Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics and Policy, edited by Gwendolyn Mink and Alice O’Connor, (ABC-Clio 2004), pp.537-544 (volume 2)

Picturing Poverty I: 1880-1960

Although images of poverty circulated in a variety of forms during the nineteenth-century (in chap books, penny magazines, and religious tracts) they are most commonly associated with what came to be known as the “social documentary” tradition of photography. Social documentary emerges at the intersection of a set of technical, economic and political forces. The technical preconditions (emulsions capable of capturing movement, high speed shutters, and the ability to reproduce photographs in books and newspapers) had coalesced by the late 1870s. We see the initial manifestation of a social documentary impulse in Great Britain. Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor was published in 1849-50 with engravings drawn from Richard Beard’s daguerreotypes. In 1868 photographer Thomas Annan was commissioned to document the slums of Glasgow, and by 1877 John Thomson published Street Life in London, replete with images of the “crawlers” of St. Giles. This concern with urban poverty in particular is emblematic. The technical innovations that allow for the creation of images of the poor in situ coincide with the high point of Victorian industrialization and urbanization. These processes proved to be particularly unsettling in the United States, which had long held that its vast frontier would immunize it from the European “disease” of urban class conflict. This proved, of course, not to be the case, and in the period of intense industrialization following the Civil War America’s cities became home to an increasingly large immigrant working-class.

This immigrant population transformed perceptions of the American city, or at least its impoverished regions. Increasingly the city was seen as a haven for disease (cholera, tuberculosis) and disorder (anarchism, labor organizing), even as the middle and upper classes were beginning their long march to the suburbs. The result was a growing spatial and psychological distance between the urban poor and the rich. This accounts in part for the frequent reliance on a quasi-colonialist rhetoric in nineteenth-century social documentary, in which the photographer casts himself as an intrepid explorer traversing the “dark continent” of East London or Lower Manhattan. The more sequestered and concentrated the poor became the more imperative the demand to investigate, classify and reveal them. This process of disclosure ran along a continuum from the dryly scientific (Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People of London, 1902-03) to the frankly sensationalistic (Gustave Dore’s London: A Pilgrimage or Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York & Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, both 1872).

The social documentary tradition in America can be traced to the 1880s, when the Danish immigrant and police reporter Jacob A. Riis began using photographs of poor, mostly immigrant, New Yorkers to proselytize for improvements in housing. Riis combined the quasi-scientific investigative approach pioneered by Mayhew with a finely tuned ability to excite his audiences’ voyeuristic fascination with race and class others. Making use of the new German technology of blitzpulver or flash powder Riis would often surprise his subjects while asleep or inebriated in dives and lodging houses. In order to galvanize public support it was necessary for Riis to solicit the viewer’s empathetic identification with the urban poor. At the same time this humanitarian impulse was carefully calibrated with a more self-interested appeal based on the potential threat (of crime, disease and disorder) posed by immigrants confined in overcrowded tenements. We can identify a visual corollary for this frisson of danger in Riis’s frequent use of the alley as a framing device. Bandit’s Roost (1888) invites the viewer to enter the chaotic urban interior, while simultaneously evoking a dangerous gauntlet, ringed by a phalanx of menacing slum-dwellers.

Riis’s lantern slide shows, newspaper articles and books (e.g., How the Other Half Lives, 1890) were part of a larger struggle to reform housing regulations in New York state, leading to the passage of the Tenement House Law of 1901. Fueled in part by the success of the tenement reform movement New York’s Russell Sage Foundation sponsored surveys of several American cities during the early twentieth-century. In these projects the overtly moralistic character of Victorian-era reform gave way to an environmentalist approach in which poverty was viewed as the product of a complex set of spatial and economic forces associated with city life. Early twentieth-century surveys addressed a wide range of issues, from urban congestion, to tuberculosis, to women’s labor, to prison reform. All were seen as interrelated components of a larger social gestalt. The survey findings were presented in books as well as public exhibitions that combined photographs, charts and graphs, dioramas, and models to generate support for specific legislative remedies. The rise of the survey methodology marks the transition to a professionalized approach to municipal reform. Riis’s somewhat haphazard forays into the city, and his often sensationalistic narratives of “the other half,” were supplanted by more systematic techniques, epitomized by the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey of 1908.

The Pittsburgh Survey featured numerous photographs of the city’s poor and working class neighborhoods. Among the most powerful of these images were Lewis Hine’s portraits of immigrant steel workers. Where Riis was willing to indulge the not-so-subtle racism of his uptown audiences, Hine was determined to portray immigrants in a more dignified and compassionate manner. Although not immune to contemporary anxieties over the need to “Americanize” foreign-born workers, Hine’s photographs (often borrowing formal conventions associated with art and middle-class portraiture) mark a significant break with the exoticizing stereotypes of his predecessors. At a time when immigrants were widely reviled in the press, Hine produced a series of photographs that portrayed new arrivals at Ellis Island not as parasitic invaders but as more fully human, simultaneously hopeful and uncertain about their new lives in America. Hine was also active with the National Child Labor Committee, producing images of young workers in textile mills, mines and factories throughout the United States during the nineteen-teens. In his “work portraits” of the 1930s Hine endeavored to show both men and women as skilled craftspeople, in control of complex machinery, at a time when Taylorist managerial literature portrayed the worker as little more than a brute laboring body.

