In 1943 Daniel Senise was a $53-a-week conductor on the Illinois Harbor Belt Railroad. In February of that year he was approached in the Blue Island switching yard by a young man. I work for the government, said the man, and I want to take your picture. “I told him exactly what I was doing,” recalls Jack Delano, the photographer, “and what it was for, and asked him if I could go to his house and photograph his family and so on. He said, ‘Sure, that would be OK.’” The rest, as they say, was history.
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“Imagine a young guy having passes and clearance–from the War Department, the FBI, the Secret Service, and just about anybody you could think of–to get on and off trains anywhere he wanted to, with the power even to stop the train if I wanted to take a picture. It was just a wonderful assignment,” says Delano, who now lives in Puerto Rico, a place he discovered in 1941 when he was sent there to photograph farming conditions.
That was familiar turf for Delano, who had begun working for OWI when that agency took over the photography department of the Farm Security Administration in 1942. Under the benevolent direction of a tough-talking Columbia University professor named Roy Stryker, the FSA’s photography division acted as the conscience of the New Deal, documenting American poverty and hope and despair from the Dust Bowl years of the mid-1930s to the beginning of World War II. Some of the FSA photographs have become icons, the sort of images that come to mind automatically when we think of the depression: Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” Arthur Rothstein’s view of a father and two small sons trudging through an Oklahoma dust storm.
The FSA/OWI photos were seen: many were published in books, brochures, and magazine and newspaper stories. “I thought that I was providing material for people to use sometime in the future in all sorts of ways,” says Delano’ “And we were looking toward publication. We weren’t thinking about photographs as works of art to be shown in museums and sold for a lot of money, as seems to be the trend today. If some of them turned out to be great works of art that was fine, but that wasnt the object.”
