History of Photography — Module 09: Documentary Photography, the FSA, and World War II

By the 1930s photography had split into several distinct professional disciplines, each with its own standards, audiences, and practitioners. Documentary was one. Fashion was another. The distinction mattered because it shaped what photographers were asked to do, who paid them, and what the image was ultimately for. Walker Evans had no patience for the commercial and fashion photography of Steichen, whom he described as having a special feeling for parvenu elegance and a hardness that was the hardness of America's latter day. Evans was not simply expressing an aesthetic preference. He was drawing a professional and moral line. On one side stood photography as truth-telling. On the other stood photography as persuasion. What Evans was really objecting to was the pretense that any photograph was neutral. Steichen was simply honest about his intentions. What the decade demonstrated, exhaustively, was that the line between truth and persuasion was harder to hold than anyone wanted to admit.

The Farm Security Administration was the largest and most organized documentary project in American history. Roy Stryker supervised roughly twenty photographers, drafted shooting scripts, controlled what reached the press, and described the entire operation as publicity rather than propaganda, a distinction that required some confidence to maintain. The photographs that came out of the F.S.A. were real. The people in them were real. The suffering was real. But the images were selected, captioned, sequenced, and distributed by an agency with a specific political mission, which was to build public support for New Deal relief programs. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother became the national icon of the Depression not simply because it was a powerful photograph, which it was, but because the F.S.A. repeatedly sent it to newspapers and magazines, and Lange herself had a retoucher airbrush out what she considered a flaw. Arthur Rothstein moved a steer skull across parched soil to improve its relationship with the frame and was accused of fakery. The accusation landed because by then documentary photography had built its authority on the claim that it recorded things as they were.

Walker Evans understood the tension more clearly than almost anyone, and his solution was to remove himself from it as far as possible. He composed his images with formal deliberation that he compared to the prose style of Hemingway: spare, rhythmic, without apparent commentary. He published them without captions and out of chronological order, demanding that the viewer bring their own interpretation. He was fired from the F.S.A. in 1937 for disregarding Stryker's assignment guidelines. He spent the rest of his career writing for Fortune magazine, a publication devoted to big business, which did not seem to bother him the way Steichen's fashion work bothered him. Lange continued her social justice work with equal conviction and was equally selective about her images. The difference between them was temperament, not method.

Meanwhile, on the other side of Evans's moral line, fashion photography was consolidating into a real commercial discipline with its own logic and demands. The illustrated magazines that had expanded so rapidly in the 1920s were now the primary platform for fashion imagery. Life launched in 1936 with a Bourke-White photograph on the cover. Vogue and Harper's Bazaar maintained the Modernist visual vocabulary that Hoyningen-Huene and Horst had developed in the previous decade. The fashion photograph existed in a different relationship to truth than the documentary photograph, and it made no apology for that difference. Its job was not to record but to construct. The garment, the model, the light, the background, the pose were all chosen. The image was built. What made it work was the quality of the decisions behind the construction, not the pretense that the construction had not happened. The fashion photograph demanded everything documentary claimed to value — observation, light, decisive composition, an understanding of the subject — and added a layer of creative direction that documentary photographers exercised without acknowledging it.

The war complicated everything. Photographers who had been working in fashion and celebrity portraiture found themselves in combat zones. Lee Miller, who had been Man Ray's studio assistant and had developed solarization as a darkroom technique, became an accredited war correspondent and sent unsparing photographs from Buchenwald and Dachau. Bourke-White flew combat missions and documented concentration camps. Robert Capa's images from the Normandy landings were blurred because a darkroom aide used too much heat and partially melted the film, and those damaged frames became some of the most powerful images of the war, the blur reading as urgency rather than technical failure. Edward Steichen, who had moved from Pictorialism to fashion photography to advertising to fine art, spent the war commanding the Navy's photographic unit. That a single photographer could move fluently from Pictorialism to fashion to combat documentation was not a contradiction. It was evidence that the disciplines shared more than either side admitted.

What the war ultimately demonstrated was that photography's authority, which documentary photographers had worked hard to establish, was subject to the same pressures as every other form of representation. Capa's Death of a Loyalist Soldier was disputed almost immediately and has been disputed ever since. Rosenthal's Iwo Jima flag raising was the second raising, replacing a flag too small to see from the beach. The photograph was real in the sense that what it showed had happened. It was constructed in the sense that Rosenthal had positioned himself deliberately and Khaldei, photographing the Soviet flag over the Reichstag a few months later, openly staged his version of the same image with a flag his uncle had sewn from red tablecloths. Neither photograph was lying. Both were making pictures rather than recording them. By the end of the war, the distinction between the photograph as document and the photograph as construction had not been resolved. It had simply become more difficult to pretend it did not exist.