Photography

Between 1929 and 1945, photography became increasingly important in art (see ART AND architecture), social reform, popular culture, and even military operations.

By the onset of the Great Depression, photography had become an effective agent of reform as well as an established form of art. The efforts of such photographers as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen had enabled photography to gain acceptance as an art form, while others had followed the lead of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine in pursuing documentary photography on behalf of social reform.

In the early 1930s, the nature-oriented Western school of photographers further developed the place of photography in the art community. Led by Edward Weston, members of this school abandoned soft-focus effects for a sharper, more detailed study of nature. Guided by this principle, Weston went on to help establish the f.64 Group in 1932. This group derived its name and artistic objectives from the smallest f-stop on the camera, which allowed for the maximum sharpness necessary for landscape photography. The most accomplished member of the Western school and the f.64 Group was the famous photographer Ansel Adams.

Although photography was not included in the Federal Art Project of the New Deal, it did find an important place in the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Recognizing the power of photography in the cause of reform, FSA director Roy Stryker undertook an effort to create a photographic record of the dreadful conditions of farmers and migratory laborers who faced economic disaster brought on by the depression and the dust bowl. FSA photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, created some 270,000 negatives during this project. Lange (coauthor of An American Exodus with Paul S. Taylor, 1939) devoted much attention to migrant workers, while Evans (coauthor of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with James Agee, 1941), spent two years with the FSA following the plight of sharecroppers. When the Farm Security Agency was terminated during World War II, its photographic section was transferred to the Oeeice of War Ineormation (OWI).

In 1936, the introduction of Life and Look magazines established a popular outlet for the new genre of photojournalism, which combined photographers with researchers, writers, and editors. Photographers were briefed for their assignments and encouraged to take great quantities of photographs, so that the editors could develop a picture story with maximum impact on readers. Life’s W. Eugene Smith and Margaret Bourke-White quickly became recognized as top photojournalists for their ability to depict the drama of events while maintaining perfect composition. Photojournalism also produced one of the most memorable images of World War II, when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took his Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of U. S. Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in 1945.

During the war, OWI photographers sought to portray American life and culture to inspire patriotism as well as to document social change for Aerican Americans, women, and other groups. Also responsible for coordinating the release of war news for domestic use, OWI controlled images produced by combat cameramen, who served on the battlefronts and whose work was essential to the historical record of the war. OWI wanted the photographs used to bolster home-front morale and to maintain popular approval for the America war effort, so images of American casualties and other photographs deemed inappropriate for release were kept at the Pentagon in a file known as the “Chamber of Horrors.” By September 1943, concerned with public complacency as the war turned in favor of the Allies, the government released the first images of dead Americans and thereafter presented increasingly more graphic depictions in order to maintain the support needed for victory. Even so, Life did not show photographs of American blood being shed until 1945.

Photography also took on new roles for the military as it served as a primary source of intelligence during World War II. In the two years following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, U. S. airmen mapped some 21 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface. General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the U. S. Army Air Forces, declared that “a camera mounted on a P-38 often has proved more valuable than a P-38 with guns.” The role of photography was especially evident in preparations for the invasion oe Normandy, which relied on vital intelligence gathered from more than 4,500 photographic reconnaissance sorties. Photography thus served a variety of purposes in the era of the Great Depression and World War II.

Further reading: James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); Pete Daniel, et al., Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987); Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939); George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989).

—Ronald G. Simon