by David E. Anderson
Between 1935 and 1943 -- the height of the Great Depression and the early years of World War II -- the federal government embarked on one of the most remarkable and ambitious artistic projects in American history. Under the auspices of what became known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI), photographers traveled the country making a visual record of the impact of the depression and the war on the American people.
![River baptism in Morehead, Kentucky by Marion Post [Wolcott], 1940](pics/p_exclusive_home.jpg)
The mostly amateur and, at the time, unknown photo-graphers -- among them Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Walker Evans -- took thousands of pictures over the years the project lasted. Some 164,000 black-and-white negatives have been preserved in the Library of Congress. Among the fraction of religious photographs are pictures of families saying grace, river baptisms, itinerant preachers, stark wooden churches in rural settings, Salvation Army officers in San Francisco, and boys studying Hebrew texts in rural Colchester, Connecticut.
The purpose of the project was both to document and to propagandize. "If Americans saw the lives of the poor," Colleen McDannell writes in PICTURING FAITH: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION (Yale University Press, 2004), her fascinating study of one sampling of the mass of photographs, "they would be more concerned about poverty in the United States" and more supportive of New Deal efforts to respond to the depression.
PICTURING FAITH makes a complex and nuanced argument. McDannell, a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Utah, wants to challenge the pervasive view associated with most presentations of the government images: that they present a "decidedly secular" America. She acknowledges that the 1930s was "a profoundly secular period of American history" and that Roy Stryker, the head of the historical section of the Farm Security Administration who directed the project, and his photographers were among the "unchurched." Yet despite that secularity, as part of the documentary impulse guiding the project, Stryker told his photographers to include pictures of things religious, and they complied.
Because of the nature of the medium -- photography can depict some but not all aspects of religious experience -- and their own attitudes about religion, art, and the project's need to show the poor as both dignified and deserving, the photographers focused on certain expressions of faith and ignored others. "Their 'eyes' were shaped by their own personal biographies, their understanding of the project's mission, the reigning standards of art, and the changing American political environment," McDannell writes.
In MATERIAL CHRISTIANITY, her pioneering work of a decade ago, McDannell explored in depth the connection between material culture and religious iconography. A number of the pictures that introduce and underlie the argument she made in that 1995 study were taken by Roy Stryker for the depression-era project described in PICTURING FAITH, and the continuity between the two books is clear when McDannell writes: "In documenting submarginal housing and presenting the decaying rural landscape ... FSA photographers unintentionally recorded the religious practices of many poor Americans. The photographs show us how people used Christian material culture to visually open up their materially constricted world to a much larger religious world of beliefs and rituals."
Over the life of the federal project, two slightly different motives directed the work as its mission shifted. During the depression, the aim was to portray the essential dignity of the poor and those displaced by the economic cataclysm that had shaken America to its roots. During the war, however, photographers used religion and religious communities "as ways to assert the cohesiveness of American society." As America prepared to enter the war, McDannell notes, religion "ceased to be merely one element of culture and became one of four essential freedoms upon which a moral order could be built."
The chapters of PICTURING FAITH generally follow the chronology of the federal project, but they also are topical. The book begins with an overview of the project's assumptions and goals, followed by separate looks at subjects such as the South, city congregations, rural Jewish farmers, African Americans in Chicago, and Roman Catholics in New Mexico. Along the way there are some gems of explication, including an insightful historical interpretation of Gordon Parks' famous 1942 photograph of government office cleaning woman Ella Watson posed as "American Gothic" with broom and mop in hand, standing before a huge American flag. The picture was part of a series that Parks, the only African American to work in the FSA/OWI project, had undertaken about Watson's life and neighborhood and her vibrant storefront church in Washington, DC. The church, part of the spiritual movement that flourished in urban black neighborhoods between 1920 and 1950, was characterized by an eclectic religiosity that borrowed from Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics alike.
