: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (Kansas City: Hallmark Cards, ),
.
. Van Vechtens Robeson is reprinted in Davis, The Passionate Observer, .
. Van Vechtens ONeill and Mann are reprinted in Davis, The Passionate Observer, , .
Steichens Mann is in Vanity Fair (Aug. ): .
. Van Vecthens Wong is reprinted in Davis, The Passionate Observer, .
. Steichens Bankhead is in Vanity Fair (Dec. ): .
. Van Vechtens Bankhead is reprinted in Davis, The Passionate Observer, .
Chapter 6: MoMAs Big Top Show
. Paul Strand, The Art Motive in Photography, reprinted in Photography in Print: Writings
from to the Present, edited by Vicki Goldberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), .
Stieglitz had shown pictures by David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron at the gal-
lery and in Camera Work, but in general the movement he spearheaded saw itself as sui generis.
. In New York the exhibition drew , attendees, more than the seasons other MoMA
exhibitions except Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which had fty thousand visitors. The next
year the First Annual International Photography Exposition at the Grand Central Palace would
attract a daily average of fteen times as many visitors as MoMAs.
. Newhall to Paul Vanderbilt, April , Paul Vanderbilt Papers, AAA; Beaumont Newhall,
Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Little, Brown, ), . Newhall initially saw
the pictorialists as purisms most formidable adversary, a residue of Group f.s manifesto he had
absorbed by reading Adamss Making a Photograph: An Introduction to Photography (New York:
Studio Publications, ). But by the time he wrote the catalog he barely mentioned them.
. Newhall to A. Conger Goodyear, Jan. , MoMA Archives. Stieglitz quoted in Russell
Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum,
), .
. Christopher Phillips claims that Moholy-Nagy was an important adviser to Newhall but pro-
vides no evidence of it. Given Newhalls commitments it seems unlikely, and if advice was given
it is difcult to see that it was taken. In any case Moholy-Nagy was living in London at the time.
Christopher Phillips, The Judgment Seat of Photography, in The Contest of Meaning, edited by
Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
. Interview with Newhall in Dialogue with Photography, edited by Paul Hill and Thomas Coo-
per (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), .
. Besides Newhalls deemphasis on social documentary, American Western photography from
the last half of the nineteenth century was also nearly invisible, represented only by Timothy
OSullivans Caon de Chelle, lent at the last minute by Adams. In A Pageant of Photography
three years later Adams would include a much larger representation.
. This hierarchy has had remarkable staying power although with some modications such as
Evans and Weston moving up as well as Adams (although possibly more in popular estimation
Notes to Pages 7584
315
than critical); Anton Bruehl diminished and Bouchard and Martin disappearing; and Sheelers
photography rediscovered.
. Newhall, Focus, .
316
. Susan Weiley, A Conversation with Beaumont Newhall, Art News (Oct. ): ;
Newhall interview in Dialogue with Photography, ed. Hill and Cooper, .
. In his rich and challenging essay Christopher Phillips traces the history of photography at
MoMA, including the show, and via a somewhat different route, comes to similar conclu-
sions about how it became a vade mecum to aesthetic appreciation that overwhelmingly stressed
esthetic judgment untouched by the inuence of any larger social and historical forces. Phillips,
The Judgment Seat of Photography, .
. Two of Beatons four images may have been originally fashion work, and two of Lyness
four certainly were (they were loaned by Harpers Bazaar). In the color section were two by Anton
Bruehl, although none of his six black-and-white shots was of fashion.
. The conation of the genius of individual photographic authorship with technological
advances was not entirely a logical one, however happily it married the connoisseurship Newhall
embraced from his art historical training and the condence in technology of the larger American
culture, although the combination was such a commonplace at the time that no one who wrote
about the show even remarked on it. Allison Bertrand provides a ne account of Newhalls prepa-
ration for writing the catalog and an intellectual history of its precepts in Beaumont Newhalls
Photography : Making History, History of Photography (Summer ): .
. Beaumont Newhall, Toward the New Histories of Photography, Exposure (Winter
): . That in the show and then the catalogalthough not in the book that derived from the
latterNewhall did imagine Stieglitzs early work as essentially pictorialist is indicated by the
catalog statement that his postwar work is noticeably different from his earlier work and has a
precision of detail which gives a special value to this photographers always remarkable vision.
That was misleading because much of his prewar photography was straight, too. What the
statement reected was Newhalls determination at that moment to diminish the importance of
the Photo-Secession and, implicitly, Stieglitzs authority. Newhall, Photography, (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, ), .
. Newhall, Photography, , , , , , , .
. Ibid., , , . There is a hint that Newhall intended a more ambitious social perspective
than he achieved in the awkward structure he conceived for both the exhibition and the catalog,
with what seem to be annexes for stereoscopic, press, color, and scientic photography, and for
movies, attached to but unconnected with photographys artistic and technological development.
He may have simply been copying the Film und Foto and Harvard Society shows that
employed a similar scheme, but these sections nevertheless suggest that he initially hoped to link
discussion of these practical and social uses with the formal precepts he actually did raise.
. Ibid., .
. Beaumont Newhall, Photography: A Short Critical History (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, ), .
. Stieglitz quoted in Newhall, Photography, .
. Clippings of notices are in the MoMA scrapbook of the exhibition, MoMA Archives. See
also Speaking of Pictures, Life, March , ; and Magic Boxes, Time, March ,
Notes to Pages 8490

. Mumfords review, one of the most astute, ran under the general title The Art Galleries, The
New Yorker, April , .
. USC (New York: William Morrow, ), ; Jacob Deschin, Amazing Progress
of Photography in a Hundred Years, PP (June ): , . In Newhall reprised for
the same readership his observations about the purity of early photography. Beaumont Newhall,
Photography Is a Hundred Years Old, PP (Jan. ): , .
. Reviews of the traveling versions, and comments by recipients of them, are in the MoMA
Archives.
. Beaumont Newhall, This Was , in The Best of Popular Photography, edited by Harvey
V. Fondiller (New York: Ziff-Davis, ), .
Chapter 7: Camera Periodicals and the Popular Audience
. Thomas J. Maloney, Photography Comes of Age, Review of Reviews (June ):

.
. The rst three numbers, , , and , appeared during the year in the title, but then
Maloney decided to advance the cover date so it would be available before the year began. The
fourth number was dated but had a copyright of . There was no issue dated .
. The annuals were spiral-bound, which more effectively displayed photographs bled to the
vertical edges. Paper varied, creamy in some numbers, slick in others, and in both. Begin-
ning in , photographers were invited to include statements about their work in the appendix
in addition to technical data, and some did. The number awkwardly interleaved appendix
materials among groups of photographs, and in these appeared as captions.
. The print-run gures and the comment about U.S. Camera becoming an institution are in
Success Story, Minicam (Sept. ): ; Our Book Shelves, Camera Craft (Nov. ):
; and Ralph Steiner, review of USC , PM, Dec. , .
. The new magazines included Good Photography, Minicam, Photo Technique, Photo Art Monthly,
Prize Photography, Popular Photography, and U.S. Camera Magazine.
. Ansel Adams, letter to the editor, USCM (Feb.March ): . The edition of Ayers
periodical guide lists circulation gures.
. PP and USCM also consistently featured how-to articles but never exclusively. USC annuals
did not, with a single exception, publish camera advice, although providing technical information
in appendixes was a gesture toward readers practical interests.
. Beaumont Newhall, This Was , in The Best of Popular Photography, edited by Harvey
V. Fondiller (New York: Ziff-Davis, ), . The magazines made no attempt to disguise their
dependence on advertisers. Lets Buy Another Camera was only the most blatantly titled of the
frequent editorial blandishments to patronize them, and the advice the practical columns proffered
also often required new purchases.
. Among the tiny representation of experimental modes in USCs portfolios were a Man Ray
solarized portrait from Harpers Bazaar and a George Platt Lynes surrealist composite of a mus-
cular young mans body that seems to grow from a tree, both in the number, and a Barbara
Morgan montage in that superimposed negatives of a male dancer, a second-oor view of a
snowy city park, and a photogram of a tulip. Steichens multiple exposure New York (the Empire
Notes to Pages 9195
317
State Building, a picture elsewhere called The Maypole) in , and his multiple exposure
portrait of Carl Sandburg in , were more gimmicky than experimental. A few pictures used
straight means to approximate abstraction, such as Anton Bruehls study of a ships deck vents in
318
the issue and Paul Outerbridges color close-up of a womans breast and nipple in the
one, but these, too, were uncommon. In its rst issue USCM remarked of the migrs: Europes
best photographers continue to troop to American. When they arrive they usually come with
portfolios of beautiful work and no money. At the end of three years here, the position is always
reversedmuch money and no beautiful workjust pictures. This formulation was misleading,
but it did justify excluding their work. Lens Lines, USCM (Autumn ): .
. M. F. Agha, Preface, USC (New York: William Morrow, ), . Aghas author-
ity to pronounce on such matters without seeming merely chauvinistic may have been enhanced
by his origins as a Russian educated in Paris.
. Elizabeth McCausland, One Hundred Years of the American Standard of Photography,
USC (New York: Random House, ), .
. Frank Crowninshield, Foreword, USC (New York: William Morrow, ), .
Readers would be able to judge the validity of Crowninshields judgment by consulting Steichens
FSA feature in the same number.
. Agha contributed another witty introduction to the number, a Pocket History of
Photographic Aesthetics, that he mischievously entitled Is Photography Art? In it he divided
photographys history into four eras. In the most recent of which since the world war, photogra-
phers protested romanticism, academicism, militarism, capitalism, impressionism, subjectivism,
pictorialism and orthodox perspective.
. Beaumont Newhall, review of Changing New York, USCM (June ): , and review of
Home Town, USCM (Dec. ): ; Berenice Abbott, review of Photography and the American
Scene, USCM (Jan.Feb. ): , ; Ansel Adams, review of Mexican Photographs, USCM
(Dec. ): ; Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces: How the Pictures
Were Made, PP (March ): ; F. Anthony Saunders, Fifty-thousand People Saw the
Show, PP (Feb. ): ; Rosa Reilly, The Camera World on Parade, PP (July ):
; A Pageant of Photography, USCM (Feb. ): . Beginning in , USC annu-
als began to include textual features in addition to the prefatory ones. The preview of California
and the West appeared in the annual, as did Newhalls reprise of MoMAs show. Edward Weston
and Charis Wilson Weston, Of the West: A Guggenheim Portrait, USC (New York: Ran-
dom House, ), ; Beaumont Newhall, The First Fifty Years, USC (New York:
William Morrow, ), . Newhall in contributed historical pieces to both USCM and
PP commemorating photographys centenary. A comment Weston made to Henry Allen Moe,
head of the Guggenheim Foundation, about USC s preview of California and the West is
a reminder of how the expansion of photographys art that supplied artists with new audiences
brought economic benets in train. The $ he received for rights, Weston told Moe, would help
him get back into business again. Weston to Moe, March , Weston Scrapbook B, CCP.
. Condensed citations are in alphabetical order. Abbott: Rosa Reilly, Berenice Abbott Records
Changing New York, PP (Sept. ); Berenice Abbott, My Favorite Picture, PP (Feb.
). Adams: Photography of Architecture, USCM (Dec. ); An Approach to a Prac-
tical Technique, USCM (April-May ); Discussion on Filters, USCM (Oct. );
Photo Murals, USCM (Autumn ); Practical Hints on Lenses, USCM (AprilMay
Notes to Pages 9698

). Bourke-White: Rosa Reilly, Why Margaret Bourke-White Is at the Top, PP (July );
Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces: How the Pictures Were Made, PP
(March ): ; American Aces: Margaret Bourke-White, USCM (AprilMay );
Margaret Bourke-White as told to Robert W. Brown, Portraiture Is Going Informal, PP
(Dec. ). Dahl-Wolfe: My Favorite Picture, by Dahl-Wolfe, PP (Sept. ). Elisofon:
Playgrounds for Manhattan, USCM (AprilMay ). FSA: Edward Steichen, The F.S.A.
Photographers, USC (New York: William Morrow, ); Rosa Reilly, Photographing
the America of Today, PP (Nov. ); Edwin Locke, F.S.A., USCM (Feb. ); The
Home Front, USCM (Sept. ). Frissell: Michael Talbott, Toni Frissell: Outdoor Spe-
cialist, PP (Oct. ); Frank Crowninshield, American AcesToni Frissell, PP (Oct.
). Glaha: Boulder Dam: The Photography of Engineering Works, USCM (Jan.Feb.
). Hine: Elizabeth McCausland, Boswell of Ellis Island, USCM (Jan.Feb. ). Krutch:
TVA: Photographs by Charles Krutch, USCM (July ). Lange: An American Exodus,
USCM (AprilMay ); Pare Lorenz, Dorothea Lange: Camera with a Purpose, USC ,
vol. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, ), . Lee: Pie Town: Life on the Ameri-
can Frontier Version, USCM (Oct. ). Lynes: Glenway Wescott, Illustrations of
Mythology, USCM (Jan.Feb. ); Robert W. Marks, George Platt LynesPhotographer
of Fantasy, PP (Dec. ); Portraits by Lynes, USCM (Nov. ). Morgan: Dance Pho-
tography, USCM (Feb.March ). Munkcsi: Munkacsis Adventures, PP (May ).
Outerbridge: Gray Strider, This Man Outerbridge, PP (Dec. ); American AcesPaul
Outerbridge, Jr., USCM (Jan.Feb. ). Sekaer: Nothing to Photograph Here! USCM
(Aug. ). Steichen: Rosa Reilly, Steichenthe Living Legend, PP (March ); Stei-
chen, USC (New York: William Morrow, ); Photographing Paul Robeson, USCM
(Oct. ). Stieglitz: Edward Steichen, The Lusha Nelson Photographs of Alfred Stieglitz,
USCM (Feb.March ); Robert W. Marks, StieglitzPatriarch of Photography, PP
(April ). Strand: Elizabeth McCausland, Paul Strand, USCM (Feb.March ). Swank:
Beaumont Newhall, Luke Swanks Pennsylvania, USCM (Autumn ). Weston: Nestor
Barrett, Edward Weston: Master of Simplicity, PP (June ); I Photograph Trees, PP
(June ).
. Reilly, Berenice Abbott Records Changing New York, , . Abbott and her work
regularly appeared in camera magazines. The month before Reillys prole PP published her
rooftop view of New York at night; she also evaluated camera design and discussed her favorite
picture in the same issue. For USCM she reviewed Tafts book and contributed a two-part, well-
illustrated appreciation of Atget. Bonnie Yochelson maintains that although Abbott hoped to do
a book exclusively on Trinity Church she included no photographs of it among the in Chang-
ing New Yorks nal compilation. The two reprinted here must have been made before she joined
the WPA. Yochelson, ed., Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (New York: New Press, Museum
of the City of New York, ), .
. Proles of commercial photographers appeared, too, such as the advertising workers Paul A.
Hesse, Lejaren Hiller, and John Paul Pennebaker, and the Hollywood glamour specialists Clar-
ence Sinclair Bull and George Hurrell. These pieces consistently emphasized their journeyman
competence and nancial success, thus distinguishing them from others who had more ambitious,
expressive goals and leaving no doubt that in photographys hierarchy they occupied a humbler
position than their artistic counterparts.
Notes to Page 99
319
. McCausland, Paul Strand, , . Other pieces in this category included McCauslands
on Hine, Abbotts on Atget, and Newhalls on Swank.
. Fashion photographers with gure studies were Steichen in , Frissell in , Dahl-
320
Wolfe in and , and Horst in (which, he commented, was one of the few nonfashion
or commercial photographs he had made). The magazines also included articles by or about Beaton,
Dahl-Wolfe, Frissell, and Munkcsi as well as Steichen, but they may have been less inclined to
highlight that brand of photography as much as the annuals because Vogue and Harpers Bazaar
published so much of their work and the multiple reproductions that always accompanied camera
magazine articles would be too repetitive.
. Edward Steichen, Photographs? USC (New York: William Morrow, ), .
. Steichen, The F.S.A. Photographers, ; Stryker to Lange, Dec. , RSP. Another
piece on the FSA appeared almost simultaneously with Steichens: Reilly, Photographing the
America of Today, .
. A somewhat different account of this piece is Alan Trachtenberg, From Image to Story:
Reading the File, in Documenting America, , edited by Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly
W. Brannon (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. Evanss Bethlehem shot, the features nal one, was spread over two pages and the only
one not run with a quotation, perhaps because any quotation would be utterly mismatched. This
placement has a certain conventional logic, ending the series with an evocation of mortality, but
its rhetorical location, visually speaking, also suggests that Steichen was not indifferent to the
imaginative power of Evanss work, even if he were determined to diminish what he believed to
be an inated reputation.
. Walker Evans, The Reappearance of Photography, Hound and Horn (Oct.Dec. ):
; Museum of Modern Arts Photo Department, USCM (Feb. ): .
. Two of Evanss shots appeared with the piece by Reilly, Photographing the America of
Today, ; none was among the fteen in Locke, F.S.A. James Agee and Walker Evans,
Colon, New Directions (Norfolk: New Directions, ), . In a piece on photography
as art by a commercial photographer, MoMAs purchase of some of Evanss prints is mentioned in
passing, although the author adds that Weston is unquestionably the greater artist. George Hur-
rell as told to Alex Evelove, Photography Is a Fine Art, PP (March ): .
. Edward Steichen, Photographers and Button Pushers, USC (New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, ), l; An American Exodus, ; Reilly, Photographing the America of Today,
; Lorenz, Dorothea Lange: Camera with a Purpose, . Lange was apparently dissatis-
ed with the Lorenz pieces illustrations, which did not include many of her strongest or at least
best-known FSA pictures. The captions were also contrived. That for White Angel Bread Line,
for example, read, When they get through working you they want you out of the way. Stryker
to Lange, Feb. , RSP.
. Reilly, Berenice Abbott Records Changing New York, ; Erskine Caldwell, You Have
Seen Their Faces: Why I Wanted to Do This Story, PP (March ): ; TVA: Photographs
by Charles Krutch, ; Glaha, Boulder Dam, ; Morris Engel, Metropolis, USC (New
York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, ), : ; Locke, F.S.A., . Locke was Strykers assis-
tant at the FSA from to . Strands testimonial was reprinted from his review Engels
One-Man Show, Photo Notes (Dec. ), reprinted in Photo Notes, edited by Nathan Lyons
(Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, ). The audience for the Photo League publication was
Notes to Pages 100106

