A Modern FSA?

Los Angeles, April 2009 - It would be easy to dismiss the latest group of efforts by various organizations and enterprising individuals to organize a modern day Farm Securities Administration (FSA) documentary project. For all the good intentions that lay behind its creation, many have come to believe that the FSA was essentially a propaganda arm of the New Deal, simultaneously raising awareness about the plight of fellow Americans, but also persuading us to believe in the social policies of the Roosevelt Administration. Putting aside the inherent conflict of interests that arise when the government funds a project that essentially documents the outcome of its own policies, there is something to be said about the collective desire to once again use photography to document the plight of Americans during a time of economic turmoil, and the belief that images can effect positive change in moments of crisis.

The FSA’s goal of “introducing America to Americans” made the assumption that Americans were not already familiar with each other, that the nation had become estranged from itself due to the Great Depression, and there existed a great gulf that was created between the have-nots, and those with even less. The FSA became a way to visually demonstrate that abject poverty and privation by the land were actual and serious consequences of the Depression, a living testament to lives that may otherwise have been forgotten and marginalized, but now are preserved for posterity at the Library of Congress. This act of photographic salvation by the government, by way of its documentarian proxies, was a symbolic act that showed the country’s most vulnerable citizens would not be forsaken. More importantly, the dissemination of these images would bind the nation in a way that transcended differences in race, class and religion. The pictures produced by the FSA showed that the Depression cut across all divisions, that no American was alone in their suffering, regardless of social position.

To propose a modern-day version of the FSA, one is essentially seeking to fulfill similar goals of national unity in times of crisis, while also attempting to capture a cultural moment that deserves preservation. That so many groups independently arrived at such a similar conclusion must speak to a kind of continuing collective need and faith in photography, one that re-affirms the belief that human experiences need to be articulated photographically, widely shared, and finally archived for the benefit of future generations. Such a humanistic bent is a natural response during times of great uncertainty, when individual struggle can only be assuaged by a collective empathy.

The question should not be whether we need a re-incarnation of such a program, because the desire to create such a photographic body is clearly there. Rather, one must ask how such a project should be undertaken. Changes in technology in the last few years alone have fundamentally altered the landscape of media, from the production of images and news articles, to the way audiences receive and consume them. What has been most striking is the blurring between producer and consumer, and the rapid democratization of the fields of professional news-gathering and image-taking. Is it appropriate to use the same methods of documentary journalism from more than seventy years in the past?

The various proposals currently being put forward all share the idea that a group of trained professional photographers will deploy themselves to various parts of the country, finding and documenting the ways in which the current recession has changed peoples’ lives. The images these people bring back will be edited down, and a body of photography will be created from within this vast trove of images. But how would this process be any different from all the other photographic collections that exist in the world, whose subjects vary from the mundane to the socially timely and trenchant? Or put another way, the means by which the various organizations wish to re-constitute the FSA for the 21st century do not well reflect the way which we understand one another as citizens of a nation, of individuals suffering a collective calamity.
If the goal is to “introduce America to Americans”, then the photographers seem to be given the task of producing images of a nation we only thought we knew, of making uncanny our understanding of ‘America’. The FSA did this, as they brought to those more fortunate the opportunity to see images of an America that was largely forgotten, or was not even known to exist. It focused its cameras on an agricultural and rural way of life that was being devastated by the Dust Bowl, to an audience that knew little or nothing about making a living off of the land. This is hardly the case today, as victims of our current economic depression are no longer limited to such specific social groups. They cut across the entire socio-economic spectrum, with a specific emphasis on the middle-class and the homes many have lost due to foreclosure. Photographers won’t need to travel far to see the new devastation being wrought on the average citizen, as its effects can be felt in any community.

My point in saying all this is that I question the idea of having a small crew of photographers capturing a national portrait of economic hardship that most everyone in this country is witness to. While a professional photojournalist has the ability to produce a more satisfying and nuanced image, is not the point of such a photographic endeavor to record as many instances and occurrences of this new recession as possible? To give such a large task to a select group of photographers not only seems to contradict the broad scope of the project, it undermines the idea of the collective strife of this economic downturn, and restricts the possibility of a fuller representation of this period in history. When an entire nation and its individuals become the subject of a story, who better to report that then the subjects themselves?

Magnum, and the other organizations that have proposed enlisting well-known and distinguished freelance photographers to travel the country as photojournalists, seem to represent an older model of doing things, one which denies the participation of the actual subjects and their ability to document their lives. This is not a blanket advocacy of so-called ‘citizen journalism’, a problematic term in itself. Rather than claiming that every citizen is a journalist, we should instead acknowledge every persons’ ability to contribute to a larger photographic body, that we collectively can contribute to such a large archive of images ourselves. It is not necessary for the intervention of professionals to tell the story of Americans at this time, they are more than capable of doing so themselves.

By Kenneth Tam, Student, USC Annenberg, Written for: Visual Communication and Social Change

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