Farm Security Administration

The Farm Security Administration ( FSA ) is an American organization created by the ministry for agriculture in 1937, charged with helping the poorest farmers touched by the Grande Depression.

The FSA is the successor of the Resettlement Administration , created in 1935, (but the name being used little, one will indifferently use initials FSA for one or the other of the programs). It is about the one of the programs of the New Deal ( Nouvelle gives ) set up by Roosevelt following the Grande Depression.

This project carried out until in 1943 to the the United States emanates from a political decision, caused by the archivaux and advertizing needs for the new agencies of the Roosevelt government.

Directed by the economist Rexford Tugwell, the agency is in charge of the assistance to agriculture in the form of subsidies with the small farmers, but also to carry out programmes of farming planning and creation of agricultural cooperatives.

For better promoting its reforms near the general public and of the Congress, the agency creates in its center a division of the Information, which includes/understands a Historique section, charged to join together all the possible documents on the agency, for immediate information as for the posterity.

The photographic section of the FSA

It is by its photographic section directed by Roy Emerson Stryker of 1935 to 1942 that the FSA marks the History: the project consists in making an objective assessment of the living and working conditions of the rural Americans. Roy Striker recruits a dozen photographers, among whom one counts:

But the objectivity aimed officially by this project cannot dissimulate the true governmental intention: they are actually to convince America of the utility the reforms of Roosevelt. Roy Striker, inspired by the work of Lewis Hine, chooses the photographers according to their social and political engagement.

Through 270.000 photographic documents, the photographers, each one with their way, draw up a very human portrait of America in crisis. The portraits of migrant Mother of Dorothea Lange or Fermiers in Alabama of Walker Evans mark the Americans of the between-two-war deeply.

The person in charge of the section, Roy E. Stryker, had been charged into 1925 to collect the many illustrations, often photographic, of the book of Tugwell, American Economic Life , but this experiment of gathering of images hardly helps it when it is a question of deciding desimages to make or of the documents to be gathered: reports/ratios, statistics, charts, photographs… This indecision and this relative ignorance of photography, will allow upon the departure a catch of strong initiative of the photographers and Walker Evans, enjoying the statute of " Senior Specialist" Information; , consequently will trace the broad outlines of them.

In 1935, Walker Evans leaves on mission and brings back photographs falling under the line of his preceding work. Taken with the room, of an impeccable precision, they stick to the vernacular Architecture, the interiors, the signs and the posters as much as with the problems directly dealt with by the FSA.

Its impact exceeds the individual stylistic influence and extends from now on to the design even project from the FSA, being in particular widening set of themes of the whole of the treatment of the only agricultural problems towards a project of documentation aiming at the whole of the company and the vernacular culture.

The service is replaced by the Office off War Information (OWI) in 1942.

See also

Internal bonds

External bonds

One can consult the photographs on http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html (in English)

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