small, and only rarely were items reprinted elsewhere. Nevertheless, the annuals republication of
Strands assessment illustrates how events in one corner of photographys art world could rever-
berate in another.
The most copiously illustrated of the documentary pieces was in USC , seventy-six com-
monplace photographs by J. W. McManigal, a farm photographer of Horton, Kansas, that pur-
ported to be A Midland Chronicle. Aside from this one occasion McManigal was entirely obscure
at the time and remains so now. Maloneys bombastic preface to the annual hints at why it
dropped its standards to print these mediocre photographs. The threat of war meant that publish-
ing the years best pictures had become less important, he said, than that U.S. Camera should be
rst of all American. Not only American, but literally ag-waving American, proud American,
even belligerent American, if belligerence is a necessity to maintain all that this land has given us.
McManigals pictures nominally served those patriotic purposes, his landscapes suggesting the
American heartlands fecundity and his studies of Hortons citizenry their sturdy independence. In
subject if not execution they resembled similar ethnographic community surveys by some of the
FSA photographers, such as Russell Lees of St. Augustine, Texas, and Pie Town, New Mexico. But
nineteen of the St. Augustine pictures had already appeared in Travel, and the Pie Town project
had gotten underway too late for this issue of USC. Maloney would publish thirty-nine pictures
from it in USCM late in . Moreover, because of Steichens substantial article on the FSA two
years earlier and the Lange prole in the same number, Maloney must have felt he could not dip
into this well again, even for superior pictures. Maloney, Preface, : .
. Ansel Adams, letter to the Photo League, USCM (Oct. ): ; Elisofon, Playgrounds
for Manhattan, . Readers could assess Elisofons judgment about Bourke-Whitealthough
not this particular picture, which was from You Have Seen Their Facesby turning to a prole
of her in the same issue.
. John Kabel, I Do Landscapes, USCM (JuneJuly ): ; Ted Cook, Cameramen
Classied, USCM (AprilMay, ): .
. James Thrall Soby, Notes on Documentary Photography, USCM (Autumn ): ,
.
. Widely representative as they were, the portfolios were also selective, and procedures for
determining contents received regular editorial emphasis. Steichen reported that three thousand
photographers vying for inclusion in the annual had submitted fteen thousand pictures.
Maloney winnowed these by two-thirds, Steichen reduced this number to ve hundred and then
three hundred after randomly going through percent of Maloneys initial eliminations to ensure
that their standards matched. Maloney then made the nal cut to two hundred or so based on lay-
out requirements. Edward Steichen, Photography in its One-Hundredth Year, USC (New
York: Random House, ), . Although a summary of cumulative portfolio appearances in the
seven prewar issues would be tedious, these examples suggest how repeated showings identied
to readers the leading photographers: Steichen and Bourke-White (seven appearances); Edward
Weston (six, with a feature story the year he had no portfolio representation); Lange (four, Steichens
FSA piece and Lorenzs prole in two of the years she was not in the portfolios); Cunningham
and Brett Weston (ve); Abbott (three, all before publication of Changing New York); and Adams
(three).
. Harland L. Swift, letter, USCM (AprilMay ): .
. Steichen, The Lusha Nelson Photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, .
321
. Letters from S. G. Weisman, USCM (JuneJuly ): ; Leo Velleman Jr., USCM
(AprilMay ): ; C. A. Maginn, USCM (Oct. ): ; Williard K. Smith, USCM (April
May ); ; and Brooking P. Tatum, USCM (July ): .
322
. Letters from Bruce Cole and Williard K. Smith, USCM (AprilMay ): ; and
Philip Palmer, USCM (JuneJuly ): . A correspondent also took Strand to task for over-
estimating Engels achievement in USC .
. Letters from Roberta Smith, USCM (Dec. ): ; John C. Rogers, USCM (Feb. ):
; Patrick Tyre, USCM (Oct. ): ; John P. Breedon Jr., USCM (Feb. ); Brooking
P. Tatum, USCM (July ): .
. Thanks, U.S. Camera Readers, USCM (Oct. ): .
. Letters from M. L. Hutslar, USCM (Feb.March ): ; Carleton Mitchell, USCM
(Oct. ): ; Rolf Tietgens, USCM (Feb.March ): ; Earl Kenyon, USCM (Dec.
): ; and John C. Rogers, USCM (Dec. ): .
. Letters from Margaret McKittrick and Bruce Cole, USCM (AprilMay ): ,
.
Chapter 8: Culture Morphology in Berenice Abbotts New York
. A sign of this neglect is that not until nearly sixty years after she made her New York pho-
tographs was a denitive collection published, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (New York:
New Press, Museum of the City of New York, ), edited by Bonnie Yochelson, with the
images that she had chosen for a denitive set in contrast with the many collections of FSA
photographs that began to appear during the sixties.
. Berenice Abbott, Changing New York (New York: E. P. Dutton, ), reprint entitled New
York in the Thirties (New York: Dover, ). A list of her exhibitions and publications through
is in the Charles Christopher Adams Papers at the AAA, prepared either by Abbott or Eliza-
beth McCausland near the end of that year. Subsequent references to the photographs in Changing
New York will appear in parentheses in the text, using the books numbering system, also followed
in the Dover reprint.
. Yochelsons Introduction: A Fantastic Passion for New York, in Berenice Abbott: Changing
New York (New York: New Press, Museum of the City of New York, ), n.p., provides details
of Abbotts WPA/FAP employment and the fate of her negatives. According to William F. McDon-
ald, in addition to the one in New York, WPA/FAP units in San Francisco and Florida permitted
personal work, although some was also undertaken in Portland, Oregon (by Minor White) and
in Illinois (as seen in the WPA Illinois Writers Project state guidebook). Aside from New York,
however, the extent of this activity remains obscure, a fact that also indicates how WPA/FAP
sponsorship has retarded recognition of its more ambitious work. William F. McDonald, Federal
Relief Administration and the Arts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, ), .
. Abbott quoted in Rosa Reilly, Berenice Abbott Records Changing New York, PP (Sept.
): . Cowleys book is about writers, but it is likely that Abbotts experience inuenced it.
They shared an apartment in Greenwich Village before she went abroad and remained friends.
The fullest biographical account is Hank ONeil, Berenice Abbott: American Photographer (New
York: McGraw-Hill, ). A thoughtful analysis is Michael G. Sundell, Berenice Abbotts Work
in the Thirties, Prospects (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), .

. Abbott interview with James McQuaid, July , typescript in the Eastman House, . That
Atgets example was an inspiration for Abbotts New York work is an unexceptionable fact, and
they share similarities in approach and style although there are many differences as well. Sundell
has shrewdly pointed out one of the latter, the characteristic use of light by each artist, Atgets
even, mellow light as against Abbotts undiffused full sunlight that radiates abrasively onto the
streets, often contrasting sharply with great areas of dark. Sundell, Berenice Abbotts Work in
the Thirties, .
. Berenice Abbott, A Guide to Better Photography (New York: Crown, ), , . Near
the end of her project Abbott made a few photographs with a smaller hand and stand Linhof,
but she used the view camera for the overwhelming majority of images.
. Yochelson, ed., Berenice Abbott, n.p. Abbott discusses her noninvolvement with the text in
her interview with James McQuaid, .
. Ibid., n.p. Among the fourteen replacements were shots of the Daily News, McGraw Hill,
and RCA buildings; another was Manhattan Skyline, the books penultimate picture. All the
newly selected images had been made earlier, not at Duttons request. Her interview with McQuaid
runs to typescript pages and covers most aspects of her career, and had she harbored griev-
ances about Duttons treatment of her book it seems inconceivable that she would not have voiced
them.
. Berenice Abbott, My Favorite Picture, PP (Feb. ): . Besides eight pictures of New
Yorks bridges, one of a skyport for amphibious planes, and two of ferry terminals, Changing New
York has two of small vessels and two more with an ocean liner featured prominently.
. Gilbert Seldes, This Is New York (New York: Kemp, ), includes twelve of Abbotts
preWPA/FAP studies of the city, but the overall tone of the book is uncritically celebratory of
the citys glories.
. Berenice Abbott, The World of Atget (New York: Horizon, ), xxvi. Michael Dennings
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso
Press, ) provides a sympathetic account of this tendency in thirties culture, especially in chap-
ters .
. Berenice Abbott, Documenting the City, in The Complete Photographer, edited by Willard
D. Morgan (New York: National Educational Alliance, ), : . In an unsuccessful
proposal for a Guggenheim Fellowship to extend the New York project to ten additional U.S. cit-
ies in , Abbott and McCausland enunciated the historicist premise that guided Abbotts city
work: Less than any other nation does America know and understand its tradition, its origins, its
roots, its immediate past, its recent culture morphology. Yet till that understanding is achieved,
America cannot hope to realize its destiny. A copy of this Plans for Work: Plan to Document
the Portrait of Contemporary America is in RSP.
. Another close-up was Gay Street, Nos. and (); mid-distance shots included
Minetta Street, Nos. , , () and Gramercy Park West, Nos. and (); and establishing
shots were West Street Row (), Broome Street, Nos. (), and St. Lukes Chapel
and Old Houses () as well as Washington Square, Looking North.
. Abbott, Documenting the City, .
. Abbott, The World of Atget, xviii.
. Among the other photographs of ornate nineteenth-century transportation facilities were
Ferry, Central Railroad of N.J. () and the Third Avenue Car Barns (). Greyhound Bus
323
Terminal () compared the modest Art Deco bus facility with the massive Pennsylvania Station
behind it, modeled after the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.
. Abbott, A Guide to Better Photography, .
324
. Ibid., ; also see Abbott, Documenting the City, . The only signicant artistic insti-
tutions she photographed were Provincetown Playhouse (), which under WPA control was a
drama school and no longer produced plays, and Civic Repertory Theatre (), demolished by
the time Changing New York appeared.
. Warren I. Susman, The Culture of the Thirties, in his Culture as History: The Transfor-
mation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, ), .
. Lebanon Restaurant was paired with City Arabesque (), in which the Wall Street area
is seen through a scrim of the curving iron grillwork atop Wall Tower, a montage of contrast
united in this case by similar curvilinear forms.
. Abbott made her picture of the skyport in , before the WPA expansion of it, a fact
obscured by the caption. Bourke-White, who published a similar view in Life ( Aug. , ),
put her camera close to where Abbott had and included the same buildings, without, however,
the shoeshine boys. Bourke-Whites picture also has greater depth of eld, so the Cities Service
Building is in sharper focus.
. A Woman Photographs the City, Life, Jan. , .
. Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott: Photographs, introduction by David Vestal (New York:
Horizon, ), . She insisted that Hopper did not inuence her and that she hardly knew of
his work when she was photographing New York. Abbott interview with James McQuaid, .
. Quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (New York: W. W. Norton and
the Whitney Museum of Art, ), .
Chapter 9: Farm Security Administration Photography and the Dilemmas of Art
. The unit responsible for making the photographs, the Historical Section of the Information
Division of the Resettlement Administration (RA), came into existence in mid . The RA had
been created shortly before by executive order; it developed a number of initiatives, most pro-
viding assistance to small and tenant farmers overlooked and even disabled by the Agricultural
Adjustment Administration (AAA), the New Deals major agricultural program. Following the
elections of , Congress gave the RA legislative legitimacy with the Bankhead-Jones Farm
Tenancy Act, and it was transferred to the Department of Agriculture with a new name, the Farm
Security Administration (FSA). Late in the Historical Section was detached from the FSA
and assigned to the Ofce of War Information, where it operated for nearly a year before it was
shut down. Hereafter the Historical Section in all its incarnations will be synonymous with FSA,
even though that usage risks overstating its salience in the agencies of which it was a part.
Since the sixties there have been at least seven collections of Evanss photographs and seven
of Langes. Evanss American Photographs has also been reprinted three times, and Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men reissued with twice the rst editions number of photographs. Langes Ameri-
can Exodus has also appeared in a new edition. Evans has been the subject of two biographies and
Lange of one. Post Wolcott has been the subject of a biography and two collections. Delano, Lee,
Rothstein, Shahn, and Vachon each have had monographs. At least four omnibus volumes have
also been published, and fteen of pictures made in specic states.

. Cowles to Stryker, Nov. ; James L. McCamy to Stryker, Feb., ; Post Wolcott
to Stryker, July , all RSP.
. F. Jack Hurley estimates that about three hundred FSA images were actually seen in the
thirties, but that number seems too low. The total will never be known, but between one and two
thousand seems most likely. F. Jack Hurley, Marion Post Wolcott: A Photographic Journey (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, ), . Several score newspapers reprinted at least
one section picture, but the number of clippings in the Historical Section Textual Records in the
Library of Congress does not suggest frequent use and reveals a preponderance of progress
shots. Despite Lifes omnivorous need for pictures the sections only appeared a half-dozen times
in that magazines rst ve years, and then usually as one picture or two in a longer feature, as
was the case with two Lange shots among eighty others in The Thirties: An Album ( June
). During this same period Look published more, perhaps as many as forty, but because not all
were credited, and some only obscurely, it is difcult to be certain. On Life, see Stryker to Locke,
April , and Lee to Stryker, June , both RSP. A useful discussion of the rhetoric
of three Look features (and of Lifes minimal use of the pictures) is Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing
Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ),
.
. The only book-length history is F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Devel-
opment of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
). More specialized studies include the following, often examining the Section in a larger survey
of the thirties or documentary photography. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties
America (New York: Oxford University Press, ), is concerned with the photographsmostly
Evanssas representative of a documentary impulse in thirties expressive culture. David Peeler,
Hope among Us Yet (Athens: University of Georgia Press, ), is most interested in the photog-
raphers intentions as a means to understand the creative mind of the Depression years ().
Andrea Fischer, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women (New York: Pandora Press, ), emphasizes the
female photographers and how the depression instigated uncertain and shifting notions of personal
identity so they became a site at which a naming of the feminine might be publicly propounded
and secured (). John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, ), sees the section as implicated in a liberal corporatist plan to co-opt dissent and thus
reassert the threatened bonds of social consent (). Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life (New York:
Cambridge University Press, ), also regards it as an undertaking to conciliate public opinion
in the service of a merely palliative liberal reform effort that promised ever-immanent progress;
her book, more than others, is attentive to the agency housing the section (). Miles Orvell,
The Real Thing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), is interested in documentary
photographys relation to artistic modernism, with which it had an ambiguous relationship because
the camera was an artifact of modernity and attempted to render the exact feel and reality of things
yet also stressed the immediacy of what was portrayed rather than the problem of esthetic form.
James Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), focuses on
four groups of photographsEvanss of tenants in Alabama, Rothsteins in Oklahoma, Langes
Migrant Mother shots, and Lees work in Pie Town, New Mexicoand emphasizes how their
cultural meanings were tted to the values of the FSAs imagined urban middle class audience
(viiiix). James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, ), assesses the photographs as counterthrusts to the bromides
325
of thirties popular culture and the propaganda of business organizations. Nicholas Natanson, The
Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, ), explores the les photographs of African Americans with a good deal of circumstan-
326
tial attention to how they were actually used in the thirties. Lawrence Levine, The Historian and
the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the s and s, in Levine,
The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University
Press, ), and in somewhat different form, in Documenting America, , edited by Carl
Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannon (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), , sug-
gestively explores the tensions and ambiguities that make the photographs uncommonly useful for
historians. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, is a rhetorical analysis of reproductions appearing in Sur-
vey Graphic, U.S. Camera, and Look. The Library of Congress lists more than forty photographers
whose pictures are included in the le. Those who worked for the section before the war are John
Collier Jr., Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Marion Post
Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and John Vachon. Paul Carter and Theo Jung also were
employed briey before they were let go for inferior work.
. Stryker to Harry F. Carman, Oct. ; Stryker to Lange, undated letter from ca. Nov.
, both RSP.
. Stryker to Lee, April , HSTR.
. Stryker to Lange, April ; Stryker to Lee, Jan. , both RSP.
. Stryker to Rothstein, April ; Stryker, General Bulletin to staff, May ; Stryker
to Rosa Reilly, June , all RSP.
. James McCamy, Government Publicity: Its Practices in Federal Administration (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, ), . Five agencies (including the FSA) are discussed in Pete Daniel
et al., Ofcial Images: New Deal Photography (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ),
with pictures from each. See also Katherine Glover, America begins Again: The Conquest of Waste
in Our Natural Resources (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, ).
. Stryker to Lorenz, Feb. ; Stryker to Post Wolcott, July , both RSP.
. Resettlement Administration, First Annual Report, Nov. , . The report was well
illustrated with the sections photographs, most but not all progress shots.
. Vanderbilt to William H. Bridges, Dec. , Vanderbilt Papers, AAA. Lee is quoted in
Dana Asbury, Amarillo Symposium Reunites FSA Photographers, Afterimage (March ):
. The ve photographers were Collier, Delano, Lee, Post Wolcott, and Rothstein. Had he been
alive and attended Evans would not have agreed with the others, nor would have Lange. Stryker
made his comment about the tabu against speaking of composition in his interview with Richard
K. Doud ( Oct. , AAA). The quotation about self-conscious aestheticism is in Strykers
article with Paul H. Johnstone, Documentary Photographs, in The Cultural Approach to His-
tory, edited by Caroline Ware (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Stryker to Post
Wolcott, Dec. , RSP.
. Edwin Rosskam, Not Intended for Framing: The FSA Archive, Afterimage (March
): ; Asbury, Amarillo Symposium Reunites FSA Photographers, .
. John OConner and Lorraine Brown, eds., The Federal Theatre Project: Free, Adult, Uncen-
sored (London: Eyre Methuen, ), .
. Stryker to Lange, March ; Stryker to Cowles, Feb. , both RSP.

. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, ; Dorothy Thompson, column, New
York Herald Tribune, Jan. .
. Hartley E. Howe, You Have Seen Their Pictures, Survey Graphic (April ): . Writ-
ing to Edwin Locke just after this piece appeared, Stryker characterized it as not bad at all and
added, I am very happy that it came out in Survey Graphic, since I think this is a fairly safe place,
particularly for such an article, to appear for the rst time. It was, in fact, not the rst such piece
two had already appeared in camera periodicalsbut it was the rst (and it turned out, the only
one) in a general magazine, where a claim for the photographs artfulness might inspire legislative
mischief. But since Survey Graphic ran articles on social issues and virtually never artistic ones,
and its readership was liberal and friendly to the New Deals initiatives, it was a fairly safe place.
Stryker to Locke, April , RSP.
. There was an additional reason to proclaim the photographs artistry: to appease the sen-
sitivities of the photographers themselves. Most had artistic interests and the ambition to exer-
cise them drew them to the section. Shahn and Evans are the most obvious examples, but Lange
had been at least a titular member of Group f., and Van Dykes article had compared her with
Brady. Lee, who painted before turning to photography, learned of the section from someone in
the Woodstock artists colony, and Shahn, whom he met at the American Artists Congress, intro-
duced him to Stryker. Post Wolcott, who had studied modern dance with Ruth St. Denis and
Doris Humphrey, presented letters of introduction from Steiner and Strand when she sought a
position. Delano had been a prize student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Strand
also introduced him to Stryker. As photographers with a social mission, except for Evans, they
may not have bandied around the word art, but assurance that the section had esthetic as well as
social aims was important to maintaining the morale of this artistically minded group.
. Beaumont Newhall, Documentary Approach to Photography, Parnassus (March ):
; Edward Steichen, The F.S.A. Photographers, USC (New York: William Morrow, ),
. Steichens endorsement especially carried prestige in photographys art world. A newspaper
columnist rhetorically asked, What greater compliment can be paid Stryker and his cameramen
than to have the master photographer of them all, Steichen, say that [the photographs] were the
most remarkable human documents that were ever rendered in pictures? Arthur Ellis, Camera
Angles, Washington Post, Nov. .
. Ellis, Camera Angles. Although not the case with Lees work at the Southeast Missouri
Homesteads, sometimes such record shots did not even carry the photographers name when
they were printed and led. Stryker, however, told Ellis that such photographs of construction
work were of the utmost importance to the unit and cited Lees Missouri pictures, which, Ellis
reported, had found wide publication not only in architectural journals but in national weeklies.
This exaggerated the frequency of their publication, but shots of agency-built bungalowsvirtu-
ally always uncrediteddid show up in newspapers from time to time.
. The Historical Section Textual Records in the Library of Congress include scrapbooks of the
photographs usage in newspapers and magazines. Although clippings usually give the title and date
of a publication, in some cases only the pictures were clipped, and it is evident that this compilation
is not comprehensive. Moreover, in many and perhaps most publications the photographer is not
credited. Often the source is misattributed as wellmost commonly as the Associated Press, which
Stryker cultivated to distribute the pictures. Lees living-room shot appeared in the Bloomington
327
(Illinois) Daily Pantograph on April and in several other newspapers as well. This is not his
better-known picture of a Hildalgo, Texas, couple seated on each side of their console radio.
. Stryker to Rothstein, March , RSP. A selection of Rothsteins Visalia coverage is
328
reprinted in Documenting America, , edited by Fleischhauer and Brannan, .
While working in the camp he also made twenty-nine sensitive head-and-shoulders portraits of
residents, each looking directly into his lens. These compelling photographs, of no record and
little news value, illustrate how such an assignment could sometimes also be the occasion for more
ambitious work. They are strongest seen together because Rothsteins uniform shooting strategy
emphasizes differences among the migrant residentsin dress, relationship to the camera, and
mienwhile simultaneously conveying the impression of a group that neither asks for pity nor
invites condescension. His strategy in making the portraits was identical to Evanss in his portrait
of Allie Mae Burroughs (Annie Mae Gudger), and Rothsteins portraits may without embarrass-
ment be compared with this more famous one.
. Stryker to Lange, Oct. and March , both RSP.
. Stryker to Lee, Feb. , RSP. In his encyclopedia article on documentary Stryker
conceded that plastic elements must be the essential criteria in any work, and a documen-
tary intention merely gives these elements limitation and direction. But the snarled sentence in
which he then tried to sort out this precept indicates his discomfort with it. Thus composition
becomes emphasis, and line sharpness, focus, ltering, moodall those components included in
the dreamy vagueness qualityare made to serve an end: to speak, as eloquently as possible, of
the things to be said in the language of pictures. Roy Stryker, Documentary Photography, in
The Complete Photographer, edited by Willard Morgan (New York: National Educational Alliance,
), : .
. Under different circumstanceshad he felt less the necessity of justifying the section by the
truthfulness of its photographshe might have emphasized that they were interpretations and
thus embodied the photographers artistic sensibilities. On at least one occasion he did so. Each
individual has made his contribution to the le, he told a photography journalist in . Each
man is inuenced by the work of other individuals. [The] camera technique and personality of
each photographer of this staff is revealed in these les. Because he knew this interviews read-
ership would be photography enthusiasts he could be more candid about the constructedness of
the pictures. Ellis, Camera Angles.
. Stryker and Johnstone, Documentary Photographs, , emphasis added. This article
adapted a paper presented at the meeting of the American Historical Association. Stryker,
Documentary Photography, : . About a year after the sections inception Stryker con-
trived a scheme, never implemented, to have experts contribute denitions of documentary with
three photographs to illustrate their denitions. Out of this exercise, he hoped, an accepted deni-
tion would emerge. Stryker to Lange, Oct. , RSP. In fairness to Strykers fumbling efforts
to dene it, no one else at the time did much better. For a discussion of the confusions surround-
ing this term, see Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal to
the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .
. Stryker and Johnstone, Documentary Photographs; Stryker, Documentary Photogra-
phy. Stryker had chronic writers block. Near the end of his life in he coedited with Nancy
Wood a collection of FSA photographs, In This Proud Land, America as Seen in the
FSA Photographs (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society). Its signed introduction was actually

