The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography by Nicholas Natanson (review)

BookReviews 261 tion. Malcolm's militancy and "black consciousness" had been hallmarks of the strugglesince slavery times. King's nonviolent survivaliststrategy was equally rooted inslavery.Both strategies represented two complementary levels of response to the dark and ugly realities of slavery, and had become integral to the struggle ever since.To borrow Harding's expressions, Cone presents "authentically human" characterswho remain significant "sign posts" for all those engaged in the struggle for suIVivaland self-determination (see Thomas Harding, Hope and History [Orbis, 1991]). TundeAdeleke Loyola University •••••• Nicholas Natanson. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Pp.xii + 305. The photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), operating between 1935and 1943to record the rural rehabilitation efforts of its parent agency, isprimarilyremembered for its arresting documentation of white poverty and resilience . Nicholas Natanson, however, uncovers a sizeable volume of FSA images representingDepression conditions and New Deal measures for African Americans: ten percent of the filed photographs (about 6,000 prints), a fraction roughly proportionate to the African-American presence in the American population of the period. In Natanson's handling, this substantial "Black file" trails with it fascinating storiesand compelling lessons about race relations and the making of cultural meaning , as well as raising challenging questions about the FSA's effectiveness as an agent in the formation of public consciousness. Natanson situates the "Black file" quantitatively, comparatively, and analytically. Chartingthe volume of photographs, their geographical and temporal spread, and their range of subjects enables him to weigh up ambiguous agency conditions. On the one hand, racism was not unknown in the FSA; Roy Stryker, progressive and visionarydirector of the photographic section, did not giveAfrican-American topics priority,partly because of his sensitivity to public relations; white photographers vastlyoutnumbered African Americans in the section; and the prints which survive failto confront the farther reaches of terrorism and systemic injustice against AfricanAmericans . That said, it is a statistical fact that the FSA unit recorded African- 262 CanadianReviewof American Studies American subject matter more frequently and with more diversity than any other institution. The force and originality of some of these images are established by comparison with a vast range of African-American representations by other government agencies , newspapers, and private photographers of the period. The FSA's particular contribution emerges in complex form: in the series shot by the white Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee and the African-American Gordon Parks, Natanson reads the avoidance of degrading stereotypes and various attempts to suggest "multiple layers of cultural identity." These photographs represent rural African Americans in a spectrum of roles-not only pickers, but checkers, weighers, and taggers in the cotton fields; pathetic victims, but also spirited activists and quietly composed workers in the Missouri sharecropper demonstration-and often facilitate a measure of self-presentation and self-definition in their subjects, portraying a variety of dress and choosing camera angles "respectful of human dignity." Certain biracial compositions also suggest the complications, complicities, and tensions in African American-white relations. The final impression is that material destitution does not necessarily erase human individuality nor cultural depth. Having teased out the layers of meaning in the photographs' original series context , Natanson considers what happened when the filewas put to work in the public arena, through the incorporation of selected photographs in FSA exhibits, newspaper stories, and more than a dozen books, from Archibald MacLeish's Land of the Free (1938)to Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam's12 Million Black Voices (1941). The "Black file" received very limited exposure in public exhibits; the few images selected were subject to vigorous cropping, captioning and, on at least one occasion, retouching, mainly by Rosskam, who was named ''visual information specialist" by Stryker. Editing seems to have been calibrated to each region's cultural nonns (few African-American tenants were included in southern exhibitions; biracial images-especiallythose juxtaposing African-American men and white women-were treated gingerly).As exhibits retreated to more familiar typifications of African Americans as heroes or victims, the particular agency and individuality of African-American subjectswere often erased. In charting this process with immense care and research, Natanson points to a key...