| Popis: |
The essay analyses the case-study of the documentary section of the Farm Security Administration, in USA, an example of unprecedented “visual” investigation, both for the amount of images it produced, and for the famous and “institutional” committment that it had. Strongly desired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935, with the aim of documenting life in the American countryside in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929, the operation was perfectly in the wake of a tradition of social photography, inaugurated already by Hine and Riis. In 1935 Roosvelt commissioned Tugwell to direct the New Deal farm program and the Resettlement Administration, in particular the Agricultur Adjustment Act (AAA). Tugwell considered the photographic medium a powerful means of documentation, the identification process, it was, according to the professor, necessary to really understand the situations that were being investigated or simply being studied. That same year, therefore, at the suggestion of Tugwell, an Information Division, called the Historical Section, was founded. The Resettlement Administration since 1937 called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) whose direction was entrusted from Tugwell to an economist, his ex-student: Roy Stryker, now a university professor. But how did Stryker plan, direct and organize the work of the FSA Historical Section? First of all he created a darkroom by hiring the first photographer, Arthur Roshtein, with whom he had collaborated, to whose call was added that of Carl Mydans (journalist) and Walker Evans already at the time affirmed photographer. Later Ben Shahn was hired, a painter friend of Evans and collaborator of Diego Rivera, and in 1935 Dorothea Lange arrived, whose Migrant Mother became the emblem of the Great Depression and the colossal and imposing work of the FSA; already attentive to the problems of the less well-off classes, even socially engaged, Lange continued to live in Berkley in California during all her activities within the Documentary Section. The FSA chapter in general, and the one from the Historical Section in particular, is, in short, one of the most ambiguous and controversial that divides scholars and critics, in my opinion, into two groups: one who considers the story a simple “photographic legend”, the other who interprets it as a forerunner of social and documentary photography. Whatever the more or less latent and manifest distortions and functions of the operation have been, it is certain that the “FSA reporters” have represented, denounced and legitimized the contradictions of a crucial era through the creation of a visual ideal-type of Weberian memory, which contributed to transforming the story of the 1930s into a unique collective memory, whose image was printed in the memory of anyone who remembers with an “eye” the unforgettable American 1930s, in some respects very similar to years that we are living. |