an edited transcript of a tape-recorded interview made some years earlier by Calvin Kytle, who
then turned it into a book prospectus that he had unsuccessfully peddled to publishers. When the
prospectus later appeared as the introduction to In This Proud Land it did so, says Kytle obscurely,
without Roys knowledge but with his presumed approval. James C. Anderson, Roy Stryker: the
Humane Propagandist (Louisville: University of Louisville Photographic Archives, ), n.p.
. Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, viii and passim; Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth, .
. One of Strykers earliest pronouncements was that the sections overriding purpose was to
get as much good publicity as possible for the federal agency, a commitment he may have modi-
ed but never abandoned. Stryker to Lange, Oct. , RSP.
. Rothstein, Delano, and Lange quoted in Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographers
Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ), . Evans quoted in Belinda Rathbone, Walker
Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifin, ), ; and Stott, Documentary Expression
and Thirties America, . Evans apparently had little admiration for the work of the other pho-
tographers, either. In an interview shortly before his death and after the interviewer had remarked
that Evanss photographs stood out in the FSA le, Evans said, I look at those other photographs
and I see that they havent got what Ive got. Im rather egotistical and conceited about that. I
knew at that time who I was, in terms of the eye, and that I had a real eye, and other people were
occasionally phony about it, or they really didnt see. I know thats immodest, but I have to say it.
William Ferris, A Visit with Walker Evans, Images of the South; Southern Folklore Reports, no.
(Memphis, ), .
. Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth, , , .
. Stryker to Harry F. Carman, Oct. ; Stryker to Evans, (n.d. but March because
it was sent to St. Marys, Florida, where Evans then was), both RSP.
. Walker Evans, Visiting Artist: A Transcript of His Discussion with Students at the Univer-
sity of Michigan, in Photography: Essays and Images, edited by Beaumont Newhall (New York:
MoMA, ), , . Evanss recollection was not strictly accurate. He made record photographs
at FSA projects in Reedsville, West Virginia, and Eatonton, Georgia, although unquestionably he
believed such work an inappropriate use of his talent.
. Stryker to Lange, Oct. , RSP.
. College Art Association exhibition catalog brochure, RSP. Stott says Evans got into trouble
with Roy Stryker because his photographs were insufciently political, too aesthetic and ivory
tower, but he indicates no source for these quoted terms that do not show up in Styrkers papers
or interviews. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, .
. Stryker to Lange, Nov. , March , and March , all RSP; Rathbone,
.
. Penelope Dixon, Photographers of the Farm Security Administration: An Annotated Bibliog-
raphy, (New York: Garland, ), .
. Stryker to Jonathan Garst, Nov. , RSP. Twice during her FSA tenure Langes status
was changed from staff photographer to a per diem, part-time basis, for a few months at the end
of and from November until October . In the midst of this latter period Post Wol-
cott was hired for a three-month trial, and when her work proved satisfactory she was kept on.
. Lange to Stryker, Dec. ; Stryker to Lange, Jan. ; Lange to Stryker, March
; and Stryker to Lange, Dec. , all RSP; Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographers Life,
.
329
. Lange to Stryker, March ; Stryker to Lange, March , both RSP. Curtis argues
that by remaining rmly rooted in California Lange frustrat[ed] Strykers efforts to centralize
administrative control of the project (Minds Eye, Minds Truth, ). Stange likewise sees Langes
330
resistance to Strykers bureaucratic impositionshis efforts to control her negatives and lack of
sympathy with her determination to publicize regional current eventsas directly leading to
her dismissal (Symbols of Ideal Life, ).
Late in her FSA career they argued over the retouching of several negatives, including Migrant
Mother, from which her retoucher removed an unseen persons thumb holding back the ap of
the tent. Stryker thought the retouchers work had been careless and philosophically objected to
retouching documentary photographs. Although the disagreement was about a substantiveand
yet unsettledissue, it seems mistaken to take it as the precipitant for Langes dismissal, as some
have suggested. It preceded her leaving the payroll by more than six months. Meltzer, Dorothea
Lange: A Photographers Life, .
. Lange to Gilfond, Oct. ; Stryker to Lange, Nov. ; Lange to Stryker, Nov. ;
Lange to Stryker, March ; Stryker to Lange, March ; Lange to Stryker, Nov.
; and Lange to Stryker, June , all RSP.
. Lange to Stryker, Nov. , May ; Stryker to Lange, April , Nov. ,
Oct. , all RSP.
. Stryker to Falke, Aug. , RSP; Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographers Life, ;
Garst to Stryker, Nov. ; Soule to Fischer, Nov. , both RSP.
. Other explanations for Strykers decision to re Lange have included his sexism and the
sections shift to more positive views of American culture, which it is argued, Post Wolcott was
better prepared to make. Like many men of his generation he could be patronizing with women,
and he probably saw Langes emotionality and administrative inefciency as conforming to a
widely held sexual stereotype. His sexism likely intensied his dissatisfactions with her but was
not their root. Strykers relations with Post Wolcott were not devoid of paternalism but free of
the exasperation he felt with Lange. And around the time Lange was laid off the photographers
did begin to make a greater proportion of positive views, some by Post Wolcott, but she did not
by any means specialize in them. She in later years made contradictory statements about whether
she was hired especially to make positive photographs, sometimes saying she was and other times
that she and Stryker never talked about it. Hendrickson, Looking for the Light, .
. Stryker to Lange, May , Oct. , March , all RSP.
. Lange to M. E. Gilfond, Oct. ; Lange to Stryker, March , both RSP; Lange
interview by Richard K. Doud, May , AAA.
. Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth, , and Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, , have
most prominently made such arguments. Jonathan Green has as well in American Photography: A
Critical History since to the Present (New York: Abrams, ), .
. All these (and other) shooting scripts are included in the RSP. The one inspired by the Lynd
luncheon is reprinted in In This Proud Land, edited by Stryker and Wood, .
. Lynds Middletown was arguably the most important book in the interbellum period about
American culture, and Strykers solicitation of his advice was shrewd. Nearly three years after
their luncheon he wrote to Lynd about how much some of your ideas have entered into our eld
photography. Not that we have been able to photograph some of the things which you mentioned,
but your comments guided our view-point a lot. Stryker to Lynd, Jan. , RSP. Stryker was

not alone in considering Middletown a source of inspiration for photography; so did Evans, whose
outline memorandum for a eld trip proposed photographs of contemporary Middletown
subjects. Outline Memorandum for Mr. Stryker, in Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work (New
York: Harper and Row, ), .
. Stryker to Delano, Sept. , emphasis added; Delano to Stryker, Sept. , both
RSP. Green has cited this letter as evidence of Strykers imperiousness (American Photography,
). More persuasively, Levine uses the often-quoted letter to suggest how the European war
instigated a modest shift in the sections priorities (The Historian and the Icon, ). Also see F.
Jack Hurley, The Farm Security Administration File In and Out of Focus, History of Photog-
raphy, (Autumn ): . On his swing through New England in the autumn and winter of
Delano did make some positive shots of the sort Stryker requested. Two of the best-known,
a family Thanksgiving dinner and a mirthful older couple in a tobacco shed, are reprinted in In
This Proud Land, edited by Stryker and Wood, , . He also made sensitive portraits of ethnic
AmericansFrench Canadians, Italians, Poles, Portuguese, Finns, and Armeniansand tackled
many other topics as well, including some forty pictures of the Vought-Sikorsky assembly line in
Connecticut that was turning out warplanes.
. Delano to Stryker, Nov. ; Rothstein to Stryker, May ; Stryker to Lee, April
, all RSP; Delano interview by Richard K. Doud, June , AAA.
. Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth, .
. Undated instructions to photographers, Paul Vanderbilt Papers, AAA. This document also
specied how to handle repairs, order lm, keep expense records, and so on. Fleischhauer and Bran-
nan conjecture that these instructions date from or later and that in the early years Stryker
seems to have selected pictures autocratically, provoking complaints from the photographers (Docu-
menting America, , ). Even if that were so, and the evidence is scanty and inconclusive,
it affected fewer than percent of what would comprise the total le. No later than the beginning
of Strykers letters unmistakably indicate that the photographers had the ultimate say-so about
which pictures would be printed or killed. Stryker to Lee, Jan. , Stryker to Lange, June ,
both RSP. He made similar comments to Post Wolcott not long after she joined the staff. Stryker to
Post Wolcott, Feb. , RSP. The le contains many pictures that were not titled or captioned,
usually inferior versions of those printed, and someby no means allof those killed negatives
had a hole punched in them. A system of efciently discriminating between the les permanent
and discarded negatives was necessary, but this was an exceedingly poor one. Strykers commitment
to the archives historical signicance ought to have made him devise another. But the question of
how the triage was conducted is a separate issue from the decision to punch holes in those rejected.
That Stryker unilaterally killed negatives is among the most persistent legends about FSA operations.
The images he didnt like he either killed with a hole punch, or simply ignored, writes Michael
Lesy in a magazine piece that reproduces a killed Evans shot (Evans Reviewed, The New Yorker,
March , ). Lesy reiterates this assertion in Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait
of America, (New York: W. W. Norton, ), .
. The undated instructions to photographers in the Vanderbilt Papers unequivocally state that
submitting exposed lm to the laboratory was not mandatory, if you would prefer developing
your lm in the eld. The information about specifying development procedure is in Rosskam,
Not Intended for Framing: The FSA Archive, . Information about cropping instructions
is in Delanos interview with Doud, AAA.
331
. Adams to Lange, Jan. , Adams Archive, CCP. Evans made his pitch for doing his
own laboratory work even before he was permanently employed by the section. He wrote to John
Carter, the Information Divisions director, about some contract work that he had been delayed
332
in nishing. In passing, he added, I hope you will agree with me that the only really satisfac-
tory prints of a careful photographers negative must be made by the original photographer; and
that you will appreciate a certain craftsmans concern on my part over the quality of prints from
my negatives. Evans to Carter, Aug. , RSP.
. Amarillo Daily News, Nov. ; Indianapolis Times, May , clippings in HSTR.
. The Lean Thirties, Harvester World (Feb.March ): ; Asbury, Amarillo Sym-
posium Reunites FSA Photographers, .
. Rathbone, Walker Evans, . The principle of government sponsorship and ownership of
creative work also pertained in WPA arts projects, marking the thirties as an era uniquely com-
mitted to the idea of artwork as public rather than private property. F. Jack Hurley (The Farm
Security Administration File In and Out of Focus, n) reports that Stryker suspected Evans
of making shots he did not send to Washington, a suspicion conrmed by American Photographs,
in which there were numerous examples of pictures that were almost identical to images in the
FSA le, but not quite, and nearly always better. The issue is confounded by substantial differ-
ences among pictures shown at MoMA and reproduced in its catalogso great as to make them
almost two separate instrumentalities. None of those in the catalog, although cropped differently
than in the FSA le, appears to be an entirely different version. Perhaps it was the exhibitions
pictures that Stryker felt conrmed his suspicion. This is a matter needing further research. In any
case, in later exhibitions Evans did show photographs that by locale and date indicate they were
made during his FSA tenure, but they are not acknowledged as such and do not appear in Walker
Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, (New York: Da Capo Press,
). That book, though, only claims to reproduce the preponderance of his work and notes
that some pictures the compliers assumed to be made for the FSA were not found in its Library
of Congress archive.
William Stott says that Dorothea Lange and Paul Shuster Taylors An American Exodus: A Record
of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, ) included a fair number of pictures
Lange had taken for the FSA that werent then (and arent now) in the FSA le, despite Langes
declaration to Stryker that she retained no negatives. Stott offers no specic evidence to support
this argument, which may be true but also may not be. The question is complicated by the fact
that during parts of the nearly a year in which Lange was employed on a temporary basis,
and , she was limited to supplying a maximum of three hundred pictures. Nothing ethically
or legally prevented her from making additional work that she kept for herself when she was also
providing some images to Washington. Stott, Introduction to a Never-Published Book of Doro-
thea Langes Best Photographs of Depression America, Exposure (Fall ): .
. One of numerous examples of Strykers instructions to give priority to documentary work
is in a letter to Lee, April , RSP. The quotation is from an autobiographical sketch he sent
to a writer for Popular Photography who was preparing an article on the section (RSP).
. Hendrickson, Looking for the Light, ; Evans quoted in Walker Evans, in Artists in Their
Own Words, edited by Paul Cummings (New York: St. Martins Press, ), .

Chapter 10: Farm Security Administration Photography in the Aura of Art
. Its a Fake, Fargo Forum, Aug. .

. Clippings from these newspapers and many others are in the Stryker Scrapbook, RSP.
Accounts of the controversy are many; the fullest is F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), .
. Cara A. Finnegan argues that because these pictures appeared without captions they became
unmoored from the particularities of their subjects circumstances and even from the agencys
political agenda in favor of a proclamation of their artfulness. Her point, although unexceptionable,
needs to be qualied by the fact that readers in could hardly fail to recognize that the pictures
depicted suffering exacerbated by the depression and most viewers would likely also know some-
thing about the RAs activities inasmuch as it was one of the New Deals most controversialand
publicizedinitiatives. Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), .
. In a survey of photographic books Elizabeth McCausland remarks that the rise of the
form has come in the past decade simultaneously with the development of the documentary lm,
and the two dozen books she discusses all appeared in the thirties. McCausland, Photographic
Books, in The Encyclopedia of Photography (New York: National Educational Alliance, ), :
.
. Christine Bold, The WPA Guides: Mapping America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
), explores the cultural dynamics of the guidebooks as a genre. Although she discusses illus-
trations throughout she devotes only one brief discussion to the FSAs contributions, four pictures
in the Missouri guidebook. She sees the sections potentially explosive photographs subverted by
the guides undertone of calm control and rational direction (, ). Jerre Mangiones The
Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers Project, (Boston: Little, Brown, ) is an
insiders history by its former national coordinating editor. Its appendix by Arthur Scharf provides
bibliographical information on many of the publications produced by the project, including all the
state guides. Some of the projects other publications included photographs, as did Montana: A
Prole in Pictures (New York: Fleming ), which had twelve by Rothstein, but the state guides
were far and away its most important undertaking.
About two-thirds of the guides FSA photographs carried individual credits. The non-FSA
pictures came from a plethora of sources, including other federal and state agencies, newspapers,
industrial and business enterprises, universities and historical societies, and local amateur and
professional photographers. The Mississippi guide featured three by Eudora Welty, not yet a cel-
ebrated writer, and the New Mexico one included twelve handsome studies of Indians by Laura
Gilpin and another fourteen by Edward Westons friend Ernest Knee. The California guide had
seven shots by Horace Bristol and two by Brett Weston; two Lange pictures were not credited to
her or the agency.
The sections photographers were commonly the only government workers to be credited. Of
these, Lee and Rothstein had the most, ninety-seven and seventy-four respectively; Post Wolcott
and Shahn had twenty-four; Lange, twelve; Vachon, seven; Evans, four; and Mydans, three. Again,
Evanss pictures seemed less attractive to most purveyors in the thirties than those by colleagues.
Langes low representation probably reected two thingsthe California guide used little FSA
material, and editors sedulously avoided photographs of migrants, her specialty.
333
. Stryker to Lyle Saxon, July , HSTR.
. Shahn to Stryker, ca. March , and Stryker to Shahn, April, May, May , all
HSTR; In the Towns, The Ohio Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, ), n.p. This was
334
the only occasion Shahn was actually employed by the Historical Section. Although his
photographs were included in the le, he was employed by the Special Skills Section, with the
nominal justication for his photography that his photographs would serve as aide-mmoire for
his graphic work.
. Another explanation for the greater use beginning in is that more positive shots were
available because it was around then that Stryker encouraged the photographers to make them.
Probably that did affect the increased number nding their way into the guides, but it overlooks
the fact that the photographers had always produced such pictures, as may been seen in the
Delaware guides three pastoral landscapes.
. T. K. Whipple, The New Republic, April , . MacLeishs high visibility in thirties
cultural life is indicated by the journals in which he published while also putting together Land of
the Free: The Nation and The New Republic, North American Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Literary
Digest, Saturday Review of Literature, and Theater Arts.
. Stryker to Lange, March ; C. A. Pearce [an editor at Harcourt, Brace] to Stryker,
June ; and Stryker to Lee, July , all RSP; Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New
York: Harcourt Brace, ), . MacLeish rst saw the pictures in the ofces of his employer,
Time Inc., where Stryker was hoping to secure outlets. John Puckett Rogers and others errone-
ously report that MacLeishs inspiration was the success of Bourke-Whites and Caldwells You
Have Seen Their Faces, which appeared in autumn , six months after MacLeish proposed his
book and even after he had written its text. John Puckett Rogers, Five Photo-Textual Documenta-
ries from the Great Depression (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, ), .
The rst book to feature FSA photographs was Charles Morrow Wilsons Roots of America
(New York: Funk and Wagnalls, ), in which about half of the thirty-three illustrations were
from the Section. A novelist and freelance writer, Wilson had taken to the road to rediscover the
great and enduring cradle of land that was the United States; sixteen proles of mostly rural
people composed his text. In hyperventilating prose he proclaimed the benecial effects of rural
America on national character, passing quickly over social problems with a reassuring bromide.
The sob story of tenantry was not the whole story, Wilson announced, and in fact was again
proving itself the great school of apprenticeship for agricultural success. He was equally upbeat
about roadside Americans forced off their land. They were nurtured by American roots that
even if wind blown . . . seem forever alive. Open roads wait, and our countrymen arise to meet
them. In this fatuous context Langes migrant family, their possessions roped to their cars run-
ningboard, became no more than vagabond adventurers, and Wilsons caption, With at least two
unpunctured tires, was astoundingly patronizing. The Section could exercise no control over
where or how its pictures were used, but Wilsons book was a particularly inauspicious venue for
introducing them and must have made MacLeishs proposal a few months later to cover the same
ground all the more attractive (, , ).
. Archibald MacLeish, Notes on the Soundtrack-and-Picture Form as Used in Land of the
Free, New Directions in Prose and Poetry (Norfolk: New Directions, ), n.p. Langes cap-
tion was former tenant farmers on relief. In Land of the Free it was Dust Bowl farmer who has
migrated to California for a new start. Although not misleading, the books caption puts a spin

