This film brings to life the remarkable stories behind the legendary group of New Deal-sponsored photographers who captured the face of Depression-era America.
“Roy Stryker proved to me that you cannot photograph a bigot and say ‘this is a bigot’ because
This film brings to life the remarkable stories behind the legendary group of New Deal-sponsored photographers who captured the face of Depression-era America.
“Roy Stryker proved to me that you cannot photograph a bigot and say ‘this is a bigot’ because they have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry by showing the people who suffered most under it.” – Gordon Parks
It was the first time Americans saw each other’s faces and witnessed what life was like across the nation: north to south, east to west, rich and poor, black and white. Ordinary people. Extraordinary times.
Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers encoring Monday, August 30 at 7 p.m. on PBS World (cable 524/DT21.2), explores the personal vision and the struggles experienced by photographers Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano who created some of the most iconic images in history. Still recognized today, Dorothea Lange’s haunting photograph of the “Migrant Mother” remains one of the most famous images of all time.
This unlikely group of photographers and artists was brought together by a fiery prairie populist and government bureaucrat named Roy Stryker. His vision of sending some of America’s most talented photographers out into the countryside in a government-sponsored project drew ire from the conservatives in Congress and praise from the general public. What they captured, for the first time, was a complete picture of their countrymen in the context of a national identity. As Stryker would later comment, “Our photographers had one thing in common, and that was a deep respect for human beings.”
But the photographs were controversial and the agency under constant attack. At one point, the collection was under threat of destruction by the conservative congressional opponents of the time, who consi