Migrant Mother. Dorothea Lange, 1936.
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Documenting America: Footnotes
Chapter 1
1 F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 36-54.
2 From an interview with Shahn conducted by Richard Doud, April 14, 1964; quoted in Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, 50.
3 Biographical information from Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Ben Shahn (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), 345-47.
4 Selden Rodman, Portrait of the Artist as an American (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 89.
5 Ibid., 90.
6 Ibid., 91.
7 Ibid., xv and 78.
8 From an interview with Shahn conducted by Richard Doud, April 14, 1964, quoted in John D. Morse, ed., Ben Shahn (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 135-36.
9 Some of the killed negatives from Shahn's trip have holes punched in them but others, like this one, do not.
10 From an interview by John D. Morse, "Henri Cartier-Bresson," p. 189 in the Magazine of Art, May 1947, quoted in Morse, Ben Shahn, 134.
11 From an interview by Richard Doud, April 14, 1964, quoted in Davis Pratt, The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), x.
12 The policy matters alluded to here are discussed in Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); and Stephen F. Strausberg, "The Effectiveness of the New Deal in Arkansas," in Donald W. Whisenhunt, The Depression in the Southwest (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980), 102-16.
13 From John D. Morse, "Ben Shahn: An Interview," 136-4l in the Magazine of Art, April 1944, quoted in Morse, Ben Shahn, 133.
14 Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (1957; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 47 48.
15 Baldwin, Poverty and Politics, 263. Cotton -- Page 7
Chapter 2
1 Brian Vachon, "John Vachon, A Remembrance," in American Photographer 3, no. 4 (October 1979): 36.
2 Anne Hull, "John Vachon, Noted Cameraman, Departs," Greenbelt [Maryland] Cooperator, 8, no. 8 (October 8, 1943): 1-2.
3 John Vachon, "Tribute to a Man, an Era, an Art," Harpers, September 1973, 96-99.
4 Vachon, "Tribute to a Man," 98; George R. Leighton, "Omaha, Nebraska," Harpers, July, 1938, 113-14, 320-328.
5 Vachon to Stryker, [October 1938], Roy E. Stryker Papers, Photographic Archives, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky.
6 Vachon, "Tribute," 98. The street with cheap hotels was Douglas Street, and the railroad car was from the Chicago Great Western (CGW) line.
7 T. J. Maloney, ed., U.S. Camera 1940 (New York: Random House, 1939), 197.
8 George R. Leighton, "Omaha, Nebraska: The Glory Has Departed," in Five Cities: The Story of Their Youth and Old Age (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 140-236; Vachon's photographs appear on 151, 198, 199, 215, and 216.
9 File caption for negative LC-USF34-8859-D.
10 Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 82.
11 Vachon to Stryker, October 12, 1938, Roy E. Stryker Papers, Photographic Archives, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky.
Chapter 3
1 Copies of the reports are in Lots 897 and 898, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
2 Much of the information in this text is from Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 38-49; Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978), 126-29; and Dorothea Lange interview by Richard Doud, 22 May 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
3 Lange to Stryker, 16 February 1937, Stryker Collection.
4 Paul S. Taylor and Dorothea Lange, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939; rev. ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975), 145, 148.
5 Federal Writers' Project, California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, 1939), 639-40.
6 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life, 163-70.
7 Lange to Stryker, 12 March 1937, Stryker Collection.
8 Lange to Stryker, 12 March 1937, Stryker Collection.
9 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life, 166-69. Clippings from serials may be found in the Supplementary Reference files and agency scrapbooks, FSA-OWI Written Records. Not all of the clippings offer full bibliographic citations. Lange's 1937 Imperial Valley pictures were used in the following newspapers, journals, and magazines: St. Louis Post Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 17 April 1938, 4; Current History, April 1939, 33; Social Work, April 1939; St. Louis Post Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 28 January 1940; Country Gentleman, February 1940, 9; and Democratic Digest, June-July 1940, 46.