on the picture more consonant with MacLeishs message that the depressions calamities required
wiping the slate clean and revising Amercan ideology. The same picture, cropped to eliminate the
anking men, had been the single FSA photograph in Lifes The U.S. Dust Bowl, June ,
where its caption was close to MacLeishs: Dust Bowl Farmer Is New Pioneer.
. Mydans and Jung also had one photograph in Land of the Free, and one FSA shot was uncred-
ited, of Arkansas tenants evicted for participating in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Nick
Natanson has conjectured that the unique failure to provide a photographers credit was an attempt
to shield the photographer, whom he names as Vachon, from reprisals by Arkansas authorities. A
more likely reason is the les obvious misattribution of the picture to Vachon, who did not even
join the Section as an ofce boy until after the picture was made, probably in January , and
thus MacLeish (and Stryker) were uncertain to whom to credit it. Natanson, The Black Image in
the New Deal (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, ), , . This misattribution has
never been straightened out and presently the le caption still carries Vachons name.
Alan Trachtenberg discusses Land of the Frees use of Evanss Bethlehem photographand
several other publications of it as welland correctly suggests that the books tendentiousness
disgured Evanss beliefs about how his work ought to be seen. Although Evans wanted to empha-
size the disinterestedness of his vision, MacLeish enrolled him in telling a story about the hard-
ship and heroism of the times. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History,
Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, ), .
. MacLeish, Land of the Free, . If Lange objected to this disguration there is no record of
it.
. These quotations are drawn from Eugene Davidson, review, Yale Review (June ): ;
Babette Deutsch, Meaning and Being, Poetry (June ): ; John Holmes, Poetry Now,
Boston Transcript, April , ; Peter Munro Jack, Archibald MacLeishs Poem for Our Day,
New York Times Book Review, May , ; Ruth Liechlitner, Now the Land Is Gone, New
York Herald Tribune Books, April , ; Pare Lorentz, We Dont Know, Saturday Review
of Literature, April , ; Talking Pictures, Time, April , ; Eda Lou Walton,
Poetry as Sound Track, The Nation, April , ; and T. Whipple, Freedoms Land, The
New Republic, April , .
. Walton, Poetry as Sound Track, ; Lorentz, We Dont Know, .
. To the two little magazine reviews might be added MacLeishs piece in New Directions
discussing the artistic problem of merging words and images. James Laughlin, its editor,
said a piece on the special artistic questions raised by photography and lm had not material-
ized and MacLeish had stepped in to make a strong rst assault on the problem. Headnote to
MacLeish, Notes on the Soundtrack-and-Picture Form as Used in Land of the Free, New
Directions , n.p.
. Stryker to Lange, May , RSP.
. In chronological order, books after MacLeishs that extensively used FSA photographs were
Herman Clarence Nixon, Forty Acres and Steel Mules (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, ); Walker Evans, American Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, );
Dorothea Lange and Paul Shuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New
York: Reynal and Hitchcock, ); Sherwood Anderson, Home Town: The Face of America (New
York: Alliance Book Corporation, ); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men: Three Tenant Families (, rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifin, ; reprint with a fore-
335
word by John Hersey, ); Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, Twelve Million Black Voices: A
Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York: Viking, ); Arthur F. Raper and Ira
DeA. Reid, Sharecroppers All (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); and Arthur
336
F. Raper, Tenants of the Almighty (New York: Macmillian, ).
. Hartley E. Howe, You Have Seen Their Pictures, Survey Graphic (April ): . Natan-
sons discussion of all of these books is the most synoptic. His special focus is on how they deployed
the les pictures of African Americans, but he also provides a wealth of illuminating detail about
the books writing, selection of photographs, captioning, and reception. Natanson, The Black
Image in the New Deal, , .
. The exhibition and catalog differed considerably. American Photographs, the exhibition
at MoMA, displayed a hundred images, whereas the catalog reproduced eighty-seven. Moreover,
about half of the exhibitions pictures were not in the catalog, and thirty-three of the books images
were not in the exhibition. Some of those that appeared in both were differently cropped. The
exhibition was hung as one long sequence, the books pictures divided into two discrete ones. The
exhibition is recreated in Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (New York:
Harry T. Abrams, ), . The catalog has been reprinted three times with some changes
from the original in editorial matter, placement of titles, and reproduction media. The most recent
edition, published by MoMA in , is closest to the original and includes an informative note
by Peter Galassi on the various editions.
. American Photographs has attracted far more close scrutiny than any other photography publi-
cation or event in the thirties, much of it centering on its structure. Alan Trachtenbergs analysis is
particularly subtle and detailed, so richly so as to defy paraphrase. His conclusion is that Evanss art
was fundamentally a political one, not of reform but of social observation and critical intelligence
(Reading American Photographs, ). Douglas R. Nickel has quarreled with this judgment by
adducing Kirsteins participation in putting the book together, his role so signicant as to make
him a coauthor, perhaps even the senior one. Nickel sees the sequence as embodying Kirsteins
attraction to both Marxist and agrarian ideas and thus it conveys a more explicit (if inconsistent)
political argument than Trachtenberg allows for. Nickels argument is certainly plausible, but
hard evidence that Kirstein played such a decisive role is lacking. Nickel, American Photographs
Revisited, American Art (Spring ): ; see also Judy Fiskin, Borges, Stryker, Evans:
The Sorrows of Representation, in Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography, ,
edited by Daniel P. Younger (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), ; and
Lew Andrews, Walker Evans American Photographs: The Sequential Arrangement, History of
Photography (Autumn ): .
. Lincoln Kirstein, Photographs of America: Walker Evans, in Evans, American Photographs,
.
. This handwritten draft memorandum is reprinted in Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work
(New York: Harper and Row, ), .
. Another conclusion that might be drawn from the consistency of Evanss vision was to see
the Section as an exemplary patron, providing him wherewithal to continue work he had formerly
had to undertake with less secure support and not requiring that he bend his efforts to its ends.
But the catalogs editorial context militated against anyone taking such a view, and no one did.
. Kirstein, Photographs of America: Walker Evans, , . Douglas R. Nickel and
others cite an intemperate letter from Adams to McAlpin condemning American Photographs as

evidence that the book threatened Adams on several fronts, esthetic and political. No doubt it
did, but unacknowledged in these accounts is the possible bilious effect produced by Kirsteins
sally against the photographic practice championed by Adams and Weston. Nickel, American
Photographs Revisited, . Adamss letter of November , , is reprinted in Adams, Ansel
Adams: Letters and Images, , edited by Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Still-
man (Boston: Little, Brown, ), . Westons response was more measured. He thought
the book had some really ne things, although some like American Legionnaire he couldnt
understand. Weston to Adams, [late ], Adams Correspondence, CCP.
. Kirstein, Photographs of America: Walker Evans, , , , . The repres-
sion of Evanss FSA connection was not an oversight. Thomas Mabry, MoMAs secretary and
Evanss strongest advocate among the museum staff as well as the chief organizer of a publicity
campaign for the exhibition and book, strongly urged Kirstein to avoid linking Evans with other
documentary photographers, including those of the FSA. Mabry also disapproved of Westons
(and Strands) work, which he believed made the commonplace too exquisite, an opinion that
probably inuenced Kirstein to censure Group f.. James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York:
Basic Books, ), ; for Mabrys publicity campaign, see Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans:
A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifin, ), .
. Recorded Time, Time, Oct. , ; Thomas Dabney Mabry, Walker Evanss
Photographs of America, Harpers Bazaar (Nov. ): ; Carl Van Vechten, Born to Use a
Lens, New York Herald Tribune Books, Oct. , ; reviews, Dallas Times-Herald, Oct.
, Washington News, Oct. , Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, Nov. ; F.A.W.,
Jr., Walker Evans, Magazine of Art (Dec. ): .
. Robert M. Coates, The Art Galleries, The New Yorker, Oct. , ; Edwin Alden
Jewell, Camera: Aspects of America in Three Shows, New York Times, Oct. , ix, ; Wil-
liam Carlos Williams, Sermon with a Camera, The New Republic, Oct. , ; S. T.
Williamson, American Photographs by Walker Evans, New York Times Book Review, Nov.
, ; review, American Photography (Dec. ): ; Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, Bir-
mingham Post, Sept. . In the reviews the substantial differences between the exhibition and
the catalog went unnoted, and most of those cited discuss the catalog version.
. Pare Lorentz, Putting America on Record, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. ,
; review, San Francisco News, Dec. .
. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, ; Stryker to Evans, Nov. , RSP.
. The traveling version included photographs arranged in eighteen sequences with a wall
label for each; it cost sponsoring organizations $. College galleries showing it included those
at Smith College and Duke, Brown, Harvard, and Louisiana State Universities. The Chouinard
Art Institute in Los Angeles was an art school; it is now the California Institute for the Arts. The
exhibit also went to the Society of the Arts and Crafts in Detroit and the Garrett Club in Buffalo,
as well as to Kaufmanns Department Store in Pittsburgh. The only municipal museum was the
Honolulu Academy of Art, which may indicate a still strong reluctance among such institutions
to show photography. Arthur Millier, review, Los Angeles Times, Jan. ; review, Saturday
Night, Jan. ; Ted Cook, review, Script, Jan. , all in the MoMA Archives.
. Notices, New Haven Register, March ; Bloomington Sunday Pantagraph, July ;
Springeld Sunday Union and Republican, Dec. . The rst two notices are included in the
HSTR, the third in the RSP.
337
. Elizabeth McCausland, review of the U.S. Camera exhibition, Springeld Sunday Union
and Republican, Oct. .
. Just how or why Sekaer was designated to make the selections is not clear. For overviews
338
of his career see Michael G. Sundell, Peter Sekaer: U.S. Slum Conditions, Prospects ():
, and Allison N. Kemmerer, Peter Sekaer, American Pictures (Andover: Addison Gallery
of American Art, ).
. Rexford Tugwell, Foreword, in Documentary Photographs from the Files of the Resettlement
Administration (n.p.: College Art Association, []), n.p. Sekaer had rst tried to persuade Elea-
nor Roosevelt to write the foreword, and his letter to her of August , , uses many of the
phrases Tugwell later borrowed, although Tugwells statement that the photographs standing as
works of art was incidental to our purpose was entirely his own. Sekaers letter is in the RSP.
. Evanss subjects were usually distinctive enough to be able to identify his photographs from
the catalogs titles, but some of the other exhibits defy identication, with titles such as Cleanli-
ness, Young Boy, Beach, Beef, and An Ohio Farm that do not match those used in the
le.
. Rothsteins apprehensive Sharecroppers Wife, Arkansas was included, and so was Shahns
acidic Sheriff during Strike, Morgantown, West Virginia, but such socially pregnant images
were a distinct minority in the CAA show.
. Van Fisher to Stryker, Dec. , Stryker to Van Fisher, Dec. , and Stryker to
William M. Millikin [the museum director], March , all HSTR; Stryker to Post Wolcott,
Dec. , RSP. The show emphasized recent work, sixty-four of the eighty photographs made in
or , which may account for only one Evans being included (a high panorama of Bethle-
hems crowded housing). Lee had the most (thirty-two), followed by Rothstein (thirteen), Lange
and Shahn (eleven), and fewer by Post Wolcott, Vachon, and Mydans. Only a minority of exhibits
duplicated the Grand Central Palace show and/or Land of the Free: Langes Migrant Mother,
Hoe Culture and Young Family from Arkansas Camped along the Road, Imperial Valley, Cali-
fornia, Rothsteins Arkansas sharecroppers wife and child and eroded land in Alabama, Lees
hands of an Iowa homesteaders wife, and several of Shahns views of destitute Ozark mountaineers.
Six of Shahns pictures of central Ohio were included, and four from Vachons coverage of
Omaha the same year, along with a number of other cultural studies such as Lees pictures of a
Louisiana blacksmith at his forge and an Iowa cigar store Indian. But the exhibition also included
seven of Post Wolcotts studies of dreary West Virginia mining communities and many other pic-
tures depicting degraded land, inferior housing, and poverty. The representation of social distress
and disruption was far greater than in the CAA exhibition two and a half years earlier and about
equal to the Grand Central Palace exhibitions.
The Cleveland exhibition traveled to art museums in Rochester and Cincinnati, and a letter from
Stryker to Isabel C. Herdle, the assistant director of the former, indicates how chary artistic institu-
tions then were about the appropriateness of displaying problem pictures and how ingratiating
Stryker had to be to convince them to do so. She had apparently said something to him about the
photographs focusing too much on social problems, and he replied that although the section did
not want to overemphasize these citizens needed to be aware of them. But he added that we are
broadening our eld of activities and including a great deal of photographic work on the positive
side of the rural problem and hoped the museum would be interested in another show with an
emphasis on the good land, for example. Stryker to Herdle, May , HSTR.

. It is impossible to determine the precise composition of this show despite several documents
that seem categorically to dene it. Rothstein took installation shots, and there is a list of exhibits
in the RSP. But Rothsteins seven installation shots only depict fty-nine exhibits, about two-thirds
of the total. The list, apparently put together at some later date from Lees and Rothsteins work
sheets, does not necessarily use the les captionsmaking some identications difcultand
lists eighty-one images, of which two were killed, two for which no record was found, and one
repeated, some but not all entries with negative numbers. But the list does not include at least one
photograph that appears in Rothsteins installation shots, his own Dust Storm. The consider-
able overlap with Land of the Free included Langes Plantation Owner, Mississippi, but in
its full version, and her shot of the grizzled migrant that concluded the book but cropping the
two men anking him, the same version Life had used nearly a year earlier. The lists seventy-six
identied images were by Lee (twenty-four), Rothstein (twenty), Lange (fteen), Shahn (eight),
Mydans (three), Jung (two), and Carter, Evans, Locke, and Vachon (one each).
. Stryker to Locke, April , RSP; Stryker interview with Richard K. Dowd, Oct.
, AAA. For a fuller discussion of the First Annual Photographic Exposition see chapter .
. Stryker to Lange, Nov. , RSP. He included trade union conventions in this list of
possible sites for exhibitions as well, suggesting that he did not accept the division between art
values and problem pictures that the CAA exhibition implicitly honored and Cleveland had
wanted to maintain as well.
. Stryker to Locke, Jan. , Stryker to Rothstein, May , both RSP, and Stryker to
Newhall, Nov. , HSTR. The episode is somewhat murky in extant documents, but a rea-
sonable conjecture is that Evans had a strong ally within the museum, Mabry, and another closely
connected with it, Kirstein, and they lobbied hard for his one-man show. Newhall at the time was
still MoMAs librarian and had less clout than these two, even if he did urge a FSA show, which
there is no evidence he actually did. As several commentators have observed, after the his-
tory of photography show a one-person exhibition that would hail a contemporary master was a
logical next step for the museum.
. Beaumont Newhall, Documentary Approach to Photography, Parnassus (March ):
. MoMA also showed FSA photographers in its Paris exhibition of American art, seven
Evans (not all FSA) in the small photography section of its tenth anniversary show in , and
three Evans (at least two FSA pictures) and Langes Migrant Mother in the photography
departments inaugural exhibition in . Trois sicles dart aux tas-Unis (Paris: ditions des
Muses Nationaux, ); Museum of Modern Art, Art in Our Time: An Exhibition to Celebrate
the Tenth Anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art and the Opening of Its New Building, Held
at the Time of the New York Worlds Fair (New York: MoMA, ); Museum of Modern Art
Department of Photography, The New Department of Photography (New York: MoMA, ).
Publicity materials for the traveling version of Art in Our Time asserted, rather misleadingly
that In Mr. Evans helped outline the photographic policy of the Resettlement (now Farm
Security) Administration.
. Newhall to Stryker, Dec. , HSTR, mentions his editing of the show. The wall label
and publicity materials are in the MoMA Archives. Lange had nine photographs in Documents
of America, Shahn eight, Lee six, Evans and Rothstein two, and Jung, Locke, and Mydans one.
There seems to have been a fty-image version of the Grand Central Palace show also circulated
by MoMA during before Newhall edited it to thirty at the end of the year. Elizabeth McCaus-
339
land mentions such an exhibition in a September review of Newhalls Photography: A Short
Critical History, and an undated, unsourced clipping in the HSTR praises the rst photographic
show of the Farm Security Administration at the Hotel Jefferson in St. Louis, part of a Midwest
340
Photographers Exposition, which may have been this larger version. No record of it exists in the
MoMA Archives, and Strykers letters refer only to the thirty-image version.
. The presidents radio address was reprinted the next day, May , , in the New York
Herald Tribune (, ). It is possible that MacLeish, by this time one of the presidents advisors,
drafted the speech.
. Other than that in Pageants historical section, there is little or no information about which
photographs were displayed. The sources that indicate these exhibitions actually took place are
items in Photo Notes, including a May review by Robert Disraeli that discusses exhibits by
Lee, Rothstein, and Post Wolcott (for Photo League shows); Stryker to Lee, Nov. , RSP
(for American Faces); the Daily Oklahoman, March , a review that bristles with disapproval
of what it sees as propaganda parading under the guise of an exhibition of art photography (for
the Oklahoma show); and a clipping in the HSTR (for the New York Worlds Fair). For the Pag-
eant of Photography see chapter .
. General Bulletin to Staff, May , RSP.
. The FSA le at the Library of Congress has nearly forty photographs of these panels, some
installation shots but most taken before installation.
. Natansons discussion of the African American images is particularly revealing about how
Rosskam chose ones with the least disturbing implications. Natanson, The Black Image in the
New Deal, . Langes work was only skimpily representedEvanss and Shahns even less,
just an exhibit or two each. All three had left the FSA, but their works uncongeniality with the
exhibitions theme seems as strong a reason why so little was included.
. Norris Harkness, review, New York Sun, Aug. , . Robert W. Brown in the New York
Times expressed roughly similar sentiments, although he had more reservations about whether
documentary could be genuinely artistic because the rapidity with which these photographs
must be made leaves little time for serious artistic work. It was perhaps symptomatic of the ebb-
ing of photography as a topic commanding unusually wide public attention that Browns review
appeared buried on the newspapers hobbies page along with news about stamps and coins. The
Times cultural section did not notice the exhibition at all. Brown, Rural Face of America, New
York Times, June , x, .
Chapter 11: The Nations Newsstands
. Prominently displayed on Vachons Omaha newsstand was Life, its cover that week in
featuring a glamour portrait of the years leading debutante, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, heralding
one of its most sensationally popular features. Conspicuous on Abbotts newsstand was Modern
Screens cover with Claudette Colbert and other lm magazines portraying female stars.
. Weston Naef, Andr Kertsz: The Making of an American Photographer, in Sandra Phillips
et al., Andr Kertsz of Paris and New York (New York: Hudson and Thames, ), ; Frances
Phillips, letter to the editor, Vanity Fair (Dec. ): .
. Creative Arts articles were Harold Clurman, Photographs by Paul Strand (Nov. ):
; Mr. Walker Evans Records a Citys Scene (Dec. ): ; Samuel M. Kootz,

