For the photographers who worked for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and ’40s, life was never easy. Charged with traveling around the country and documenting poverty and the New Deal policies being implemented to ameliorate it, they spent months every year on the road, staying in cheap hotels, eating bad food, spending evenings writing captions for the photographs they’d taken. During the day, they had to contend with the suspicion many people harbored toward outsiders–especially those with cameras.
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The few women in the ranks had a particularly difficult time of it. They had to decide whether it was all right to wear slacks on duty, for example (in Florida it was, they found, but not in rural Tennessee). In January 1939, the photographer Marion Post Wolcott, assigned to photograph vegetable pickers in Florida, wrote to FSA director Roy Stryker. “I just wish you had been along with me for just part of a day looking for something, particularly with POCKETS,” she wrote. “Let us assume that we agree on the premise that all photographers need pockets–badly–+ that female photographers look slightly conspicuous + strange with too many film pack magazines + rolls + synchronizers stuffed in their shirt fronts, + that too many filters + what nots held between the teeth prevent one from asking many necessary questions. Now–this article of clothing, with large pockets, must also be cool, washable if possible, not too light or bright a color. Try + find it!”
The photographer also documented segregation. Some of her work is about the hardscrabble lives of black Mississippi cotton pickers and the seamy juke joints of rural Florida. One of her most famous photos shows a black man ascending an outdoor stairway to the “colored” entrance to a movie theater–the sort of scene that was so commonplace in the 30s and 40s that some people wondered why it was worth photographing. Now it is a piece of history, and a vindication of the lasting value of documentary photography.
