Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (review)

In this significant book, Cara Finnegan approaches an old question from a new point of view. Where other scholars of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) identify their disciplines as art history, agricultural history, or American studies, Finnegan is a student of rhetoric and views the photographs made by the FSA "not as art or propaganda but as circulating images" (p. xi).

Finnegan is a good writer and a talented historian who informs her discussion with much new primary research. She presents the FSA archive as a historical institution created by Rexford Guy Tugwell and led by Roy Stryker, who hired photographers to make images designed to generate support for the New Deal. Her emphasis is on an important and long-understudied aspect of the FSA's influence: the articles using FSA images that appeared in major periodicals such as Survey Graphic, U.S. Camera Annual, and Look. She provides a thorough summary of the history and staffing of each magazine and illuminates Stryker's relationships to the editors, publishers, and writers, often quoting from his own correspondence, oral-history interviews with photographers, and other archival collections. From this foundation, she moves to illustrated articles that appeared in print, calling attention to the often tenuous ties among images, text, and captions. When comparing the images that appear in each magazine to the originals in the FSA file, she found changes in composition and tone that altered meaning. The FSA images worked to foster old-fashioned progressive ideology in Survey Graphic, for example, and to support claims in U.S. Camera Annual about photography as a modernist art.

Finnegan is also one of the first scholars to discuss the distinctive editorial view of Look. Less well-known today than its competitor Life, Look differed in significant ways. It concentrated on features rather than breaking news, welcomed controversy, endorsed Democrats, and took a strong populist stance. It also published many more FSA photographs between 1937 and 1939—dozens of them compared to only three that appeared in Life, even though Stryker consistently tried to place FSA images in Life and even advised photographers to work in a Life-oriented style. Finnegan's comparison sheds new light on both magazines.

As a historian of photography (not a rhetorician) I was disappointed to find so little attention paid to the rhetoric of documentary photography itself, which drew on such diverse sources as film, fiction, stage and radio drama, anthropology, and folklore. (Surely William Stott's excellent Documentary Expression and Thirties America [1973] could be brought up to date.) Another problem is that the title does not quite fit. We go through much fascinating material on the FSA, Tugwell, Stryker, the federal bureaucracy, the magazines, and the editors before we arrive at any extended discussion of the subject matter in the photographs, which are images of poverty. When Finnegan does get to the images as used in articles, she draws on slender evidence gleaned from readings of those images to support very large generalizations about the clash between the ideology that informs the FSA images and the way these images function in the publications. There are two problems here: even if she is right, she considers far too little evidence; and more seriously, her reading of the images is too heavy-handed, suggesting that she reached her conclusions before beginning her analysis.

In the end, this book is interesting if incomplete. A true history of the FSA images used in magazines would have considered a much larger timeframe and taken on subjects aside from poverty. A more considered examination of pictures of poverty would have considered pictorial sources other than the FSA. But in opening the door to future investigations and providing a new analytic approach, Finnegan has made an undeniably important contribution to scholarship.