Ford Plant Photos by Charles Sheeler (April ): ; Lola Ridge, Paul Strand (Oct.
): ; Dr. M. F. Agha, Ralph Steiner (Jan. ): ; Samuel M. Kootz, Edward
Steichen (May ): ; and Maurice Burcel, Paul Outerbridge, Jr. (Feb. ): .
Ansel Adams is quoted from his Introduction to A Pageant of Photography (San Francisco: Crocker-
Union, ), n.p.
Once a pillar of genteel culture, Scribners magazine also took up artful photography in hopes
of bolstering its anemic circulation. Early in it announced a new monthly feature, Life in
the U.S. . . . Photographic, portfolios it claimed would be the nest collection of contempo-
rary photography to be published in any form. The claim outstripped their achievement and the
portfolios did not save the magazine, which expired the next year. Before its demise, Scribners did
publish some strong pictures by such people as Evans, Elisofon, Lynes, Morgan, Rothstein, and
Van Dyke alongside a larger contingent of mediocre ones. In addition to their erratic quality, the
portfolios format probably doomed them to ineffectiveness in attracting a photography-minded
audience. Other new periodicals provided more outstanding pictures than each portfolios six to
ten, and the lack of textual apparatus to educate viewers about what made the pictures distinctive
probably reduced their attractiveness to regular readers.
. Toward a Standard by Which to Appraise Coronets Photographs, Coronet (Oct. ):
; Arnold Gingrich, Nothing but People (New York: Crown, ), , .
. Blumenfelds photographs discussed appeared in (May ): , and (Nov. ): ;
the quotation comes from Talking Pictures, (May ): . A large selection of Outerbridges
erotic pictures may be seen in Elaine Dines and Graham Howe, Paul Outerbridge: A Singular Aes-
thetic (Santa Barbara: Arabesque Books, ); a Lacanian reading is Lynn M. Cazabon, Paul
Outerbridge, Jr.: The Representation of Feminine Sexuality, History of Photography (Spring
): .
. Representative of Brassas Coronet appearances is a mini-portfolio of six night workers (Sept.
): . The quotations are from Talking Pictures, Coronet (Dec. ): , and (Oct.
): . In a piece on Brassa published in a Paris newspaper and written about the same time as
Coronet reprinted the wire chair photograph, Henry Miller also singled out this picture as revealing
the photographers genius. It seems likely that Gingrich borrowed from Miller. Miller, The Eye
of Paris, rst published in the Chicago Globe in and reprinted in Brassa: The Monograph,
edited by Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie (Boston: Little, Brown, ), .
. Robert Forth, The New Histories of Photography Ive Never Seen, Exposure (Winter
): . The portfolios hardly ever included experimental work, but Coronet did publish an illus-
trated piece, introduced by Julien Levy, on Herbert Bayers photomontages. In it, Levy applauded
Bayers eschewal of documentary verisimilitude in favor of surrealistic invention; Levy, From a
Portfolio of Photomontages, Coronet (Jan. ): .
. Susan Sacher, biographical note on Marks, Library Journal, June , .
. Robert W. Marks, Man with a Cause, Coronet (Sept. ): .
. Robert W. Marks, Chronicler of Our Times, Coronet (Dec. ): ; Robert W.
Marks, The Last Stylist, Coronet (Nov. ): ; Robert W. Marks, Portrait of George
Lynes, Coronet (July ): ; Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Paul Outerbridge, Coronet
(March ): .
. Marks, Chronicler of Our Times, ; Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Bourke-White,
Coronet (Jan. ): .
341
. Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Lewis Hine, Coronet (Feb. ): . Markss exclusion
of the Photo League, despite its New York base, is more understandable. Outside its own gallery
its photographs had limited visibility, and Markss emphasis on individuals did not comport with
342
its collective undertakings. Eliot Elisofon was a member of the Photo League, its president in fact,
but Markss prole of him did not mention that afliation.
. Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Eliot Elisofon, Coronet (Aug. ): ; Robert W. Marks,
Portrait of Victor Keppler, Coronet (Nov. ): . Advertising photographers all worked in
color, and all but two of their proles were illustrated with color work, so it seems probable that the
editors of Coronet, which featured a fair number of color pages, encouraged Marks to write about
them. That may account for the inclusion of fashion photographers as wellcolor work illustrated
most of their proles, toobut there were sounder artistic grounds for including them.
. Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Munkcsi, Coronet (Jan. ): ; Robert W. Marks, Por-
trait of Horst, Coronet (July ): ; Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Dahl-Wolfe, Coronet (Oct.
): ; Robert W. Marks, Portrait of Hoyningen-Huen, Coronet (Feb. ): .
. Phyllis G. Tortora, The Evolution of American Fashion Magazines, unpub. Ph.D. diss.,
New York University, , , ; Marcia R. Prior-Miller, Vogue : A Graphic
Prole, unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Missouri, , , ; Henry F. Prin-
gle, High Hat, Scribners (July ): . An amply illustrated sketch of twentieth-cen-
tury fashion photography is Nancy Hall-Duncan, The History of Fashion Photography (New York:
Alpine, ). A similar collection, solely of the Vogue photographers, is Polly Devlin, Vogue: Book
of Fashion Photography: The First Sixty Years (New York: William Morrow, ).
. Surprisingly, there is no collection of Steichens fashion work although it is represented in
monographs reprising his career, in Hall-Duncan, History of Fashion Photography, and in Devlin,
Vogue. Horst has published two similar collections of his work during the thirties: Horst Photographs
of a Decade (New York: J. J. Augustin, ), and Salute to the Thirties (New York: Viking, );
an exhibition catalog is Horst (New York: International Center of Photography, ). Also lav-
ishly illustrated is a biography by Valentine Lawford, Horst: His Work and His World (New York:
Knopf, ). For Hoyningen-Huen, an exhibition catalog is William E. Ewing, Eye for Elegance:
George Hoyningen-Huen (New York: International Center of Photography, ); Ewing has also
published The Photographic Art of Hoyningen-Huen (London: Thames and Hudson, ). Over
a long career Dahl-Wolfe developed her own approach to fashion work but for her Steichen was
the master, as she wrote in her compilation Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Photographers Scrapbook (New
York: St. Martins/Marek, ), ix. Beatons work is reproduced in Josephine Ross, Beaton in
Vogue (New York: C. N. Potter, ).
. Carmel Snow with Mary Louise Aswell, The World of Carmel Snow (New York: McGraw-
Hill, ), .
. Two collections of Munkcsis work are the catalog for an exhibition, Spontaneity and Style:
Munkcsi (New York: International Center of Photography, ), and Nancy White and John
Esten, Style in Motion: Munkcsi Photographs, Twenties, Thirties, Forties (New York: Clarkson N.
Potter, ).
. Frissells work is collected in Toni Frissell, Photographs, (New York: Doubleday
and the Library of Congress, ).
. A collection of Man Rays fashion work is John Esten, Man Ray: Bazaar Years (New York:
Rizzoli, ).
Notes to Pages 2014

. Nast is quoted in Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Cond
Nast (New York: Viking, ), ; Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, ), .
. A contemporary noted the vast improvement in the quality of fashion photographs since
so that today a photographer has not really arrived unless his pictures appear in Vogue and
Harpers. The prominence these two magazines have given to a purely photographic medium of art
has had a very benecial inuence upon the whole profession. L. Willingner, The New Trend
in Fashion Photography, PP (Jan. ): .
. The instances of modernist arts inclusion in fashion shots are many. Representative exam-
ples in Vogue are Steichens photograph of the Countess Fumasoni-Biondi in a fur wrap and in
front of a Lger ( Jan. , ); Beatons Lady Smiley with a Picasso, composed so that each
seems to represent a reverse angle of the other ( June , ); Steichens four chic ladies at
a Brummer Gallery exhibition of modern sculpture ( Jan. , ); Beatons trompe loeil
shot that makes his model seem to melt into a Tchelitchew ( July ); and four Horst shots
of Picasso paintings and models in furs ( Jan. ). In Harpers Bazaar there was Man Rays
Observatory TimeThe Lovers and lounging model (Nov. , ); Dahl-Wolfes series made at
MoMA that include a Brancusi sculpture and paintings by Braque and Matisse (July , );
and a Huen of a Picasso in Helena Rubensteins apartment ( Sept. , ). In Fashion and
Surrealism (New York: Rizzoli, ) Richard Martin discusses the intermingling of Surrealism
and fashion work and reproduces numerous examples of it; the quotation about the magazines
being the major disseminators of Surrealism is on page . Martin nds an additional reason for
Surrealisms attractiveness to fashion magazines, that the simultaneity of an optical truth and
its dreamed doppelgnger could render the product enticing ().
. Margaret Chase Harriman, Steichen, Vogue, Jan. , ; Martin Munkcsi, Think
while You Shoot, Harpers Bazaar (Nov. ): ; Vogues Eye View of Photography, Vogue,
June , . Vogues editorial was followed by an article by Frank Crowninshield, making com-
parable claims that Cond Nast photographers had solved new aesthetic problemsinstigated
major changes, and augmented the horizons of photography generally. Crowninshield, Vogue
. . . Pioneer in Modern Photography, Vogue, June , .
. Klein quoted in Jane Livingston, The New York School Photographs (New York: Stewart,
Tabori and Chang, ), . Sponsoring the one-person shows, all in and , were the
Carstairs Gallery (Beaton), the Arden Gallery (Frissell), and the Germaine Seligman Gallery
(Horst.) In the sixties and subsequently the fashion photographers Irving Penn and Richard Ave-
don developed strong artistic reputations but by then a much rmer distinction was being drawn
between their fashion and their private work.
. Bourke-Whites pictures appeared in virtually every important exhibition between the Har-
vard Societys in and Adamss Pageant in . She shared equal billing with Evans and
Steiner at the John Becker Gallery in ; with Steichen, Steiner, Strand, and Weston at the
Cleveland Museum of Art in ; and her one-person show at the de Young Museum followed
close on the heels of Group f.s exhibition.
. Marks, Portrait of Bourke-White, ; May Cameron, Margaret Bourke-White Finds
Plenty of Time to Enjoy Life along with Her Camera Work, New York Post, reprinted in James
Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (, rev. ed.
Boston: Houghton Mifin, ; reprint with a foreword by John Hersey, ), ; Rosa
Notes to Pages 2058
343
Reilly, Why Margaret Bourke-White Is at the Top, PP (July ), . Other such proles
include Dangler, American Magazine (Oct. ): ; Janet Mabie, Snapshotting a Snap-
shotter, Christian Science Monitor, Sept. , , ; and American Aces: Margaret Bourke-
344
White, USCM (AprilMay ), . Conrming the enduring fame of Graubners shot
of her and the Chrysler Building gargoyle was its use by Bruce McCall as the basis for a New
Yorker cover some seventy years after the original picture was made ( May ). Bourke-Whites
autobiography is Portrait of Myself (, repr. Boston: G. K. Hall, ); lively and dramatic, it
is not always reliable. Vicki Goldbergs Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper
and Row, ) is the standard biographical account. There are several collections of her work;
an omnibus one is the catalog for a International Center for Photography exhibition, Bourke-
White: A Retrospective (Hartford: United Technologies Corporation, ), with an essay by Vicki
Goldberg.
. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, ), .
. Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, ; Copper in the Mills, Fortune (July ):
.
. Soviet Panorama, Fortune (Feb. ): ; Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia
(New York: Simon and Schuster, ). The New York Times Magazine pieces were Silk Stock-
ings in the Five-Year Plan ( Feb. , ); Making Communists of Soviet Children (
March , ); Nothing Bores the Russian Audience ( March , ); Where the
Worker Can Drop the Boss ( March , ); A Days Work for the Five-Year Plan (
May , ); and A Day in a Remote Village of Russia ( Sept. , ).
. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, ; The Drought, Fortune (Oct. ):
.
. Margaret Bourke-White, Dust Changes America, The Nation, May , . In
Portrait of Myself she characterized the Plains farmers as being numbed like their own dumb
animals and living in an atmosphere of bewilderment and the paralysis of despair ().
. Success Story, Fortune (Dec. ): . A few years later when she was working
with Caldwell he brought her up short by disapproving of her rearrangement of items on the
bureau of a woman she was photographing. This was a new point of view to me, she confessed
(Portrait of Myself, ).
. Floods Aftermath, Life, Feb. , ; the readers letter was published on March
, . This photograph appeared in MoMAs Photography, exhibition the next
month. An intelligent appraisal of the Louisville photograph is John A. Walker, Reections on
a Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, Creative Camera (May ): . Guimond
also discusses it and several others of NAM billboards by the FSA photographers. James Guimond,
American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
), .
. Muncie, Ind. Is the Great U.S. Middletown, Life, May , . Arguably, a shot
of a barber is also about work, but its special function in the feature minimizes this emphasis, and
in any case service workers constituted only an insignicant proportion of Muncies labor force.
. Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, . At the time, Newhall was ignorant of Hine and
the FSA; both Evans and Abbott had been represented in MoMAs exhibition, however, so his
comparison included their work.

. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (, repr. New
York: Arno, ); subsequent references will be to the reprint and parenthetical in the text. The
South of Erskine Caldwell Is Photographed by Margaret Bourke-White, Life, Nov. ,
. Camera fans could also see a selection in PP, with Bourke-Whites account of making them
and Caldwells tribute to her skill in tell[ing] the story to a camera-conscious world. Margaret
Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces: How the Pictures Were Made, PP (March ):
; Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces: Why I Wanted to Do This Story, PP
(March ): .
. Such criticism of You Have Seen Their Faces has become nearly ubiquitous inasmuch as a
solid percentage of those who write about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men compare it with her
book, as Agee implicitly urged by reprinting the newspaper piece in Famous Men. Representa-
tive examples of this critique may be found in William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties
America (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ; John Puckett Rogers, Five Photo-
Textual Documentaries from the Great Depression (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, ), ;
Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, ; and Belinda Rathbone, Walker
Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifin, ), .
. Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces: How the Pictures Were Made, .
.Ibid., .
. Alan Trachtenberg, Foreword to a reprint of You Have Seen Their Faces (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, ), vviii.
. Reviews cited include David L. Cohn, The Bookshelf, Atlantic (Feb. ): n.p.;
Margaret Marshall, The Nation, Dec. , ; Malcolm Cowley, Fall Catalogue, The New
Republic, Nov. , ; Hudson Strode, Pictures of the South, Drunk on Cotton, New
York Herald Tribune Books, Nov. , ; Robert Van Gelder, A Compelling Album of the
Deep South, New York Times Book Review, Nov. , ; Ralph Thompson, Books of the
Times, New York Times, Nov. , ; Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. , ; and
Speaking Likenesses, Time, Nov. , .
. Another who betrayed no reservations about Bourke-Whites methods was Beaumont
Newhall, who in his documentary essay quoted at length and with obvious approval her
description of her procedures in making what he called these excellent pictures. Newhall, Doc-
umentary Approach to Photography, Parnassus (March ): .
. Lawrence Levine, The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the Ameri-
can People in the s and s, in Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American
Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, ), .
Chapter 12: The Photo League, Lewis Hine, and the Harlem Document
. New York City Guide (New York: Random House, ), reprinted as The WPA Guide to New
York (New York: Pantheon, ), .
. Gary Saretzky interview with Sol Libsohn, Jan. . http: www.visitmonmouth.com/oral
history/bios/Libsohn.htm. The most compact history of the Photo Leagues founding is Anne
Tucker, Photographic Crossroads: The Photo League, Afterimage (April ): . Also see
William Alexander, Film on the Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), and Beverly
Moore Bethune, The New York Photo League: A Political History, unpub. Ph.D. diss., Univer-
345
sity of Minnesota, , and her article from it, A Case of Overkill: The FBI and the New York
City Photo League, Journalism History (AutumnWinter ): , .
. Filmfront, Jan. , reprinted in Photo Notes, edited by Nathan Lyons (Rochester: Visual
346
Studies Workshop, ), . Lyonss compilation is unpaginated and reproduces issues chrono-
logically with their original pagination; hereafter citation will be to specic issues in Lyonss com-
pilation.
. Anne Tucker, A History of the Photo League: The Members Speak, History of Photog-
raphy (Summer ): . Tuckers The Photo League: A Center for Documentary
Photography, introduces a volume of League photographs and reprises her earlier writings
about it, This Was the Photo League: Compassion and the Camera from the Depression to the Cold
War, edited by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Claire Coss, and Steven Daiter (Chicago: Stephen Daiter
Gallery, ), . This volume also contains useful biographical sketches of seventy Photo
League members.
. Details of the Leagues composition and activities may be gleaned from PN. It is likely not
all issues are extant (and that publication was skipped some months), and thus it is impossible to
develop a comprehensive record of League activities. Nevertheless, enough issues exist to provide
a basis for a calendar, even if modestly incomplete. It is unknown whether it began publication
before the February number, the rst Lyons found; information about League activities
before that date is scarce.
. Tucker, Photographic Crossroads, . One former student who did achieve an important, if
limited, reputation was Morris Engel, primarily for his lmmaking. After having his photographs
hailed by Strand, working on the PM staff, and serving as a U.S. Navy photographer in World War
II, he made several well-regarded lms that had, however, only limited distribution. The rst, Little
Fugitives (), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Silver Lion for best direction
at the Venice Film Festival; Francois Truffaut said that it inspired the French New Wave. A Film-
maker Who Valued Art More Than Fame, New York Times, Feb. , ii, .
. Libsohn interview by Gary Saretsky, Jan. . Announcements and/or reports of these
events appeared in PN between and .
. PN (April ): .
. Carl Chiarenza, Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors (Boston: New York Graphic Society,
), ; Lili Corbus Bezner, Aaron Siskind: An Interview, History of Photography
(Spring ): .
. PN (Oct.Nov. ): .
. In mid-, coordinated with a call to increase membership by forming a national League
of American Photographers, PN announced a forthcoming magazine to feature documentary
and asked for nancial contributions to launch it. Together the new organization and periodical
would more effectively confront those who would distort [photography] and defeat [its] true func-
tion, namely the pictorialists and unspecied modernists, cultists of red lters and confusing
angles. This clarion call led nowhere. The League remained a New York organization, and the
new magazine never appeared. PN (Aug. ): , .
. Elizabeth McCausland, Documentary Photography, PN (Jan. ): .
. Morris Engel, review of U.S. Camera , PN (Jan. ): ; Albert Fenn, review of U.S.
Camera , PN (Feb. ): ; Louis Clyde Stoumen, review of U.S. Camera , PN (Jan.
): .

. Paul Strand, Engels One Man Show, PN (Dec. ): ; Bezner, Aaron Siskind: An Inter-
view, . In this interview Siskind suggests that the antipathy was mutual. Evans hated organi-
zations, especially the Communist organization, while the League never would include Walker
Evans for a minute in its core of admired workers because their judgment of a photographer
and the quality of his work depended on whether they thought he was doing work that related to
documentary work. Although some assumptions in Siskinds remembrance are dubious or puz-
zlingthe League was not a communist organization, and any denition of documentary work
would seem to include Evansnevertheless his point about the mutual disdain seems accurate.
Harold Corsini remembers that Evans did visit the League once to show some pictures but then
stalked out when they were criticized for insufcient social consciousness. Author interview with
Harold Corsini, Oct. .
. Paul Strand, review of American Exodus, PN (MarchApril ): .
. Beaumont Newhall, Lewis W. Hine, Magazine of Art (Nov. ): ; Elizabeth
McCausland, Portrait of a Photographer, Survey Graphic (Oct. ): ; also see McCaus-
land, The Boswell of Ellis Island, USCM (Jan.Feb. ): . Markss Coronet piece also
contributed to Hines new visibility, but it followed Newhalls and McCauslands by a few months
and after his Riverside Museum show had closed. Hines opinion of the Stieglitz group is in a
letter to McCausland, Sept. , reprinted in Daile Kaplan, Photo Story: Selected Letters and
Photographs of Lewis W. Hine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, ), .
. A copy of the exhibitions catalog is in HSTR.
. Kaplan, Photo Story, .
. Abbotts judgment is in the foreword to Kaplan, Photo Story, xiiixiv.
. PN (Jan. ): , .
. PN (Jan. ): . Stoumen included Lange in the Leagues pantheon as well. Lewis W.
Hine, Survey Graphic (Dec. ): .
. Abbott interview with James McQuaid, July , typescript in the Eastman House,
.
. In late November the group began to discuss its next projects, the two proposed a
study of a single block on Sixteenth Street and of the lost generation of youth who had come
of age in the depression. MHD, Nov., Dec. , CCP. The minutes that survive from
may not be complete but must be nearly so. In addition there are three minutes of the Street
Group from May , and it is seems likely the deliberations they report are about the project
to examine Sixteenth Street.
. Siskinds enumeration of personnel is in his article about the group in PN (JuneJuly ).
The fact that two of the three unacknowledged frequent participants were women corroborates
a complaint Abbott made in her interview with McQuaid about the Leagues sexism. Predictably,
perhaps, Kosofsky served as secretary. Minutes of the meetings list attendees. Grossmans
short-lived participation is recounted in Tucker, A History of the Photo League, .
. MHD, Feb., Oct., , CCP.
. MHD, Nov. , CCP; interview with Siskind, Vineyard Gazette, Aug. , Siskind
Archive, CCP, ellipses in quotation. Corsini explained the shots rooftop vantage by his need to
make certain his camera would be secure from theft. Author interview with Harold Corsini,
Oct. .
. PN (JuneJuly ): .
347
. , Native Sons, Look, May , . The Photo League is credited in the fea-
ture itself, and in an obscure box elsewhere in the issue the photographers are listed as Corsini,
Engel, Kosofsky, Lyon, Mendelsohn, and Siskind. Fortune republished three of Siskinds shots in
348
an article on Harlem, part of a special issue on New York: Harlem, (July ): . Two
issues of The New Masses used the pictures: Harlem: Boarded Up, May , , and Harlem
Children, May , . A third may have, Portrait of a Tenement, Sept. , ,
although it is likely some (or perhaps all) of these came from other League projects. Siskind had
two in U.S. Camera portfolios, one in , a shot made before the Harlem Document got under-
way, and another in . Aside from the latter the only other picture in the annuals that is speci-
cally attributed to the project is Engels Harlem Merchant in . Mendelsohns two shots in
are not so attributedeven the Photo League goes unmentionedbut the group discussed
and accepted one of them, a grizzled black man with his crutches, and the other seems likely to
be from the project (MHD, April , CCP). It is also possible that an Engel shot of a crying
black child in the annual came from it. Corsinis football players are in the annual.
Fifty-one of his photographs are reprinted in Aaron Siskind, Harlem Document, Photographs
(Providence: Matrix Publications, ), with a text derived from oral histories and
urban folklore collected by the Federal Writers Project. Nineteen are from The Most Crowded
Block, a related project Siskind began with Carter and Max Yavno in that was never pub-
lished or even completed. Many of the same photographs are in Harlem, the s: Photographs by
Aaron Siskind (Petaluma: Pomegranate Art Books, n.d.), which was prepared with the assistance
of the National Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution.
The ethnographic ambition of the Harlem Document may be inferred from the subjects of
Carters projected chapters, alluded to in several of the minutes. There were to be chapters
on housing, religion, labor, crime, health, society, and recreation, and that is likely a complete list
because Carter promised early in November to have the complete rst draft of the text ready in
the next few days.
. MHD, passim, CCP.
. PN (Feb. ): ; PN (June ): ; MHD, Feb. , CCP.
. PN (April ): .
. MHD, April, June , CCP. Curiously, the group decided that the best way to
illustrate the African American contribution to music was to show a white audience at the Apollo
Theatre listening to black musicians. PN had announced two Harlem shows, the additional one to
be at the Harlem Branch Library following on the heels of that at the YMCA. Siskinds biogra-
pher, Carl Chiarenza, also mentions this venue. But the second show seems not to have occurred.
The minutes refer several times to the YMCA exhibition but never to the one at the library. The
YMCA show opened on February , and by February the minutes report that Lyon will take it
down Saturday morning, which day had already passed by the time of the next meeting, March
. The minutes report that he had taken down the displays but had been unable to carry them
back, and thus they were still at the YMCA. That suggests the show was up for no more than
ten days and there was no following one at the library.
. A copy of the catalog is in the Siskind Archive, CCP.
. MHD, May , CCP.
. Ansel Adams, summary of talk to the Photo League, The Application of Aesthetics to
Photography, PN (Dec. ): .

