PICTURING TEXAS

The FSA-OWI Photographers in the Lone Star State, 1935-1943

by Robert L. Reid

Russell Lee visited Texas for the first time in 1939. Employed as a photographer for the federal government, his job was taking pictures. Lee and his colleagues, known to history as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers, documented the dramatic challenges the American people faced during the Great Depression and World War II. When Lee wrote to Roy Stryker, his boss in Washington, D.C., he used words familiar to Texans to describe the challenge he faced: "There is going to be plenty to do in this state as it is so damned big and diverse."¹

The FSA photography project began in 1935 with Stryker's appointment to administer the Historical Section of the Information Division. Ostensibly, the section was to document the work of a new federal agency, the Resettlement Administration (RA). The photographers, however, believed they should do more; for them it was an opportunity to tell the story of American economic and social life. Following Pearl Harbor, the FSA was absorbed into a new agency, the Office of War Information (OWI). The FSA-OWI photographers took more than 270,000 pictures between 1935 and 1943; their work is the legacy of the "most monumental" photography project ever conceived.

Stryker viewed his subject matter as "the vast number of people whose lives are ordinarily unrecorded." Fundamentally, the camera was a research tool to document the everyday activities of ordinary Americans. He was alert to the complex relationships among the farm, the town, and the city in an increasingly urbanized society, and his project reflected this economic and cultural understanding. The project became, in the words of photographer Jack Delano, "a search for the heart of the American people."

Lee was correct about Texas; he and his colleagues found "plenty to do" taking more than five thousand pictures, more than in any other state. Capturing the state's size and diversity, the photographs not only depict the poverty and anguish of the depression years; they also provide us with a rich, varied, and compelling record of Texas life in a time of domestic crisis and international challenge. The remarkable diversity of Texas kept the photographers busy. They covered the state broadly, filming Texans at work and at play, in fields and factories, in churches and schools, in resettlement projects and migrant labor camps.

Besides Lee, four of the eleven major FSA-OWI photographers took pictures in Texas--Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, Jack Delano, and Dorothea Lange--but Lee spent more time in the field and took more photographs than any other. Patient and sensitive, he went inside homes to photograph the way people lived, preserving the essential dignity of his subjects despite their desperate conditions. With his wife Jean, Lee traveled across the state taking pictures of migrant workers in the Rio Grande Valley and the Winter Garden district, pecan shellers in San Antonio, oil field workers in Kilgore, cowboys at Spur and Marfa, and West Texans at the San Angelo fat stock show. Among the very best are the pictures depicting the people of San Augustine, and among Lee's most significant contributions was his coverage of Mexican Americans.

John Vachon and Arthur Rothstein extended Lee's coverage, and Vachon also depicted the massive oil industry, including women's contributions to the labor force. Rothstein focused on the contributions of Mexican Americans to the war effort,² as well as covering roadside developments between Dallas and Fort Worth. Jack Delano's work featured much of the railroad industry.

Stryker said that of all his photographers Dorothea Lange "had the most sensitivity and the most rapport with people."³ Most compelling are her images of people: these included the gaunt figure of the wife of a migrant laborer near Childress, a family wheeling their belongings along the highway near Memphis, and six former tenant farmers in Hardeman County who had been displaced by tractors.

From 1936 to 1943 these photographers built a rich pictorial collection in Texas during these critical years, particularly in unforgettable images of the twin blows of drought and depression. The Great Depression hit all states, including Texas, hard. The price of virtually all produce declined drastically, and drought conditions in the western part of the state only worsened the rural situation. Unemployment soared in the early 1930s.

As the nation moved from depression toward war, however, the pictures were becoming more celebratory, even patriotic. To Stryker's critics, this is evidence of political manipulation. But the shift corresponds with what was taking place in America. By the late 1930s, economic indicators were encouraging, and the war brought a startling transformation. Westerners now had visions of unlimited growth and expansion, and a newly diversified economy was booming. The West emerged from the war as a pathbreaking self-sufficient region with unbounded optimism.⁴ War contracts and facilities were indicators of the economic boom but so, too, were the facts that unemployment virtually ended and the urban population soared. As a group, Mexican Americans grew the fastest, rivaling the African American population and pointing toward a future when no one ethnic group would constitute the majority in Texas. The FSA images reflect this transformation.

The changing nature of the file reflects Stryker's documentary approach, in which the camera is a tool to immortalize "the commonplace lives of ordinary people" and build a historical record for future generations.⁵ The enormous quantity of images coupled with their artistic quality help explain the many interpretations of the project's legacy. Historian Lawrence Levine concludes that the images can be viewed as cultural icons which relied on paired qualities such as "suffering and dignity and helplessness and self-reliance." This inherent ambiguity tells us much about both "the people who created" the photographs and "the people for whom they were created."⁶ A major strength of these works is their portrayal of the complex regional, ethnic, and cultural diversity of America. With its great size and complexity, Texas epitomizes this diversity.

While other government agencies employed photographers, none displayed the breadth of vision or the artistic quality of those who worked for Roy Stryker. With its commitment to provide future generations with a photographic record of the era, the Historical Section transcended the hardship and poverty of the depression years. The photographers captured the desperation of the times, but given the choice between portraying dignity and despair, Stryker and those who took the pictures chose dignity. Perhaps Jean Lee said it best: "There was tremendous pride and tremendous courage. We found it everywhere."⁷ The photographs taken in Texas bear out the truth of that statement.

¹Russell Lee to Roy Stryker, [Jan.,] 1939, Roy E. Stryker Collection (University of Louisville Photographic Archives, Louisville, Kentucky).

²David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 191. Other ethnic groups photographed for propaganda purposes included Swedes in Minnesota; Greeks, Poles, and Russians in Pennsylvania; and Portuguese fishermen in Rhode Island. Jack Delano discusses his work on such assignments on Puerto Rico Mio: Four Decades of Change (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1990), 25.

³Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphics Society, 1973), 13.

⁴Owen B. White, Texas, an Informal Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1945), 260.

⁵Stryker, "Documentary Photography," IV, 1968.

⁶Lawrence W. Levine, "The Historian and the Icon," in Fleischhauer and Brannan (eds.), Documenting America, 36-37. The vast literature on the FSA project is surveyed in Penelope Dixon, Photographers of the Farm Security Administration: An Annotated Bibliography, 1930-1980 (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1983).

⁷Russell and Jean Lee to Doud (interview), transcript, p. 30, Archives of American Art, in Daniel et al., (eds), Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987).

Robert L. Reid is professor of history and vice-president for academic affairs at the University of Southern Indiana. His article was adapted for The Texas Journal from the introduction of Picturing Texas.