Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs
Working for the government's Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, photographers set out across the country to capture the human face of the Depression. Walker Evans' portraits of sharecroppers and Dorothea Lange's images of migrant families today stand as the most popular images from the FSA's project. Yet, in their own time, the pictures functioned as urgent, powerful reminders that one-third of the nation was in a real crisis. Focusing on these and other well-known FSA photographs,...
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Working for the government's Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, photographers set out across the country to capture the human face of the Depression. Picturing Poverty examines how popular magazines used these images to construct complex and often contradictory messages about poverty. By striving to understand the original context of the photographs, Finnegan shines new light on the meanings of poverty, the Depression, and the various roles of the media.
Preface: A Rhetorical History of PhotographsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Making Rural Poverty Visible: The Depression, the New Deal, and the Historical Section11Imaging Poverty in the Historical Section362Social Engineering and Photographic Resistance: Social Science Rhetorics of Poverty in Survey Graphic573Intersections of Art and Documentary: Aesthetic Rhetorics of Poverty in U.S. Camera1204Spectacle of the Downtrodden Other: Popular Rhetorics of Poverty in Look Magazine168Epilogue: Rhetorical Circulation and the Picturing of Poverty220Notes225Selected Bibliography248Index251