. The Unseen Half of South Bend, Fortune (March ): ; Franklin Roosevelt Has
a Wild West, Life, Nov. , ; Muncie, Ind. Is the Great U.S. Middletown, Life,
May , . The Lynds rst choice for the Middletown study had been South Bend
although they then chose Muncie because it had a greater proportion of native-born citizens.
A sign of how widespread this impulse was is that even Ansel Adams, whose work would other-
wise seem to be uncongenial with it, considered such a project. Writing to David McAlpin in
he proposed a book on three New York streetsWall, Fourteenth, and one in the Fiftiesor per-
haps on a small town that he could cover completely. . . . The architecture, the vistas, the people,
the intimate details. The program would be or should be, more than just a picture book; it would
denitely be social in character, and should show the tops and the bottoms with impartiality. . . . I
would love to do something documentary like itif only to answer the prophets of doom. I do
not think America is falling to pieces. Adams to McAlpin, Jan. , Adams Archive, CCP.
. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Pantheon, ), . The Harlem Document groups minutes circumstantially
reveal its ethnographic ambition. The subjects of the pictures it discussed in are multifarious,
including, to take only a few examples, laundry workers ironing shirts, a food relief station, rent-
strike signs, religious services, striking janitors, an Elks parade, and the Harlem Hospital.
. USC , ; USC , ; PN (Feb. ).
. Portrait of Harlem, in New York Panorama: A Companion to the WPA Guide to New York
City: A Comprehensive View of the Metropolis, Presented in a Series of Articles (, repr. New York:
Pantheon, ), .
. Harlem Children, .
. The cropped version is in Siskind, Harlem Document, Photographs , . The
uncropped shot is in the Siskind Harlem Document archive at the Eastman House and may also
be viewed on its Web-site.
. Ibid., , , , .
. Ibid., , , , frontispiece, . Just a few weeks after Siskind made the shot of small busi-
nesses, Abbott, in fact, photographed precisely the same location. North of th Street, in Ber-
enice Abbott: Changing New York, edited by Bonnie Yochelson (New York: New Press, Museum
of the City of New York, ), plate .
. Siskind, Harlem Document, Photographs, , , , . Contemporary evaluations
of Harlem protests and of Randolphs union are in New York Panorama, , .
. Rothstein to Stryker, March , RSP.
. Native Sons commercial success encouraged the publication the next year of Richard Wright
and Edwin Rosskams, Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States
(New York: Viking, )photographs of African Americans, mostly by the FSA, accompanied
by Wrights text. A major reason why the Harlem Document did not nd a publisher is that it was
preempted by this book. Fiona M. Dejardin reports that Rosskam, who did the photo direction
for Twelve Million Black Voices, rst asked the Harlem Document group for pictures to illustrate
it, but faced with their demand that Carters text accompany their pictures he then turned to the
FSA. She provides no evidence for this assertion, which seems dubious given Rosskams FSA
employment and the FSA les rich resources for illustrating African American life beyond New
York. DeJardin, The Photo League: Left-wing Politics and the Popular Press, History of Pho-
tograpy (Summer ): .
349
. , Native Sons, . All the photographs and captions discussed are from this
feature except when specically indicated.
. The uncropped shot is in Siskind, Harlem Document, Photographs, , ; Bourke-
350
Whites quotation is from Portrait of Myself (, repr. Boston: G. K. Hall, ), .
. The minutes suggest this picture was either by Kosofsky or Mendelsohn because at the
September meeting she brought pictures she had made at an Elks parade which she was
asked to hold until Jacks pictures of same were brought in. This Was the Photo League, edited by
Tucker, Coss, and Daiter, attributes the shot to Mendelsohn, which Harold Corsini conrms. He
also identies the shot of a church altar in Look as his own. Author interview with Harold Corsini,
Oct. .
. MHD, Jan. , CCP. Bezner explores Grossmans career, mostly after the League was
named a subversive organization by the attorney general. Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and
Politics in America: From the New Deal to the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
), .
. Draft of letter from Kosofsky to Elisofon, Nov. , Siskind Archive, CCP. Also see the
minutes of Nov. . Tucker, A History of the Photo League, discusses the ongoing tension
in the relationship of Siskind and Grossman although she does not mention this incident.
. Desjardin, The Photo League: Left-Wing Politics and the Popular Press, ; quota-
tions on , , , , emphasis added.
. On Grossmans politics see Tucker, A History of the Photo League, . Beverly M.
Bethune provides details of the professional witness Angela Calomiriss denunciation of Gross-
man as a communist in the trial of party leaders (A Case of Overkill, ). The social
characteristics Denning discovers in participants in what he calls the cultural front that took
shape in the mid- to late thirties were shared by League members, who were often second-gen-
eration ethnics from urban working-class families. His analysis of political alignments, adapted
from Raymond Williams, is more subtle and useful than the stale disputes about specic afliations
although perhaps it downplays how ercely ideological commitments could be held and conicts
expressed in the thirties. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front The Laboring of American Culture
in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso Press, ), only in passing refers to the Film and
Photo League and not at all to the Photo League, although the latter in his terms was a cultural
front organization.
. Stoumen, review of U.S. Camera , PN (Jan. ): . Worth mentioning, too, is that
no PN reader felt the necessity to criticize the review despite the fact that the journals casual
format meant League members had easy access to publishing in it if they wished and that the
publication of U.S. Camera was among any years signal events and members were encouraged to
examine it.
. Bethune (A Case of Overkill, ) says that the League was mostly inactive during the war,
but afterward its membership grew and it began to move away from its earlier convictions about
using art as a weapon. The fullest account of its postwar history is Bezner, Photography and Poli-
tics in America, .

Chapter 13: Seeing California with Edward Weston
. His Guggenheim applications are reprinted in Weston, Edward Weston on Photography, edited
by Peter C. Bunnell (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, ), .
. Three of the most distinguished cultural histories of American photography, each with impor-
tant sections on the thirties or about them entirely, either mention him only in passing or not at
all: James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, ); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New
York: Oxford University Press, ); and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs:
Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, ).
. Edward and Charis Weston married in April as the Guggenheim Fellowship was ending.
When their book appeared she signed it with her married name. They will be referred to as the
Westons, even though this misidenties their relationship before . For clarity, their forenames
will also be used.
. Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, edited by Nancy Newhall, vols. [Miller-
ton, N.Y.: Aperture, ], : , : .
. Weston, Daybooks, : , : , : , : .
. Waldo Frank, The Rediscovery of America: An Introduction to a Philosophy of American Life
(New York: Scribners, ); Weston, Daybooks, : .
. Ibid., : . Eventually, as his relationship with Charis deepened he photographed the whole
woman, consummately in a series of gure studies made at the Oceano Dunes in . For a sen-
sitive discussion of this work see Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., Westons Westons: Portraits and Nudes
(Boston: New York Graphic Society, ), .
. Weston, Daybooks, : . Before receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship he twice in the
mid-thirties came close to having government sponsorship of his new landscape studies. Merle
Armitage was the southern California director of the Treasury Departments Public Works of
Art Project and hired Weston in to photograph whatever he wished under the general rubric
the American scene. PWAP did not acknowledge that photographers were artists so the appoint-
ment was unique, and a few of his landscapes were duly deposited with the Los Angeles Public
Library. Armitages superior then overruled him, however, and Weston was set to making record
photographs of paintings and sculpture. After three months and a percent reduction in salary
he resigned. The next spring he told Adams that he was to be hired by the Department of the
Interior to photograph soil erosion across the nation. It was, he said, a job made for me. But
his exultance faded when he learned that the departments Washington darkroom would develop
and print his negatives, a fact that tempered any disappointment he might have felt when the job
fell through. Details about these two government positions may be found in Willard Van Dyke
Archive, compiled by Leslie Calmes (Tucson: CCP, the University of Arizona, ) ; Ben
Maddow, Edward Weston: Seventy Photographs: Biography (Boston: New York Graphic Society,
), ; Weston, Daybooks, : ; and Amy Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs from the
Collection of the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson: CCP, the University of Arizona, ),
and notes for gs. and .
. Charis made the quoted comment in the preface to the revised edition of California and the
West (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, ), . Besides her preface, this edition varies considerably
351
from the original one, some of its fewer number of photographs not in the original. It may have
been coincidental that Westons award was announced on the day before the opening of MoMAs
Photography, exhibition, but the effect of these two nearly simultaneous institutional
352
endorsements was to highlight the mediums elevation to full membership in the republic of art.
That a photographer would nally receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in was hardly a fore-
gone conclusion. After he had put together his application, Weston asked the painter Rockwell
Kent to endorse it; Kent, who had served on the Guggenheim jury the previous year, warned him
that it seemed likely photographers would not be considered eligible. In that competition, Kent
said, there had been a great many applications from photographers, and it was the jurys opinion
that if the doors were once opened to photographers it would be swamped with applications
from professionals and snap shot amateurs all over the country. He said that the jury felt that
discriminating among them would be almost impossible, because even a reasonably competent
amateur could submit a few pictures from among the thousands he or she had made that would
deservedly rank as ne photographs, and so it was decided to make all photographers ineligible.
Kents report indicated how deeply seated the belief was, at this late date and perhaps especially
among adherents of the ne arts, that photography was an essentially mechanical and thus inferior
art form. Kent to Weston, Oct. , Weston Notegook B, CCP.
. Charis Wilson Weston and Edward Weston, California and the West (New York: Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, ), ; also see Charis Wilson [Weston], Foreword to Karen E. Quinn and Theo-
dore E. Stebbins, Westons Westons: California and the West (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts/Little,
Brown, ), .
. Advertisement, Westways (Aug. ): ; Seeing California with Edward Weston ([Los
Angeles]: Westways, ).
. Weston to Ansel Adams, undated letter, , Adams Archive, CCP. Weston, Daybooks, :
, : , : .
. Weston Wins $ Award, Life, April , , ; Speaking of Pictures . . . Desert
Tragedy, Life, June , ; Speaking of Pictures . . . These are Westons Westerns, Life,
Dec. , . The feature on the dead man was provided as a narrative (with Westons help). The
day after the bodys discovery he photographed a sign warning travelers to carry sufcient water
in the desert; the picture appeared rst in Life, making the feature a miniature photo-essay.
. The New Mexico series appeared June through September and January . The
rst and last quotations are from New Mexico (June ): ; the other two from Westways
advertisements, (Sept. ): , and (Aug. ): .
. Edward Weston, My Photographs of California, Magazine of Art (Jan. ): ;
Edward Weston, Photographing California, Camera Craft (Feb. ): , and (March
): ; Edward Weston, I Photograph Trees, PP (June ) , ; F. H. Hal-
liday [Charis Weston], Edward Weston, California Arts and Architecture (Jan. ): ,
; Edward and Charis Weston, Of the West: A Guggenheim Portrait, USC (New
York: Random House, ), .
. The photographs were not equal to those readers might see in an exhibition. Photomechanical
reproduction muddied their tonality and diminished their legibility; moreover, some were reduced
by percent or more. In Westways and New Mexico the editors sometimes slightly trimmed his
negatives. None of this could have surprised Weston, who nevertheless continued to publish in
the magazines. If he did not complain, however, Adams did, apparently without Westons knowl-

edge, when Westways compiled its book. He berated Hanna for its commonplace text, atrocious
layout, and inferior reproductions that denied the dignity and spirit of the original work. His
heated letter instigated an exchange with Hanna that at bottom was about audience. The book
Adams thought the club should have published would have been an art book, Hanna responded,
considerably more expensive and one that never in the world would have gotten over to our par-
ticular audience. Adams to Westways, Sept. ; Hanna to Adams, Oct. ; and Adams
to Hanna, Oct. , all in Adams Archive, CCP.
. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , edited by Mary Street Alinder and
Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, ), ; Weston, Daybooks, : . The Gug-
genheim Foundation paid Weston $ in addition to his fellowship stipend to print a selection
of pictures to be deposited at the Huntington Library. Weston to Henry Allen Moe, March
, Weston Archives, CCP. Moe had interceded with the Huntington to persuade it to accept
the pictures on the grounds that there simply are no better photographers anywhere than Edward
Weston, not only his own belief, he said, but also that of Guggenheims advisers in the ne arts.
Moe to Max Farrand, quoted in Conger, Biography, in Edward Weston, . Weston began send-
ing prints to the Huntington in , and by the library held , mostly his Guggenheim
work and also earlier and later pictures.
. Edward Weston, A Statement by Edward Weston, in Weston and Weston, California and
the West, . The book is composed of three parts: his photographs in six unpaginated gath-
erings distributed at intervals, her paginated narrative, and his brief concluding statement, also
paginated. Subsequent references to her narrative are parenthetical in the text, as are those to his
photographs by group (). References to his statement are endnoted.
. Zomah Charlot quoted in Weston and Weston, California and the West, rev. ed., .
. For instance, he made Bad Water/Death Valley on his third trip there, but it appeared in
Group One with images from the rst visit eighteen months earlier although other pictures from
the later trip were in Group Six. Bad Water/Death Valley probably was included in Group One
because it could be paired with Evening Cloud/Panamints, the nearly reverse angles of the two
shots agreeably complementing one another. Much of the shooting chronology may be made out
in Chariss narrative. Also helpful is the information about individual pictures in Conger, Edward
Weston, Appendix E of which provides dates and locations for each of the Westons trips.
. Ibid., unpaginated note to g. . Charis also records the crabapple tree as the rst Gug-
genheim shot (Weston and Weston, California and the West, ).
. In the homage to Adams there was a private joke in foregrounding the snowy boughs;
Weston said he was too short to photograph the solitary peak as the lanky Adams would. Usually
irrepressibly candid, Charis did not mention their marriage at all. To do so would have been to
advertise that during the entire period of the Guggenheim their relationship was illicit. She was
a bohemian but in this case honored the eras moral codes. By when she prepared the books
revised edition such premarital cohabitation was more common, and hers with Edward long in
the past, so she appended an account of their wedding.
. The autobiographical overtones of this photograph are especially revealing about how cen-
tral they considered their collaboration to be. At the end of the rst years fellowship they super-
stitiously resolved to wait in the campground until word came of whether it would be renewed
because Death Valley had been the site of their rst trip a year earlier. The weather was terrible,
and the campground was crowded with noisy neighbors. The mesquite trees, feathery green on
353
their earlier stay, were leaess and made the place feel even less welcoming. They uncomfortably
stayed on nearly three weeks, until March , when word came of the renewal. Chariss account
providing a resounding climax to her penultimate chapter and to the books action because the
354
nal chapter summarizes the next year in just ve pages. The photograph, however, clearly shows
leafy trees, and the campground appears uncrowded. Conger identies this shot as having been
made on January , near the end of the second fellowship year (the other two Death Valley
shots in Group Six were made in spring , the period Chariss narrative describes). With its
placement almost at the end of Group Six it illustrates her account of a stay actually made nine
months earlier, another example of a chronological rearrangement for a rhetorical purpose. The
use and placement of this pictureso unmistakably yoked to her narrative, and to the fact of their
domestic arrangements as it wereunderscores that the collaboration between writer and pho-
tographer is a central aspect of the book. It is worth noting as well that although the photograph
shares the impulse of a tourists snapshot to memorialize a fondly remembered locale, even more
it illustrates Westons superb eye for rhythmic repetition. The at, concrete picnic tables in the
foreground anticipate the mesas level summit, as the peaked tents do the jagged mountains. The
picture is not only autobiography but also a virtuoso example of the spatial and morphological
organization of disparate materials.
. This accounting excludes what they jokingly referred to as his documentary shot, Mouth
of Russian River, a coastal vista including a handful of human gures so tiny as to be virtually
invisible (Group Two).
. Charis Wilson, The Weston Eye, in E.W. : Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston
(Carmel: Friends of Photography, ), .
. Conger, Edward Weston, note to g. .
. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, , , .
. Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photographs of the s, with an essay by
Michael G. Sundell (Cleveland: The New Gallery of Contemporary Art, ), ; Dorothea Lange
and Paul Shuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock, ), ; Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Say, Is This the U.S.A. (New
York: Duell, Pearce and Sloan, ), .
. Weston, Photographing California, ; Weston, A Statement by Edward Weston, .
. Weston, Daybooks, : . Evanss American Photographs was a notable exception to this
trend.
. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, .
. John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth-Century North America (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, ), ; Julius Weinberger, Money Spent for Play: An Index of Opin-
ion, Public Opinion Quarterly (April ): ; Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The
American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, ), .
. California (Sacramento: California Tourist Association, ), n.p.
. Bert Clark, One Hundred Thousand Miles by Automobile through the West: Wayside Observa-
tions (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, ), unpaginated foreword; Charles Finger, Footloose
in the West (New York: William Morrow, ), ; Lewis Gannett, Sweet Land (New York: E.
P. Dutton, ), . Other representative titles are Herbert Carolan, Motor Tales and Travels In
and Out of California (New York: Putnam, ); Charles Finger, Adventure under Sapphire Skies
(New York: William Morrow, ); Robert Frothingham, Trails through the Golden West (New

