discuss and brief the social and economic and political reality about the black american as expand by reacher wright in his'Twelve Million Black voices'
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1Let Us Now Hear Black Voices. Such could be an adequate subtitle for Twelve Million Black Voices, a 1941 collection of photographs, selected from the Farm Security Administration files by FSA-employed photographer Edwin Rosskam and accompanied by Richard Wright’s texts. Both books were published in 1941, both rely on photographs by Walker Evans–one of them is the exact same–and stem from the work of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers. Both books are of course a collection of photographs accompanied by a powerful text and present a tension on the page between image and fact2 on the one hand, and aesthetics and politics on the other.
3 The Resettlement Administration, newly-established in 1935, became the Farm Security Administration(...)
4 Gordon Park was the only African American photographer on the team and joined the unit only shortly (...)
5 “Roy was our boss and he didn’t let us forget it. He was the inventor of our maverick outfit, and h (...)
2Between 1935 and 1942, photographers working for the FSA, more specifically for the Historical Section, collected about sixty thousand photographs of American life in the countryside and cities with topics ranging from housing and farming to Americans at work, at home, or at leisure under the direction of Roy Stryker. Rexford Tugwell, who had been Stryker’s professor of economics and mentor at Columbia, and was now head of the Resettlement Administration (soon-to-be FSA3), handed his former teaching assistant a strategic position within the Information Division of the Resettlement Administration: the Historical Section was in charge of contributing material to present “the agency’s positive programs and accomplishments to the country” (Hurley, 1972, 34). Yet this administration with a government agenda produced an exceptional legacy beyond the immediate propagandistic purposes. Stryker was quite familiar with the use of photography in political, economic and educational contexts as he had been the illustration editor for Tugwell’s American Economic Life and the Means of its Improvement, a study the latter co-authored with Thomas Munro in 1925. On that occasion, as well as for the updated editions, Stryker worked in close collaboration with Lewis Hine and later discovered the work of Margaret Bourke-White (Hurley, 1972, 14-15). Once appointed at the FSA’s Historical Section he brought on board Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Edwin Rosskam, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott and Gordon Park.4 Stryker was thus the one who turned the thereafter ill-named Historical Section into a photographic unit whose ambitious and relentless work he defined almost on his own terms.5 Under his authority, the photographers were to achieve an unprecedented legacy that is celebrated to this day. Newhall Beaumont, first curator of photography of the New York Museum of Modern Art as of 1940, generally hailed the first historian of photography, reflected back in the 1980s that though “Documentary photography is a term that has defied definition ever since it was introduced in the 1930s”, there seems to be an understanding that documentary photography is best embodied by the FSA legacy: “The extraordinary photographic work done between 1935 and 1943 by the Historical Section of the United States Government’s Farm Security Administration is considered the classical documentation of the depression era” (Newhall, 1984, 1-2).
6 It is now known that Florence Owen Thompson, the “migrant mother” in Dorothea Lange’s celebrated 19 (...)
3How the FSA photographers of the Historical Section thus recorded the reality of 1930s America in their documentary endeavor is a starting point for this paper whose aim is to (re)consider one object among the many that stemmed from the FSA photographic endeavor: Twelve Million Black Voices. Twelve Million Black Voices displays portraits and visual representations of the lives of the twelve million invisible black Americans and releases a protesting voice for the twelve million silent black Americans. The book is both an expected product of a documentary decade and an original project and legacy: the visual icons of 1930s photography were–and still are–the Migrant Mother or the Okie tenant, in other words, white faces,6 while Twelve Million Black Voices featured a black child’s close-up portrait on its original cover and assembled close to ninety photographs of African Americans