By the early 1930s America was entering the Great Depression. Despite the increasingly broad scope of non-governmental reform during the 1920s, it was clear that this crisis demanded resources and a degree of national coordination available only at the federal level. Beginning in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs represented the most sweeping political and economic reforms in the country’s history. Among the groups hardest hit by the Depression were small farmers and farm laborers in the midwest and southeast. The economic downturn, combined with an ongoing drought forced tens of thousands of tenant families off the land in search of work. In 1935 the Resettlement Administration (RA) was established to coordinate New Deal rural relief including debt adjustment programs, farm loans, and the creation of migrant camps and resettlement communities. In 1937 the RA became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Roy Stryker, head of the “historical section-photographic” of the agency’s Information Division, was responsible for commissioning images documenting the progress of New Deal agricultural programs. These were distributed free of charge to mainstream picture magazines, newspapers and book publishers. Stryker recruited a remarkable team of young photographers, many of whom would go on to have distinguished careers in photojournalism and art, including Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon and Marion Post Wolcott. Despite the severity of the Depression FDR’s policies remained deeply unpopular with many business and corporate leaders, who viewed them as dangerously socialistic. As a result, the FSA historical section under Stryker functioned as a kind of publicity office. It was necessary to provide photographic proof of both the severity of rural poverty, and the efficacy of government programs designed to ameliorate it. This division is reiterated in FSA imagery that shows, on the one hand, scenes of deserted farms and malnourished children, and on the other, images of happily “rehabilitated” FSA clients.

The relationship between the FSA and the rural poor was, however, somewhat more complex than this description suggests. Rural poverty was not simply the result of drought and depression, but of a larger process of agricultural modernization involving wide scale mechanization and the centralization of farm ownership. For Stryker the proper role of the government wasn’t to retard the displacement of tenants and sharecroppers but to rationalize it; replacing a process that was haphazard and chaotic with one that was orderly and humane. Farm families would be gradually adjusted to urban and suburban life through resettlement camps, job training and Greenbelt incubator communities. Thus, despite the frequent paeans to America’s yeomen farmer evident in New Deal literature and imagery, one of the primary effects of FSA policies was to further undermine small, family farms. Stryker’s photographers, who could observe the contradictions of FSA policies first hand, tended to view the rural poor less as an inchoate mass to be managed and “rehabilitated” by the state, than as individuals struggling through a traumatic and bewildering moment in their lives. This movement between specificity and abstraction, between the immediacy of the photographic exchange and the pages of Life, was a frequent point of tension between Stryker and photographers such as Dorothea Lange, who resented having their captions cut and their images edited to suit the shifting exigencies of FSA publicity and mass-circulation picture magazines.

The FSA was absorbed into the Office of War Information in 1943. It would be over two decades before the photographic image would again play such a central role in debates over poverty and public policy. In his 1964 state of the union address President Lyndon Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty,” launching a plethora of programs and new federal agencies. Although there was some concern with the rural poor during the early 1960s, urban poverty, especially among African Americans, was the defining issue of Great Society-era public policy. The linkage to policy is most evident in a series of official commission reports produced in the aftermath of the riots that rocked America’s cites between 1964 and 1968. The Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots of 1965, which featured “one hundred four shocking photos of the most terrifying riot in history” along with a color-coded map of deaths and property damage, evokes the lurid sensationalism of a Victorian penny dreadful. The 1967 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders was more sober, closer in tone to the Sage Foundation’s urban surveys, but the voyeuristic quality of the descriptions and photographs remained. By the 1960s the inner city was a mysterious places to most white, middle-class Americans, and the photographic image was again called upon as a vicarious witness for viewers who were simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of urban poverty. The riot reports, along with an ancillary literature of histrionic picture books and novels (Anarchy Los Angeles, The Siege of Harlem and Burn Baby Burn!) generated an iconography of poverty that was both new and familiar, as Italian immigrants crowded into New York City tenements were replaced by African Americans crowded into the public housing projects of Chicago and Los Angeles. The reports reiterate the complex calculus of compassion and self-interest, fear of insurrection and outrage at the conditions which might spawn it, evident in Riis’s work almost a century before.

References

Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner, 1890)

The Pittsburgh Survey in six volumes, edited by Paul Underwood Kellogg (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1911)

Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938)

Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939)

Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? (Los Angeles: Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 1965)

Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, introduction by Tom Wicker (New York: Bantam Books, 1968)

Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego 2004