10 Stryker to Lange, 2 December 1936, Stryker Collection.
11 Lange to Stryker, 16 February 1937, Stryker Collection.
12 Stryker to Lange, 9 March 1937, Stryker Collection.
13 Lange to Stryker, 19 March 1937, Stryker Collection.
14 Lange to Stryker, 23 March 1937, Stryker Collection.
15 Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life, 164-65.
16 "The U.S. Dust Bowl," Life, 21 June 1937, 60-65.
17 Dorothea Lange interview by Richard Doud, 22 May 1964, Archives of American Art.
18 Lange interview by Doud, 22 May 1964, Archives of American Art.
Chapter 4
1 Lincoln Caplan, ed., "Walker Evans on Himself," New Republic, 13 November 1976, 23. Other biographic information in this text has been drawn from the following sources: John Szarkowski, Introduction to Walker Evans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971); Hurley, Portrait of a Decade; Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973); and Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1982). The last work contains selected original documents and an essay by Jerry L. Thompson.
2 Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1933), 31 photographs by Evans; Paul Radin and James Johnson Sweeney, African Folktales & Sculpture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), 113 photographs by Evans.
3 Walker Evans at Work, 107, 112.
4 James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941).
5 John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 116.
6 Walker Evans: American Photographs (one-man photographic exhibition), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 September-18 November 1938; Walker Evans, American Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); Walker Evans, Many Are Called (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). The subway series is published in the last work.
7 Stryker to Evans, 20 April, 20 May, and 3 June 1938; Evans to Stryker, 21 April, 26 May, and 15 June 1938; Roy E. Stryker Papers, University of Louisville.
8 Katz, Leslie, "Interview with Walker Evans," Art in America, March/April 1971, 85.
9 This series was exposed on 35-mm film. Unlike other film sizes used by the section's photographers, 35-mm negatives are too small to be cut into individual frames for storage, so the agency stored them in strips of five. The determination of Evans's probable shooting sequence depended on the availability of these strips, and on edge numbers added to the film by the manufacturer (not the numbers assigned by the agency to identify negatives in the file). The position of the manufacturer's edge numbers may vary from roll to roll, and the numbers themselves indicate the sequence of exposures within each roll. The edge numbers for this group of negatives reach a high value of 44, implying that Evans may have "bulk-loaded" the film. The negatives include about a half dozen images that seem to have been neither published nor printed for the file. The unprinted negatives are represented here by the picture of the two men passing on the sidewalk and the close-up of the political poster.
10 Evans's method is discussed in Jerry L. Thompson, "Walker Evans: Some Notes on His Way of Working," in Walker Evans at Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 9-17.
11 Fred H. Allen, New York City, Westchester, and Nassau Counties in Relation to Real Estate Investments 1942 (New York: Bowery Savings Bank et al., 1942); Real Property Inventory City of New York: Borough of Manhattan (New York: New York Housing Authority, 1934); Real Estate Directory of the Borough of Manhattan (New York: Real Estate Directory Company, 1938); Manhattan Land Book (New York: G.W. Bromley, 1934); New York, (map from vol. 6 of the series New York, 1903-1919 [Pelham, N.Y.: Sanborn Map Co., 1907]).
12 Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans," 85, 87.
Chapter 5
1 The names provided in the captions for these photographs have been supplied by M.G. Trend, an anthropologist who lived in Gee's Bend during the 1980s.
2Stryker to Rothstein, 5 February 1937, Roy E. Stryker Papers, University of Louisville.
3 Beverly Smith, "Molasses and Sowbelly," American Magazine 124, no. 1 (July 1937), 156-57, 164-67; Stryker to Rothstein, 18 February 1937, Roy E. Stryker Papers, University of Louisville.
4 Resettlement Administration report dated 21 May 1937; FSA-OWI Written Records, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. The supplementary reference files in this collection contain a number of variants of this report carrying later dates; similar overviews may be found in the Charles L. Todd/Migratory Labor Collection in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress.
5 Renwick C. Kennedy, "Life at Gee's Bend," Christian Century, 1 September 1937, 1072-75.
6 Resettlement Administration report dated 21 May 1937, 8; see also a Farm Security Administration report dated 16 September 1939, revised 17 January 1941; FSA-OWI Written Records.