York: Robert M. McBride, ); Zephine Humphrey, Green Mountains to Sierras (New York: E.
P. Dutton, ); and C. B. Glasscock, A Golden Highway: Scenes of Historys Greatest Gold Rush
Yesterday and Today (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, ).
. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf,
); California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, ), .
. Weston, Guggenheim Fellowship Proposal in Weston, Edward Weston on Photography,
.
. California: A Guide to the Golden State, .
. Ibid., , , , .
. Just one of the ninety-six photographs, False Hellebore (Group Two), has no designa-
tion permitting a viewer to know where it was made. Why Weston in this case made an exception
to his usual titling procedure is unknown, but had he not specied locales photographs and text
would have become more discrete.
. Man Ray was the worlds worst photographer Weston opined to Merle Armitage in .
Conger, Edward Weston, note to g. .
. Weston, Photographing California, .
. A variant of the rst juniper, on the reverse of which he wrote favorite, is taken from
slightly further away and indicates both trees. Had he used it some of the ideational energy of
the second shot would have been lost. This variant is reprinted in Weston, My Photographs of
California, .
. Ibid., .
. Weston, A Statement by Edward Weston, .
. Wilson, The Weston Eye, .
. Conger, Edward Weston, note to g. .
. Perhaps the MGM shots do echo one of the preceding photographs, though. The carousel
horse advertising a dude ranch that they found in Riverside County is likewise entirely articial
although the line of hills across the bottom of the image at least suggests its natural placement.
Weston was careful to include the ranchs advertising sign in his composition, and he placed this
image immediately preceding the one of the dead man. Together they ironically contrast a dena-
tured modern simulacrum of authentic western experience with the Wests real dangers (Group
One).
. Each sequence of sixteen had a page of text opposite the rst and last pictures with the
remainder paired on facing pages. This allowed Texas Spring Camp Grounds and Rubber
Dummies to face one another while Ghost Set is alone.
Chapter 14: Photography at High Tide
. American Photographers Salon, Literary Digest, Sept. , ; Lange to Edwin

Locke, Sept. , RSP; F. Anthony Saunders, Fifty Thousand People Saw the Show, Popu-
lar Photography (Feb. ): ; Success Story, Minicam (Sept. ): .
. Saunders, Fifty Thousand People Saw the Show, , .
. See, for one example among many, the New York Times coverage of the version
in its rotogravure section, Camera Art, , Nov. , viii, ; see also Kansas City Star,
Oct. ; New Haven Register, Dec. ; and Buffalo News, Oct. .
355
. H. I. Brock, Broadening the Art of the Camera, New York Times Magazine, Sept. ,
, ; Caught by the Lens: Vivid Flashes of Our Age, New York Times Magazine, Sept.
, .
356
. Stryker to Rothstein, May , RSP; Catalog of the Third International Leica Exhibit, Oct.
. The pictures from the Leica shows, like those from U.S. Cameras, were often reprinted in
newspapers, as were seven by the FSA in the Buffalo Times when the traveling version came
to town. The photographs, by Rothstein, Shahn, and Jung, were displayed across the page and
except for the rst, of a poor farmers tumbledown home in Virginia, all were portraits with cap-
tions by the newspaper. Read left to right they proposed the success of government programs for
the disadvantaged, from Shahns decrepit home, typical of the kind of shacks these people live
in, to Rothsteins low-angle heroicizing shot of a farmer who is beginning to enjoy life and
looks condently to the future with a smile on his face. Hope for the Despairing, Buffalo Times,
Feb. , HSTR.
. , Visit Photo Show, Business Week, April , ; Eager Crowd Opens Photo
Show Early, New York Times, April , .
. First International Photographic Exposition: Catalog of Exhibits/Program of Events (New York:
The Exposition, ), . This twenty-two page booklet, costing ten cents, listed about twenty
Sections of the exhibition with the exhibitors names but no titles or how many pictures they dis-
played. It seems clear, though, from the catalogs format that the leading contemporaries showed
multiple images and exhibitors in the amateur, camera club, and professional sections many fewer,
perhaps just one or two.
. Rosa Reilly, The Camera World on Parade, PP (July ): , .
. Typed versions of the handwritten comments are in the RSP; Stryker to Locke, April
, RSP.
. Newhall published his Parnassus essay briey praising the FSA the month before the Expo-
sition opened, but that was likely his rst opportunity to see a concentrated selection of its work.
. Evans to Stryker, April , RSP.
. Elizabeth McCausland, article, Springeld Sunday Union and Republican, April , copy
in the RSP.
. R.B., The Art of the Camera, New York Times, April , x, ; New York Pictured
for Future in Show, New York Times, Oct. , .
. Adams quoted in Andrea Gray, Ansel Adams: An American Place, (Tucson: CCP, the Uni-
versity of Arizona, ), ; Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, ), .
. Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , edited by Mary Street Alinder
and Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, ), , , .
. Gray, Ansel Adams: An American Place, , passim.
. Ibid.
. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , , , ; Adams to Weston, about
Feb. , Adams Archive, CCP. The marital problems are hinted at in his letters to Patsy English,
written from the East. He said in one of them that she had contributed so much to his show that he
could not put it into words and concluded by reassuring himself that she understood why his let-
ters were so matter-of-fact. Adams to English, postmarked Nov. , Adams Archive, CCP.
. Gray, Ansel Adams: An American Place, , ; A Reviewers Notebook: Among New
Exhibitions, New York Times, Nov. , x, ; notice, Nov. , x, .

. Nancy Newhall, unpublished memoir, quoted in Adams, An Autobiography, .
. Richard H. Dillon, Treasure Island: Our Other Worlds Fair, American His-
tory Illustrated (MayJune ): ; also see Coast Fair Organizes, Business Week, Jan.
, , and Coast Fair Pay-Off, Business Week, Sept. , .
. Artists in Action Steal the Show at San Francisco, Life, July , ; Dillon, Trea-
sure Island, .
. The space allotted to the Pageant equaled thirty-seven substantial gallery rooms although
it was congured into six galleries. Two were dedicated to the permanent historical display, and
four housed rotating one-person or group shows. Ansel Adams, Conversations with Ansel Adams:
An Interview Conducted by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun in , , and (Berkeley:
Regents of the University of California, ), .
. From this tradition MoMAs exhibition included only OSullivans Caon de Chelle,
which was lent by Adams. In the Pageants catalog Adams had nothing to say about the Photo-
Secession aside from a perfunctory characterization of Stieglitzs pictures as magnicent. In
photographys middle period, he added, aside from the western landscapists, the medium had
adopted the romantic veneer of nineteenth century painting, and turned far from simple paths,
a deviation that fortunately had been reversed to set photography again on a more stable road.
At the Pageant as elsewhere, Stieglitz forbade showing his more recent work, thus again strength-
ening the impression that he was an antique, irrelevant to contemporary practice.
. Ansel Adams, introduction to A Pageant of Photography (San Francisco: Crocker-Union,
), n.p.
. Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , , . Evans was not fond of
Adamss work, either. After seeing his Delphic Studios show he pronounced it all wrong. Evans
to Jay Leyda, late , quoted in Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New
Vision: Photography between the World Wars, the Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, ),
.
. N. Newhall, unpublished memoir, quoted in Adams, An Autobiography, ; Hambourg and
Phillips, The New Vision, . Adamss assistant Maloney from U.S. Camera was not Evanss
champion either.
. Adamss assessment is reported in PN (Dec. ): .
. A Pageant of Photography, USCM (Feb. ): , ; Adams, Conversations with
Ansel Adams, . The Pageants attendance record would last until the s, when it would be
surpassed by the worldwide showings of The Family of Man.
. Adams to the Photo League, reprinted in PN (June-July ): .
Afterword
. McAlpin to Adams, Jan. , Feb. , Adams Correspondence, CCP.

. Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: Letters and Images, , edited by Mary Street Alinder
and Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, ), ; Adams to McAlpin, Sept.
, Adams Correspondence, CCP. Adams expressed earlier reservations about Newhall in a let-
357
ter to McAlpin ( Feb. , Adams Correspondence, CCP). The account Newhall later gave of
the departments founding differs from what is revealed in the Adams-McAlpin correspondence.
In Newhall said he broached the possibility to Adams of a photography department during
358
a visit to Yosemite. The topic interested Adams so much that he immediately telephoned
McAlpin, who asked Newhall to contact him when he returned to New York. After Newhall out-
lined the idea at a lunch, McAlpin gave him $,. The department was founded shortly there-
after. Interview with Beaumont Newhall in Dialogue with Photography, edited by Paul Hill and
Thomas Cooper (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), , .
. The New Department of Photography, Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art (Dec.Jan.
). This served as the exhibitions catalog.
. Christopher Phillips, The Judgment Seat of Photography, in The Contest of Meaning, edited
by Richard Bolton (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), . By misquoting the catalog Phillips aligns it
more neatly with his argument. The catalogs summarizing proposition read: Each of the prints
is an individual expression, but all of them are common in their clear evidence of an understand-
ing of the qualities, limitations and possibilities of photography. Phillipss version is: Each print
is an individual personal expression (italics added). In Newhalls conspectus of the Program
of the Department, though, he did advert to pictures which are a personal expression of their
makers emotions, pictures which have made use of the inherent characteristics of the medium of
photography. Besides Atget, Brady, Steichen, the four early Stieglitzes, and White, the histori-
cal contingent included Emerson, Hill and Adamson, Le Secq, and OSullivan. Contemporaries
other than those named included Ruth Bernhard, a Californian with work somewhat reminiscent
of Westons; Harold E. Edgerton, the MIT scientist who specialized in high-speed, stop-action
images; the newcomer Helen Leavitt with a picture of city children; the news photographer who
shot the Memorial Day massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago; Peter Stackpole with a pic-
ture of constructing the Golden Gate Bridge; and Luke Swank, the Pittsburgh documentarian.
. As Newhall put it, Just as to judge good literature it is necessary to read many books, so to
judge photography it is necessary to see, under the most favorable conditions, the best work that
can be assembled. By this means solutions to different problems can be contrasted and compared,
the relationship of technique to visualization can be grasped, the work of today can be compared
to the work of the past (The New Department of Photography, ).
. Editorial, Cincinnati Times-Star, Jan. , . Many clippings in the MoMA archive
express similar sentiments.
. In mid- USCM changed its format from folio to quarto and its paper from glossy to
pulp, lowered its price to fteen cents, and became a monthly. The recongured magazine carried
more articles, but they were shorter and many fewer centered on leading photographers or mat-
ters of special interest to photographys art world, replaced by a predominance of how-to pieces.
The space allocated to readers letters was considerably reduced, and they no longer took up the
sorts of esthetic questions readers had earlier addressed. It became, in short, almost exclusively
a practical journal for hobbyists. Much the same thing occurred with PP even earlier. Beginning
in , features about major photographers began to decrease markedly, replaced by ones on
national defense and more practical articles. After December in both magazines the war
almost completely eclipsed any other nonpractical topics.
. Phillips, The Judgment Seat of Photography, ; Nancy Newhall quoted in Jonathan

Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press,
), .
. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, translated by Shaun Whiteside (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, ), . This volume originally was published in French in as Un
art moyen, a title that more accurately describes Bourdieus analysis than the English one. He is
primarily interested not in public activities that might be used to legitimate photography as an
artexhibition, published discourse, and the likenor in how leading photographers position
their work in the larger eld of photography but rather centers his analysis on ordinary practitio-
ners and how their uses of cameras are guided by their class afliations and their perception of
how other class formations do so.
. Bourdieu, Photography, .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., ; for Levine, see chapter . Douglas R. Nickel comments on the effect museum domi-
nance of photographic discourse has had on the understanding of photographys history. While
we must be grateful for the new information and insights museum-based research has tirelessly
brought to light, it is undeniable that the practical imperatives of museum business and the museum
audience inect the sorts of scholarship that might be generated there. Monographic exhibitions
are favored over thematic projects; marketable subjects get better catalogues than specialist topics
or unknown artists; the contents of a show will invariably be dictated by the condition, availability,
and attractiveness of original objects. Nickel, History of Photography: The State of Research,
Art Bulletin (Sept. ): .
. Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, edited by Nancy Newhall, vols. [Mil-
lerton, N.Y.: Aperture, ], : .
359
[blank page 360]
Index
Abbott, Berenice, , , , ; articles tographic Technique, ; and Group f.,
about, , , , ; career of, , , , , , ; Making a Photograph,
; and city planning, ; and Edward , ; and MoMA, , ; and
Hopper, ; equipment of, , Paul Strand, ; and photographys pro-
n; and Eugne Atget, , , , fusion, ; and Walker Evans, ,
, , n; exhibitions of, , , , n; on western vitality, ; and Wil-
, , , , , ; and Photo liam Mortensen, . See also Group f.;
League, , , ; reputation of, A Pageant of Photography
, n; subjects of, . See also Chang- -, photograph by: Boards and This-
ing New York tles, San Francisco, , n
, photograph by: Edward Hopper, African Americans: and Carl Van Vechten,
; and Edward Steichen, ; and
Adams, Ansel, , , , ; and Alfred Margaret Bourke-White, , , ;
Stieglitz, , , ; and American photographs of, , . See also Harlem
photographys superiority, ; and Ansel Document
Adams Gallery, ; and audience for Agee, James, ,
photography, , ; career of, , Agha, Mehemed Fehmy, ,
; and documentary, , , amateur photography: popularity of, , ,
; and Edward Steichen, , ; , ,
exhibition at An American Place, ; An American Exodus (Dorothea Lange and Paul
exhibitions of, , , , , , , Taylor), , , ,
, , ; An Exposition of My Pho- American Guide Series (Works Progress
Administration Writers Project), ; tographs by, , ; Luce magazines and,
FSA photographs in, , , n , , ; and Middletown (Muncie,
American Photographs (exhibition)/Ameri- Indiana), ; reputation of, , ;
362 can Photographs (book) (Walker Evans), , working methods of, , , n.
; catalog, ; composition and See also You Have Seen Their Faces
sequence of, , n; FSA in, , photographs by: The Corkum Fam-
, , , ; Lincoln Kirstein, catalog ily Library, ; Floods Aftermath,
essay for, , , n; reviews ; Middletown series, ;
of, ; traveling version of, , Phelps Dodge Corporation series,
n Brady, Mathew: as exemplar, , , ; exhi-
American photography: standing of, , , bitions of, , , , ,
, , , Brassa (Gyula Halsz), ,
An American Place (gallery), , , , Bristol, Horace, , , , n
Brodovich, Alexey, ,
Armitage, Merle, , , n Bruehl, Anton, , , ,
art world, of photography: ambitions of, ,
; and audience, , , , , , Caldwell, Erskine, , , . See also You
, , , , , ; author- Have Seen Their Faces
ity in, , , , , , , , , California, isolation of, , n
, ; changes in, , , , , California and the West (Charis and Edward
, , ; composition of, , , , Weston), , ; autobiography in, ,
; and museums, , , , , ; collaboration in, , , ,
n; pedagogical activities of, , , ; decay in, ; and documentary,
, , , , , , n; lm industry in, ; and
Ashjian, Lucy, . See also Harlem Document history, ; human presence in, ;
Atget, Eugne, ; and Alfred Stieglitz, nature in, ; pastoralism in, ; as
; career of, ; as exemplar, , , , ; road book, , ; structure of, ,
exhibitions of, , , , , , , , ; text of, , , , ; themes
. See also Abbott, Berenice of, , , , , , ; as
audience, for photography, , , , , travel guide, , , ; and western
; and Ansel Adams, , , ; mythology, . See also Weston, Edward
esthetic judgments by, , , photographs in: Abandoned Soda
Works, Owens Lake, ; Albion, ;
Barr, Alfred, , , Charis, Lake Ediza, ; `Chief
Beaton, Cecil, , , Heggens Barn, Salinas, ; Cotton-
Becker, Howard, woods, Owens Valley, ; Death Val-
Blumenfeld, Erwin, , ley, ; Donner Lake, ; Elk,
books: photography, , , , . See ; Embarcadero, San Francisco, ;
also American Photographs; California and the Evening Cloud, Panamints, ; Ghost
West; Changing New York; Farm Security Set, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, ,
Administration, Historical Section (FSA); ; Graveyard, Rhyolite, Nevada, ;
Land of the Free; You Have Seen Their Faces Jerome, Arizona, ; Juniper, Lake
Bourdieu, Pierre, Tenaya (two photographs, titles identi-
Bourke-White, Margaret, , , , ; cal), , ; Leadeld, Death Valley,
articles about, , ; books by, , ; Old Bunk House, Twenty Mule Team
; and documentary, ; and drought, Canyon, ; Owens Valley, ;
; exhibitions by, , , , , , Rainbow, Owens Valley, ; Rhyolite,
, , , , n; industrial pho- Nevada (two photographs, titles identical),
Index
, ; Riverside County, n; Alwyn Court, ; Ferries, Foot of West
Rubber Dummies, Metro-Goldwyn- rd Street, ; Fifth Avenue, Nos. ,
Mayer, , ; Texas Spring Camp , , ; Flatiron Building, ;
Grounds, , , n Fortieth Street between Sixth and Sev-
Camera Craft, , , , enth Avenues, ; Fourth Avenue, No.
camera magazines (Popular Photography, U.S. , ; Gasoline Station, ;
Camera Magazine), , , , , George Washington Bridge, ; Grand
n; and art world, ; and audience, , Opera House, ; Henry Street,
; and documentary, , , , ; Hell Gate Bridge, ; Hot
; proles in, , . See also Dog Stand, ; Lebanon Restaurant,
history, photographic; U.S. Camera annuals ; Lyric Theater, ; McGraw-Hill
canon, formation of: and camera periodicals, Building, ; Manhattan Skyline, ;
; and MoMA, ; and A Pageant Newsstand, , ; Park Avenue
of Photography, and th Street, ; Roast Corn Man,
Carter, Michael, , . See also Harlem ; Rockefeller Center: from Madi-
Document son Avenue, ; Rockefeller Center with
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, , Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Fore-
celebrity photography, ; and Edward ground, , ; Rope Store,
Steichen, , Peerless Equipment Company, ; St.
Changing New York (Berenice Abbott), ; Lukes Church and Old Houses, ; St.
ambitions of, ; captions in, ; Marks Church with Skywriting, ;
churches in, ; communications indus- Shelter on the Waterfront, ; Snuff
tries in, ; cultural history in, , Shop, ; Talman Street, between Jay
, n; culture vs. civilization in, and Bridge Streets, ; Traveling Tin
; ethnicity in, ; Great Depression Shop, ; Tri-Boro Barber School,
in, ; methodological assumptions of, ; ; Union Square, ; Wall Street,
New Deal in, ; and romantic city, Showing East River, ; Warehouse,
; skyscrapers in, ; small business ; Washington Square, Looking North,
in, ; social isolation in, ; structure , ; Water Front: From Pier , East
of, ; transportation facilities in, . River, See also Abbott, Berenice
See also Abbott, Berenice The City (Lewis The City (Lewis Mumford, Ralph Steiner, and
Mumford, Ralph Steiner, and Willard Van Willard Van Dyke),
Dyke), Coronet , ; and American photography,
, photographs in: Bread Store, ; , , ; and European photogra-
Broadway to the Battery, ; Brooklyn phy, ; proles in,
Bridge, ; Brooklyn Bridge, with Corsini, Harold, , , , n. See
Pier , Pennsylvania R.R., ; Can- also Harlem Document
yon, Broadway and Exchange Place, ; Cowles, Gardner, Jr.,
Chicken Market, ; Civic Reper- Creative Art, , ,
tory Theater, ; Country Store Inte- criticism of photography, undeveloped state of,
rior, ; Court of the First Model , , , , , , n
Tenement in New York City, ; Cus- Crowninshield, Frank, , ,
tom House Statues and New York Produce Cunningham, Imogen, ; exhibitions by, ,
Exchange Building, ; `Daily News , , , , . See also Group f.
Building, ; De Peyster Statue, , Curtis, James, , ,
; Downtown Skyport, ; `El
Station Interior, Sixth and Ninth Avenue Dahl-Wolfe, Louise, , , , ,
Lines, Downtown Side, ; Faade, Delano, Jack: exhibition of, ; and Roy
Index
363
Stryker, , . See also Farm Security Stryker, , , . See also American
Administration, Historical Section (FSA) Photographs/American Photographs; Farm
Delphic Studios (gallery), , Security Administration, Historical Section
364 de Meyer, Adolphe, (FSA); Musuem of Modern Art (MoMA)
Denning, Michael, , n , photographs by: Filling Station,
Desjardin, Fiona M. Reedsville, West Virginia, ; Main
de Young Museum, ; and Group f., ; Street Architecture, Selma, Alabama,
one-person exhibitions at, exhibitions, , , , ; commercial spon-
display of photographs, collaborative nature sorship of, , , ; untradi-
of: in books, ; in exhibitions, ; in tional venues for, , , , . See also
periodicals, , , , , , American Photographs; First International
documentary photography, ; Atget and Photographic Exposition; Farm Security
Brady as models for, , , , , ; and Administration, Historical Section (FSA);
camera magazines, , , ; Group f.; Harlem Document; Harvard
and Coronet, ; critiques of, , Society for Contemporary Art; Hine, Lewis;
; denitional difculties with, Leica exhibitions; Museum of Modern Art
, n; esthetic tensions in, , (MoMA); A Pageant of Photography; Pho-
; exhibitions of, , , , , , , tography, ; Photo League; U.S.
; status of, , , , , Camera exhibitions
, , , ; and U.S. Camera annu- experimental photography: American indiffer-
als, , , , . See also Abbott, ence to, , , n, n; in exhibi-
Berenice; American Photographs/Ameri- tions, , , , , , , , ,
can Photographs; Bourke-White, Margaret; , ; painting as inspiration for, , ,
Changing New York; Evans, Walker; Farm , n; in periodicals, , , ,
Security Administration, Historical Section n, n; straight photography, con-
(FSA); Harlem Document; Hine, Lewis; trasted with, , , , , ,
McCausland, Elizabeth; Photo League; You
Have Seen Their Faces Farm Security Administration, Historical Sec-
tion (FSA), n; appraisals of, ,
Edwards, John Paul, , . See also Group f. , , , , n; and art world,
Elisofon, Eliot, , , , , , , , , ;
Engel, Morris, , , , n. See also autonomy of photographers in, ,
Harlem Document ; intra-agency conicts of, ,
ethnography, photographic, , , , , ; lab work of, ; mission
, n, n, n. See also of, , , , , ;
Bourke-White, Margaret; Harlem Docu- and MoMA, ; ownership of pic-
ment tures by, ; periodical appearances by,
European photography, modern, , ; in , , , n; public response
Coronet, , n; in exhibitions, to, ; and race and ethnicity, ,
, , , , , , , , , ; record and news (progress) photo-
. See also experimental photography graphs by, ; reputation of, ;
Evans, Walker, ; and Alfred Stieglitz, ; and skull shot controversy, ; staff of,
articles about, ; career of, ; and , n (see also Evans, Walker; Lange,
Edward Steichen, , , n; and Dorothea; Stryker, Roy)
Eugne Atget, ; exhibitions by, , , , , book publications by, , ,
, , , ; limited visibility of, , n, n (see also An American
, ; and photographic history, ; Exodus; American Guide Series; American
and Photo League, , n; and Roy Photographs; Land of the Free)
Index
, exhibitions of, , , , western subject matter of, , ; and
; Cleveland Museum of Art, , Willard Van Dyke, , ; withering of, ,
n; College Art Association, ; , . See also Adams, Ansel; Van Dyke,
Documents of America, , , Willard; Weston, Edward
n; First International Photographic
Exposition, , , , n; In Hambourg, Maria Morris,
the Image of America, , (see also Harkness, Norris,
American Photographs; Leica exhibitions; A Harlem Document (group and project): cred-
Pageant of Photography; U.S Camera exhi- its, photographic, , n; emphases
bitions) of, ; esthetic criteria of, ; exhi-
fashion photography, , , , bitions of, , , n; genesis
, ; and art world, ; conventions of, ; membership of, , n;
of, ; emphases of, ; goals of, , and Native Son, , , ; and
; magazines featuring, , , ; Photo League, ; procedures of,
modern art in, , n; types of, ; publications of, , , ;
First International Photographic Exposition text of, ; and viewers, ,
(exhibition), , , ; composition , photographs by: [A. Philip Randolph]
of, ; documentary in, , , ; (Siskind), ; [Elks parade] (Mendelsohn),
and photographic history, ; popularity ; [Five boys], , , ; Football
of, Players (Corsini), , n; [Mother
Flato, Charles, and child at kitchen table] (Siskind), ,
Fortune, , , , ; [Scrubwoman], ; [Store-front
Frissell, Toni, , church (Church singer)] (Siskind), , .
See also Siskind, Aaron
galleries, , , n; An American Harpers Bazaar. See fashion photography
Place, , , ; Ansel Adams Gallery, Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, ,
; Delphic Studios, ; Brock-
hurst, ; Julien Levy Gallery, Hendrickson, Paul,
Genthe, Arnold, Heyman, Therese Thau, ,
Gilpin, Laura, , n Hine, Lewis, ; discovery of, , ,
Gingrich, Arnold, , , ; exhibition of, ; obscurity of,
Glaha, Ben, , , , , ; and Photo League, , ;
Goldberg, Vicki, reputation of, ,
Golden Gate International Exposition (San historicist photography, ; and Berenice
Francisco Worlds Fair), . See also A Abbott, , , n; Edward
Pageant of Photography Weston, ; and Group f., ; and
Gray, Andrea, Walker Evans,
Grossman, Sid, , , , , , history, photographic, , , , ,
Group f.: achievement of, ; and Ansel ; and Ansel Adams, ; and Beau-
Adams, , , , , , ; and de Young mont Newhall, , , , ; and Ber-
Museum, ; and Dorothea Lange, ; enice Abbott, ; and camera magazines,
exhibitions of, , , , , n; , ; and Charles Flato, ; and Elizabeth
and Edward Weston, , , , ; found- McCausland, , ; and First Interna-
ing of, ; goals of, , , , , , tional Photographic Exposition, ; and
; insularity of, , , , ; manifesto Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, ;
of, ; membership of, , , ; and and Julien Levy Gallery, ; and Life, ,
pictorialists, , , , , ; pur- ; and Lincoln Kirstein, , ; and A
ism of, , ; reputation of, , ; Pageant of Photography, , ; and
Index
365
Photography, , , , , , photographs by: Dust bowl farmer
; and Photo League, ; and U.S. Camera who has migrated to California for a new
annuals, ; and Walker Evans, start, ; Mother and child of a Mis-
366 Holder, Preston, . See also Group f. souri family stopped by tire trouble on U.S.
Hopper, Edward, Highway , ; Plantation Owner,
Horst, Horst P., , , Clarksdale, Mississippi, . See also Farm
Hound and Horn, , Security Administration, Historical Section
Howe, Hartley, , (FSA)
Hoyningen-Huen, George, , , Lavenson, Alma, , . See also Group f.
Hughes, Robert, Lee, Russell, , ; exhibitions of, , ,
Hurley, F. Jack, . See also Farm Security Administration,
Historical Section (FSA)
industrial and engineering photography, , Leica exhibitions,
, , ; and Margaret Bourke-White, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and
, ; and MoMA photomurals exhi- Evans), , , , , , ,
bition, ,
Levine, Lawrence W., , ,
Jewell, Edwin Alden, , , Levy, Julien, ; and Alfred Stieglitz, ; and
Julien Levy Gallery, , Eugne Atget, ; and Great Ss, .
See also Julien Levy Gallery
Kanaga, Consuela, , , n Libsohn, Sol, ,
Kirstein, Lincoln, , , ; and Alfred Stieg- Life, , , ; and Berenice Abbott, ; and
litz, , ; and and contemporary pho- Edward Weston, ; and FSA, , ,
tographers, ; Edward Weston, ; and n; and history, photographic, , ; and
experimental photography, , n; and Margaret Bourke-White,
Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, , Locke, Edwin,
; and Hound and Horn, ; and Look, , ; and FSA, ; and Harlem
Matthew Brady, ; and MoMA, , Document, ,
; radio broadcast by, ; and Walker Lorenz, Pare, ,
Evans, , , , Lynd, Robert S., . See also Middletown: A
Kosofsky, Beatrice, . See also Harlem Docu- Study in Modern American Culture; Middle-
ment town in Transition: A Study in Cultural Con-
Krutch, Charles, , , , icts
Lynes, George Platt, , , , , n
Land of the Free (MacLeish), , ,,
; criticism of, ; photographs in, , MacLeish, Archibald, , ; and Land of
; reviews of, ; signicance of, the Free,
; text of, Maloney, Thomas J., , , , . See
landscape photography, ; and Ansel Adams, also camera magazines; U.S. Camera annuals
, , ; and Edward Weston, , Man Ray, , n; exhibitions of, , ,
, , , , ; and , , , ; and fashion photography,
Group f.,
Lange, Dorothea, , , ; and camera Marchand, Roland,
periodicals, ; exhibitions of, , , Marks, Robert W. See Coronet
, , , , , , , , McAlpin, David, , , ,
; and Group f., ; and Paul Strand, McBride, Henry, ,
; and Roy Stryker, , , , McCausland, Elizabeth, , , ; and
n, n Changing New York, , n; and docu-
Index
mentary, , ; and evaluations of exhi- , n; and MoMA, , , ,
bitions, , , ; and Lewis Hine, . See also Photography,
; and Paul Strand, , ; and Newhall, Nancy, ,
straight photography, New Masses, , ,
McManigal, J. W., , n New Mexico,
McMullen, Frances D., Noskowiak, Sonia, , , . See also Group
Meltzer, Milton, f.
Mendelsohn (Manning), Jack, , . See
also Harlem Document Outerbridge, Paul, , ; exhibitions by, ,
Middletown: A Study in Modern American Cul- ,
ture (Lynd and Lynd), , , ,
n. A Pageant of Photography (exhibition), ,
Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural , n; audience of, , ;
Conicts (Lynd and Lynd), , catalog of, , ; composition of, ;
Modotti, Tina, documentary in, ; exclusions from,
Moholy-Nagy, Lzl, , ; exhibitions of, ; experimental photography in, ;
, , , , , , , FSA in, ; history, photographic, in,
Morgan, Barbara, , , , n ; one-person and group exhibitions in,
Mortensen, William, , n. See also ; Photo League in, , ; Photo-
Adams, Ansel Secession in, , n; western
Mumford, Lewis, , , , emphasis of,
Munkcsi, Martin, , , , n; exhi- periodicals: artful photographs in, , , , ,
bition by, ; Coronet, , , ; Cre-
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), , ative Art, , n; Fortune, ,
, ; and Ansel Adams, , ; , ; Harpers Bazaar, , ;
and Beaumont Newhall, , , ; and Hound and Horn, ; Life, , ,, ,
David McAlpin, , , ; Depart- , , , , n; Look, ,
ment of Photography, , , , ; New Masses, ; New Mexico,
, n; photo-murals exhibition, ; New York Times Magazine, ,
; Sixty Photographs exhibition, , ; Scribners, , n; Survey
, n; traveling exhibitions, , , Graphic, ; Theater Arts Monthly, ; Van-
, , , , n; ity Fair, ; Vogue, , ; Westways,
Walker Evans, nineteenth-century architec- , . See also camera magazines;
ture exhibition, , . See also American Steichen, Edward; U.S. Camera annuals
Photographs/American Photographs; Farm Phillips, Christopher,
Security Administration, Historical Section Photography: A Short Critical History
(FSA); Photography, (Newhall), ,
Photography, (exhibition), ,
Nast, Cond, , , , ; advisory committee for, , n;
Nelson, Lusha, Beaumont Newhall as curator, , , ,
New Deal, as cultural patron, , , , , , ; catalog of, ; composition
n of, , ; contemporary photographers
Newhall, Beaumont, , ; and docu- in, ; documentary in, , ; experi-
mentary, , , , , , ; and FSA, mental photography in, , ; fashion
, ; formalism of, , , , photographers in, ; photographic his-
; and Group f., ; and history, tory in, , , , ; publicity for,
photographic, , , , ; and Lewis ; reviews of, , ; straight pho-
Hine, ; and Margaret Bourke-White, tography in, ; traveling versions of, .
Index
367
See also Newhall, Beaumont; Photography: , . See also Farm Security Adminis-
A Short Critical History tration, Historical Section (FSA)
Photo League, , , ; classes of, ; , photographs by: small-town Ohio,
368 exhibitions at, ; features emphasized,
, ; lectures at, ; and Lewis Sheeler, Charles, ; exhibitions of, , , ,
Hine, , ; membership of, ; , , ,
newsletter of, , ; origins of, Siskind, Aaron, , , , , ;
; political tendencies of, , , and documentary esthetics, ; Marthas
n; Walker Evans and, , n. See Vineyard project of, . See also Harlem
also Harlem Document; Siskind, Aaron Document
Photo-Secession, , , , n; exhibitions Smith, Henry Holmes,
of, , , , , , , . See also Snow, Carmel,
Stieglitz, Alfred Soby, James Thrall,
pictorialists. See Group f. Stackpole, Peter, , , , ,
Post, Marion Walcott, n: exhibitions of, Steichen, Edward, , ; and Alfred Stieg-
, litz, , , ; articles about, , ;
Prom, Sol, career of, ; consumer culture in work,
, , ; conventions of work,
The Rediscovery of America (Frank), , ; and documentary, , ;
Reed, Alma, , , exhibitions of, , , , , , ; and
regional and local particularities, photographs FSA, , , n; fashion photog-
emphasizing, ; and Edward Weston, raphy of, , , ; gender in work,
, , ; and FSA, ; , , , ; as impresario, ;
and Group f., , , , ; and leisure in, ; portraits of celebrities, ,
Margaret Bourke-White, , , ; portraits of artists and intellectuals,
; and Photo League, , , , ; portraits of athletes, ; portraits of
, celebrities, , ; portraits of entertainers,
Resettlement Administration. See Farm Secu- , , , ; portraits of minori-
rity Administration, Historical Section ties, , , ; portraits of opera
Rollins, Lloyd, , divas, ; portraits of politicians, ;
Roosevelt, Eleanor, reputation of, ; sitters for, ; and U.S.
Roosevelt, Franklin D., , , Camera annuals, , , , , ; and
Rosskam, Edwin, , U.S. Camera Magazine, , , , ;
Rothstein, Arthur, , : exhibitions of, visual style of, , ; and Walker Evans,
, , , , . See also Farm , n
Security Administration, Historical Section , photographs by: Amelia Earhart,
(FSA) ; Anna May Wong, , ; Diana
, photographs by: The Bleached Skull Wynard, ; Dorothy Stickney, ; Dr.
of a Steer, ; Cowhand with cat- Stephen S. Wise, ; Eleanor Holm, ;
tle, Three Circle Roundup. Custer Forest, Eugene ONeill, , ; Evelyn Brett,
Montana, ; Visalia migrants camp, , ; Evelyn Laye, ; Franklin D. Roos-
n evelt, ; George Washington Bridge, ,
, ; Grace Moore, ; Joan Bennett,
Seeing California with Edward Weston, , ; Joan Crawford, ; Leslie How-
n. See also Weston, Edward ard, ; Lilyan Tashmans Beach House,
Sekaer, J. Ingemann (Peter), , ; Lily Pons, ; Miriam Hopkins, ;
Seligmann, Herbert J., Olive Hatch, ; Paul Robeson, ,
Shahn, Ben, n; exhibitions of, , , ; Peggy Shannon, ; [Self-portrait],
Index
n; Tallulah Bankhead, ; travel photography, ; and Berenice Abbott,
Thomas Mann, ; Walter Winchell, , ; and Edward Weston,
; W. B. Yeats, . See also Vanity , , ; and fashion photogra-
Fair phy, ; and FSA,
Steiner, Ralph, , , , ; exhibitions of, Tugwell, Rexford, , ,
, , , , Twelve Million Black Voices (Wright), ,
Stieglitz, Alfred, , , , , n; and n
Ansel Adams, , ; articles about,
, ; and artistic photography, Ulmann, Doris, ,
n; and art world, , , , ; and
audience, , , , ; disestablishment U.S. Camera annuals, , , , , ,
of, , , , , , , , , , n; documentary in,
n; and Edward Steichen, , , ; , ; and Edward Steichen, , , ,
and Edward Weston, , , , , ; and Edward Weston, ; FSA
n; and Eugne Atget, ; as evangel, , , in, , , , n; fashion work in,
, , , ; exhibitions ; format of, , , , n; and
of, , , , , , , , ; Group f., ; and Harlem Document, ,
and MoMA, , , , ; and ; portfolios in, , , ; pref-
Photo-Secession, n; resentment of, , aces to, , , ; reviews of, ,
, n; as totem, , , , , . See also Maloney, Thomas J.
, U.S. Camera exhibitions, , ; and FSA,
Stott, William, , , , ,
Stoumen, Louis Clyde, ,
straight photography: dominance of, , Vachon, John, ,
Strand, Paul, , , , , , ; Van Der Zee, James,
and documentary, , , n; as Van Dyke, Willard, , , , , ;
inspiration for Ansel Adams and Dorothea and documentary, , ; exhibitions
Lange, ; exhibitions of, , , , , of, , ; and Brockhurst gallery, .
, See also Group f.
Stryker, Roy, , ; ambitions for FSA, Vanity Fair: artful photographs in, , n;
, , ; and art, , , , , and consumerism, , , , n;
n; and credits, , , ; editorial orientation of, , , ; format of,
and documentary, , , n; . See also Steichen, Edward
and Dorothea Lange, , , n, Van Vechten, Carl, ,
n; editing by, , n; impresario , photographs by: Anna May Wong,
activities of, , , , ; ; Eugene ONeill, ; Paul Robe-
and relations with FSA staff, ; repu- son, ; Tallulah Bankhead, ;
tation of, , ; shooting scripts by, Thomas Mann,
; and Walker Evans, , , Vogue. See fashion photography
, . See also Farm Security Adminis-
tration, Historical Section (FSA) Welty, Eudora, n
Survey Graphic, , , , n Weston, Brett (son of Edward), ; exhibitions
Susman, Warren I., , of, , , . See also Group f.
Swank, Luke, , Weston, Charis Wilson (wife of Edward), ,
Swift, Henry. See Group f. , , ; Edward Weston por-
trait of, . See also California and the
Thompson, Dorothy, West
Trachtenberg, Alan, , , Weston, Edward, , , , n; and
Index
369
Alfred Stieglitz, , , n; Williams, William Carlos,
articles about, , ; and audience, , Wilson, Edmund,
, , , ; books by, , , Works Progress Administration/Federal Art
370 n; career of, , ; cul- Project, , , n. See also Abbott,
tural ambitions of, , , , , Berenice
, ; exhibitions of, , , , , Worlds Fair, San Francisco. See Golden Gate
, , , , , , , , , International Exposition
, , n; and Group f., , ,
, ; Guggenheim Fellowship of, , Yochelson, Bonnie,
, , n; as hero of perception, You Have Seen Their Faces (Bourke-White and
, , , , ; open land- Caldwell): captions in, , ; photo-
scapes of, ; periodical publications by, , graphs in, , ; reputation of,
; resentment of East, ; reviews of, , , ; reviews of, , ,
, n; on western vitality, , . See n. See also Bourke-White, Margaret
also California and the West; Group f.
Westways, , . See also Seeing Califor-
nia with Edward Weston
Index
John Raeburn is professor of American studies and English at
the University of Iowa, where he has chaired both departments.
He is the coeditor of Frank Capra: The Man and His Films and
author of Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer.
The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
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A Staggering Revolution

University of Illinois Press

by the Board of Trustees

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Irene Wiest Raeburn

. The Rebirth of Photography in the Thirties

1930 Fortune begins publication

1931 Julien Levy establishes a New York gallery to feature photography

1933 Lloyd Rollins dismissed as director of the San Francisco museums

1935 Lincoln Kirsteins national broadcast on the history of photography

1937 Photography, exhibition, MoMA and traveling venues

1938 Land of the Free by Archibald MacLeish

1939 Changing New York by Abbott, with captions by Elizabeth McCausland

1940 Lange laid off by the FSA

A Calendar of Thirties Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Complicated, Inter-related Aspects of

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

The Rebirth of Photography

Exemplars in American Photography

Reinventing Photographys History

Group f.64 and California Photography

Evangelizing Pure Photography

Group f.64 and California Photography

A New Art in a New Land

Group f.64 and California Photography

Group f.64 and California Photography

The Public Response to Fine Photography

Group f.64 and California Photography

Group f.64 and California Photography

Group f.64 and California Photography

The California Group

Group f.64 and California Photography

Group f.64 and California Photography

A Still More Photographic Future

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

The Things People Talk about at Parties

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

The Departments of Life

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

Carl Van Vechten and Celebrity Photography

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

Steichen and Celebrity Photography

MoMas Big Top Show

MoMas Big Top Show

MoMas Big Top Show

MoMas Big Top Show

MoMas Big Top Show

MoMas Big Top Show

A Real American Native Art

Documentary and Canon Formation

The Audience Speaks

Berenice Abbotts New York