Familiar and Foreign Bodies in 1930s Photographs of the South

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the South and its people were magnets for creative intellectuals from outside the region. As the North Carolina journalist Jonathan Daniels reflected, “almost as many visitors want to see a tenant farmer as to behold an azalea” (598). The Federal Government was the source of much of this interest because it supplemented its economic and social programs with aggressive publicity intended to convince taxpaying Americans to support programs on behalf of groups—blacks, poor whites, small farmers—whose cultural status was as blighted as their living conditions. For the New Deal, the South was a stage and a setting for cultural recuperation as well as material rehabilitation.¹

Over 13,000 photographs were taken of the South and its citizens between 1935 and 1942 by the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. Directed by Roy E. Stryker, over twenty photographers worked in the South, including luminaries such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn. For many of them, the South—like the entire American heartland— was terra incognita. Most of Stryker’s photographers lived and worked in the metropolitan centers of the east and west coasts of the United States. Boston-born Carl Mydans commented, “I lived in an isolated world. Vaguely there was a great river called the Hudson, and a great bit of land at the other side of the Hudson, but I knew very little about it.” Government employment not only broadened the photographers’ horizons, it fired their imaginations. For photographers who lived and worked in environments of mass and motor, in the shadows of the recently constructed Rockefeller Center and Empire State Building, the state of Mississippi and the southern region of which it was a part were foreign places.

Photographers were intrigued by the simplicity, personalism, and strength of community that they encountered south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The pre-modern character of the South and the poverty of many of its people made the region even more intriguing. To the photographers, suffering and hardship became prerequisites of character. Jack Delano reflected that “[T]he toil and drudgery and the constant battle for survival do bestow a kind of beauty on the human face and figure to which artists have always been sensitive” (Day 126). Ben Shahn recalled finding people “a constant pleasure” during the 1930s, especially “the poor who were rich in spirit” and who maintained “a transcendent indifference to their lot in life” (134). Reproduced in the national media, images of the South’s poor not only reflected the New Deal’s determination to undertake remedial action, but they also affirmed more positive values. As cultural symbols, “the common man/woman” in the South served as icons of New Deal populism. Embodying qualities of nobility and fortitude, the so-called “cult of the people” symbolized the New Deal’s liberal politics, registered its efforts to “democratize” American politics and culture, and also signified a national yearning for stability and consensus in a turbulent era.

As national icons, the South’s underprivileged appeared in the press under sensational banner headlines such as “Poverty’s Pioneers” and “Uncensored Views of Sharecroppers’ Misery.” However, their foreignness also allowed the southern poor to be rendered as picturesque rather than problematic. In an era when regionalist painting was so influential, it should not be surprising that the FSA’s work was often construed as a celluloid equivalent of the fine art perspectives of Grant Wood, John Stewart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton. Consequently, the Appalachian poor, photographed by Arthur Rothstein in 1935, became objects of rustic charm in local color features entitled “Out in the Country” or “Along the Highway.” While symbolizing a vanishing, idiosyncratic America, these photographs also represented cultural continuity and the nation’s heritage. They were, according to the Washington Post, “100% quaint as well as 100% American” (Kidd). By the end of the decade, through constant media recognition and reinvention, the South’s poor had become familiarized to the point where they had become a part of the rich mosaic of American life in the era of liberal politics and...