Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs.

• Author: Owen, A. Susan
• Position: Book Review

Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs. By Cara A. Finnegan. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003; pp. ix + 260; $36.95.

Cara Finnegan's Picturing Poverty advances a sophisticated argument for the importance of studying images as rhetoric, as arguments in the public sphere. As she puts it, the book explores "the relationship between seeing and knowing (p. x; emphasis in original). Moreover, the work demonstrates the rich possibilities for locating and tracing the ephemeral paths of image circulation in the public sphere. Finnegan focuses on the uses of photography as public address in order to illuminate the public construction of poverty during the Depression. In 1935, President Roosevelt appointed academic economist Rexford Guy Tugwell to head up the Resettlement Administration (RA), later renamed (1937) the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Tugwell, in turn, appointed Roy Emerson Stryker to head up the Historical Section of the Information Division. Stryker's photographers documented the social crisis in rural America produced by and through the Depression. Their photographs tracked the effectiveness of New Deal policies for combating rural poverty. From 1935-1943, photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Sahn, Marion Post, John Vachon and John Collier,Jr. produced 250,000 images of rural poverty. Fewer than half of those images survive and are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

Finnegan's interest in the surviving images concerns how the "circulating images ... made some poverty stories more rhetorically available than others" (p. xi). To investigate the rhetorical possibilities of this public construction of "poverty," she studies the images in the context of three magazines in which they circulated: Survey Graphic (social science rhetorics); U.S. Camera (technical and aesthetic rhetorics); and, Look Magazine (a popular rhetoric of "picture stories"). In addition to these extant vehicles of circulation, Finnegan examines archival resources on the magazines, Stryker's letters and office memos, letters from photographers in the field, and oral histories of those involved in the broader project. Finnegan focuses on how the photographic images "complicate, challenge, or perhaps even subvert [the] stories" in which they appear (p. xii).

Finnegan's theoretical and methodological assumptions for reading these images are five-fold: First...