Liberal Documentary Goes to School:Farm Security Administration photographs of Teachers, Students and Schools.

This paper examines photographs of schools made between 1935 and 1943 for the Farm Security Administration and later the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). From its inception, the photos were to be made available to the American people and were cataloged for access. Currently most of the 164,000 photographs in the collection are digitized and available online. Considering individual photographs and the archive itself as data and as important elements of material culture, I employed an approach resembling the grounded theory method of qualitative research to examine more than 4000 school photographs from the FSA-OWI archives. Ansel Adams, wrote to the FSA-OWI director, Roy Stryker, "What you've got are not photographers. They're a bunch of sociologists with cameras." Like some sociologists, the photographers constructed ideal types such as "healthy American schools," "child labor" and "poverty stricken and overcrowded schools." Two ideal types suggest solutions to the social problems of working children and poverty: one shows progress in the construction of new schools and consolidation of rural schools, the second depicts schools operated explicitly as New Deal programs. By 1942-43 when the OWI took over, images of poverty all but disappear. Schools are represented as serving a vital war need, as an organic part of the community, and as generally modern. Taken together the photos constitute what is in effect a visual simulacrum of the "imagined community" of America. By defining who was a legitimate member and who was outside the pale, documentary photography helped create an imagined American community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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