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Reviews in American History 33.4 (2005) 574-580



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New Deal Secularists and Images of Religion

Colleen McDannell. Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 336 pp. 128 black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

One of the great edifices built by the New Deal was the photographic documentation of American farm life created by the Farm Security Administration. The project left us some 272,000 photographs, now in the Library of Congress, an historical monument to the rural depression and a visual encyclopedia of American rural life. Its value is surely comparable to that of the bridges, dams, canals, airports, schools, and playgrounds built in that period. Its value seems greater than ever now that the devaluation of the common good has so impoverished our public sector.

Scholars and photography lovers have celebrated and analyzed the FSA photographic collection in hundreds of books and articles in the sixty-odd years since it ended, but now Colleen McDannell offers proof of how much can still be learned from this national treasure. I have been working intensively with these photos for several years and yet I could not have predicted how much she could reveal that was new: both in what she garnered about religious faith from the collection, and in what her focus on religion reveals about the perspective of the FSA photographers. At a time when the United States is experiencing another "great awakening," her book—profusely illustrated and beautifully produced by Yale University Press—reminds us of the multivalent pull of religion for so many Americans, but also how unlikely that it would have been predicted in the 1930s.

A review of this book might answer, it seems to me, two questions: What do we learn about the FSA project in particular and New Deal political culture in general by examining these pictures from a religious perspective? And what do we learn about American religiosity from these photographs? Lacking expertise on U.S. religious history, I will be able to answer the first better than the second. Moreover, to address either question, I will have to violate one of the imperatives often directed to reviewers, by discussing what is missing as well as what is present in the book. I justify that violation in part because McDannell does it so well herself, and in part because some of her [End Page 574] omissions produce misrepresentations, or at best a "spin" that is open to skepticism.

McDannell construes her topic broadly. She offers chapters on vernacular church architecture, New Mexican Catholics, Connecticut Jewish farmers, African American churches both southern/rural and northern/urban, and white churches both evangelical and mainstream. Because she is studying photographs, she pictures faith as a social construction whether she looks at buildings, worship services, or community suppers. And she is a meticulous scholar of visual evidence, using the best scholarship and providing close, magnifying-glass readings of detail in photographs, extracting much information from them. About one Russell Lee photograph of prayers at All Nations Pentecostal Church in Chicago, for example, McDannell points out:

these African Americans put coat hangers on the wall behind the pulpit and left a hat in front of one of the wooden churches. A moneybox, a collection basket, and a clock sit on the table. . . . Both the table and piano top are covered with decorative cloths. Just as their services are filled with debate, music, and dance, the congregation's visual space is packed with evocative images. There is no clear-cut division between sacred and profane, cross and coat hanger. Protestant African Americans used images in ways similar to Catholics in Texas and New Mexico . . . [and] engaged the religious imagination by creating a complicated visual environment that blended the supernatural and the natural.
(p. 240)

She is particularly attentive to gender and to absences as well as presences. She notices that religious prints in homes tend to feminize space, and notes that she found only one photograph showing a man alone, without women and children, with such religious objects...

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