A Timeline of Social Documentary Practice
 1888-1919 | 1921 | 1924 | 1925 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939 | 1940 | 1941 

1936




Dorothea Lange, Nipomo, California, 1936


“My intent almost a half-century ago was to have the pictures tell their story; to augment that story with music that would not only be an accompaniment but also would evoke emotions related to the lives of the people concerned, and finally to write the fewest possible words, solely for explanation and clarity, and to have them as much as possible in time with the music.”

— Pare Lorentz

Walker Evans & James Agee

Stay with sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama, for three weeks on commission from Fortune magazine. Evans receives a temporary leave from his FSA job under the condition that the photographs become government property. Fortune rejects the article.


Margaret Bourke-White

First photographer hired by Life Magazine, founded in 1936. Agrees to work with Erskine Caldwell on a book about the South, and begins photographing for the project in June.


Dorothea Lange

Begins major trips for the FSA, enlarging her scope to cover Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. Marries Paul Taylor.


Pare Lorentz

The Plow that Broke the Plains

Photographed by Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz and Paul Ivano.

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1937





1937 Gold Seal Edition

Allen H. Eaton

Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands

With an Account of the Rural Handicraft Movement in the United States and Suggestions for the Wider Use of Handicrafts in Adult Education and in Recreation

Features the photographs of Doris Ulmann, including many color plates.


Margaret Bourke-White & Erskine Caldwell

You Have Seen Their Faces

A tremendously successful photo-text combination which stimulates publishers to begin looking at publishing photo-documentary style books.

Unlike Roll, Jordan, Roll, which used no captions at all, You Have Seen Their Faces features fabricated captions often including fictional dialogue.
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1938




Horace Bristol, Rose of Sharon
Allied News Photo from Land of the Free
1937 flood on the lower Mississippi from The River

Horace Bristol

Toured the Central Valley of California with John Steinbeck for a photo-text project which was later scrapped.

The photographs were in casting the motion picture version of The Grapes of Wrath.


Herman Clarence Nixon

Forty Acres and Steel Mules

Uses Resettlement Administration [RA] photographs while retracting his earlier anti-industrial stance for Southern reconstruction.


Archibald MacLeish

Land of the Free

A long poem illustrated mostly by RA photographs, issued by Harcourt Brace after the success of You Have Seen Their Faces. For the more negative parts of the poem, Allied News Photos were used.



Pare Lorentz

The River

Photographed by Stacy Woodard, Floyd Crosby, and Willard Van Dyke.

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1939
First edition hardcover

John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath


Archibald MacLeish

Appointed Librarian of Congress, a position he holds until 1944.

Edwin Rosskam

Washington Nerve Center
San Francisco: West Coast Metropolis

First two books in the Face of America series. Rosskam joins the RA, renamed the Farm Security Administration [FSA] staff.


Dorothea Lange & Paul Taylor

An American Exodus

In response to the contrived captioning and theatrical technique of You Have Seen Their Faces, Lange and Taylor create an ethnography of greater precision.


Margaret Jarman Hagood

Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman

Not illustrated. "Through its scientific approach, Mothers of the South serves the research specialist, the social worker . . . On the other hand, through its clear, simple, nontechnical language . . . makes a definite appeal to the general reader"
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1940





Title Page

Oliver LaFarge

As Long as the Grass Shall Grow

Face of America series, photographs by Helen Post edited by Edwin Rosskam.

The series shifts from a geographic focus to instead focus on population groups.


Sherwood Anderson

Home Town

Face of America series, photographs from the FSA selected by Edwin Rosskam. Rosskam edited the 60,000 word manuscript submitted by Anderson to 20,000 words.

Presents an idyllic view of small town life in deep contrast to his earlier work.
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1941





Walker Evans, Hale County Alabama, 1936

Richard Wright

12 Million Black Voices

Uses FSA photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam. The book triggered an FBI investigation of Wright for ties to the communist party.


Walker Evans & James Agee

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Dismally unsuccessful when first published, this now iconic text of the depression sold only around 1,000 copies.

It marked the end of this intense period of experimental photo texts. The first edition featured only 32 photographs, which was expanded to 64 when it it was reissued in 1960.
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