7 John Temple Graves II, "The Big World at Last Reaches Gee's Bend," New York Times Magazine, 22 August 1937, 12-15.
8 Farm Security Administration report, 16 September 1939, revised 17 January 1941, FSA-OWI Written Records; Post Wolcott's photographs are stored in lot 1617, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
9 Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 230. A thorough overview of the Gee's Bend project, including an economic analysis of its outcome that calculates a one dollar benefit for each two dollars spent, may be found in M. G. Trend and W. L. Lett, "Government Capital and Minority Enterprize: An Evaluation of a Depression-Era Social Program," American Anthropologist 88, no. 3 (September 1986), 595-609.
10 The recordings and additional documentation are part of the Robert Sonkin/Gee's Bend, Alabama and the Charles L. Todd/Migratory Labor collections in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress.
11 Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 311-15.
12 Janet Strain McDonald, "Quilting Women," in Black Belt to Hill Country: Alabama Quilts from the Robert and Helen Cargo Collection (Birmingham: Birmingham Museum of Art, 1982), 21-26.
13 Calvin Trillin, "The Black Womens of Wilcox County Is About to Do Something," New Yorker, 22 March 1969, 102-8.
14 Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Seeing Historic Alabama: Fifteen Guided Tours (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 143.
15 The exhibit, titled Five Cent Cotton was organized by Jo Roy; its accompanying booklet is Five Cent Cotton: Images of the Depression in Alabama (Birmingham, Alabama: Birmingham Public Library, 1982). The materials collected during the course of the oral history project are in the Birmingham Public Library.
16 Telephone conversation with Katherine Tucker Windham by Claudine Weatherford, 19 July 1985, Documenting America, 1935-1943 Project Records, Supplementary Archives, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Chapter 6
1 Rothstein to Stryker, 1 April 1940, Roy E. Stryker Papers, University of Louisville.
2 Stryker to Rothstein, 2 March 1940, Stryker Papers.
3 Wayne D. Rasmussen, A History of the Emergency Farm Labor Supply Program 1943-47, Agriculture Monograph no. 13 (Washington: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1951), 10-11.
4 Charles L. Todd, "The 'Okies' Search for a Lost Frontier," New York Times Magazine, 27 August 1939, 10.
5 Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 222.
6 The Hub, vol. 1, no. 35 (26 July 1940), and vol. 3, no. 20 (14 June 1942).
7 The Hub, vol. 3, no. 20 (14 June 1942), 2.
8 Ibid.
9 New York Times, 9 March 1940, from a scrapbook in the Charles L. Todd/Migratory Labor Collection in the Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress.
10 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 389-393.
11 Los Angeles Times, 9 July 1939, from a scrapbook in the Charles L. Todd/Migratory Labor Collection.
12 Todd scrapbook, unidentified clipping, Charles L. Todd/Migratory Labor Collection.
13 Charles L. Todd, "Trampling Out the Vintage," Common Cause, vol. 8, no. 7 (July 1939), 7-8, 30.
14 Stryker to Rothstein, 5 March and 19 March 1940, Stryker Papers.
15 See Lots 254 and 133, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
16 Rothstein to Stryker, 1 April 1940, Stryker Papers.
Chapter 7
1 Martin H. Bush, "A Conversation with Gordon Parks," in Martin H. Bush, The Photographs of Gordon Parks (Wichita, Kansas: Wichita State University, 1983), 36.
2 Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 208.
3 Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 183-85, 268-69.
4 F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties, 158.
5 Bush, "A Conversation with Gordon Parks," 56.
6 Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 220-51; Gordon Parks interview by Richard Doud, 28 April 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Martin Bush, "A Conversation with Gordon Parks," 36-38 and 56-58.
7 Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 228.
8 Ibid., 230-31.
9 Ibid.
10 Gordon Parks, Moments without Proper Names (New York: Viking Press, 1975).
11 Parks, A Choice of Weapons, 231.
12 Gordon Parks interview by Richard Doud, 28 April 1964, quoted in Hurley, Portrait of a Decade, 158.
13 Bush, "Conversation with Gordon Parks," 38.
14 Ibid., 42.
