![]() ![]() Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn, among other notable artists, all served under Stryker, who in many ways was a pivotal support to them during times of acute economic hardship, and was a strong advocate towards their subsequent post-FSA careers.Īs his staff would send back their negatives from the field, it was Stryker who would determine which images would be printed. In fact, New Deal propaganda on the plight and needed social assistance for the rural impoverished was one of the Historical Section’s main aims.Įarly during his tenure, Stryker would hire a small but remarkable group of photographers who would go on to express new documentary styles of depicting rural America during the Great Depression. Though Stryker was not a photographer himself, he understood the power that images could have in economic argument and the general sway of ideas. The visual record left behind by the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers has, according to New York Times critic Charles Hagen, come to “represent one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to depict a society in photographs (Hagen, 1985).” Leading the FSA’s Historical Section was Roy Stryker, a Columbia-trained economist. Photograph by Russell Lee, August 1938 (Lee, 1938) I. Stryker, Head of the Historical Section (Information Division) of the U.S. ![]()
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