Faculty author's photographic research garners national attention

In the news: James Curtis, a noted authority on photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Depression years

When U.S. News & World Report devoted a special, double issue to the impact of photography on the modern world, it called upon James Curtis, history, a noted authority on photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Depression years.

A section of the magazine's combined July 9 and 16 issues, "Defining Moments: How Photography Changed the World," focuses on the FSA collection of photographs of Southern sharecroppers, migrant workers and victims of the Dust Bowl.

Curtis is the author of Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth, a 1989 book that minutely analyzes the FSA documentary photographs. "I was surprised and gratified to discover people are still interested in Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth a dozen years after it was published," he said.

The book focuses on his discovery that the FSA photographers did not simply record reality, but as artists inserted themselves into the pictures–directing them, moving the furnishings, arranging scenes that sent the message of what they envisioned as true. "The pictures were not candid shots of what existed. There is nothing wrong with this, but the viewer should be aware of the photographer's role," Curtis said.

In the U.S. News & World Report article, Curtis said, "This was the built-in dilemma in the emerging field of documentary photography. Too much emphasis on artistic creativity implied subjectivity and would undermine the picture."

Walker Evans, who later taught at Yale and worked for Fortune magazine and was probably the most famous of the FSA photographers, collaborated with James Agee on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, focusing on the lives of sharecroppers. In the article, Curtis points out that Evans, who claimed he did not alter settings for his photographs, did, in fact, do just that.

"When a scene was too cluttered to suit his intent, he moved removed objects He added others to achieve a certain balance to show the order that he believed lay beneath the surface of their poverty," he said.

Curtis recalled when he first became aware of the alterations in the FSA photographs. "During a survey course where I showed FSA photographs, an undergraduate came up to me later and said there was something wrong with one of them. The photograph showed a rocking chair against the stairway where it could not be used, and it seemed as if a bureau with a mirror also had been shifted so that the flash would not be reflected in the photograph."

Curtis began looking at the entire series of FSA photographs housed in the Library of Congress with a new eye and found evidence that settings and subjects had been altered. For example, Agee made a room-by-room inventory of a home which Evans then photographed, and the inventory did not match the images. In Evans' picture of a fireplace, there is a clock in the center of the mantle, but Agee made no mention of this item. Evans also moved a mirror in a wire stand, turning its back to the camera so there would be no reflection from his flash. In Evan's estate, there was another photograph of the same setting, revealing these changes and showing that Evans also removed the paper from the fireplace and some shoes from the hearth.

Dorothea Lange's photograph, "Migrant Mother," is another case of direction, he said. "Dorothea Lange was a well-known studio photographer, and naturally she would pose her subjects. Lange knew that the woman in the picture was 32 years old and the mother of seven children, one of them a teenage girl, who was photographed earlier in the series. But a picture of seven children, including the teenager, would undercut the message Lange wanted to convey, so the photograph includes only two children leaning on their mother with heads turned away from the camera," Curtis pointed out.

In the article, Curtis commented, "The last thing 'Migrant Mother' needed was middle-class America saying, 'This woman doesn't need relief–she needs birth control.'"

Curtis first published some of his findings about the FSA photographs in the Winterthur Portfolio. He has directed the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture for 20 years, and the museum has been influential in his research with its emphasis on using objects as historical evidence, Curtis said.

He also is working on another book on FSA photographs depicting African Americans and Mexican migrants in the 1930s, analyzing racial attitudes and the racial subtext. He also is comparing migrant camps with those where Japanese Americans were interred during World War II, based on research and a slide show he assembled in the 1970s of the camps and their occupants.

A historian with a doctorate from Northwestern University, Curtis also is the author of The Fox at Bay: The Presidency of Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication.