c. 2006 Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

(UNDATED) Between 1935 and 1943 _ the height of the Great Depression and the early years of World War II _ the federal government embarked on one of the most remarkable and ambitious artistic projects in American history.

Under the auspices of what became known as the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, photographers traveled the country making a visual record of the impact of the Depression and the war on the American people.

The mostly amateur (and at the time unknown) photographers _ among them Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, John Vachon and Walker Evans _ took thousands of pictures. Some 164,000 black-and-white negatives have been preserved in the Library of Congress.

Among the fraction of religious photographs are pictures of families saying grace, river baptisms, itinerant preachers, stark wooden churches in rural settings, Salvation Army officers in San Francisco, and boys studying Hebrew texts in rural Colchester, Conn.

Colleen McDannell, a professor of history and religious studies at the University of Utah, has compiled a fascinating study of the religious images from the project in a book, “Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression” (Yale University Press).

The purpose of the New Deal project was both to document and to propagandize.

“If Americans saw the lives of the poor,” McDannell writes in the book, “they would be more concerned about poverty in the United States” and more supportive of New Deal efforts to respond to the Depression.

The chapters of “Picturing Faith” generally follow the chronology of the federal project, but they also are topical. The book begins with an overview of the project’s assumptions and goals, followed by separate looks at subjects such as the South, city congregations, rural Jewish farmers, African-Americans in Chicago and Roman Catholics in New Mexico.

“Picturing Faith” makes a complex and nuanced argument.

McDannell wants to challenge the pervasive view associated with most presentations of the government images: that they present a “decidedly secular” America. She acknowledges that the 1930s was “a profoundly secular period of American history” and that Roy Stryker, the head of the historical section of the Farm Security Administration who directed the project, and his photographers were among the “unchurched.”

Yet despite that secularity, Stryker told his photographers to include pictures of things religious, and they complied.

Because photography can depict some but not all aspects of religious experience _ and in part because of their own attitudes about religion, art, and the project’s need to show the poor as both dignified and deserving _ the photographers focused on certain expressions of faith and ignored others.

“Their `eyes’ were shaped by their own personal biographies, their understanding of the project’s mission, the reigning standards of art, and the changing American political environment,” McDannell writes.

Over the life of the federal project, two slightly different motives directed the work as its mission shifted. During the Depression, the aim was to portray the essential dignity of the poor and those displaced by the economic cataclysm that had shaken America to its roots. During the war, however, photographers used religion and religious communities “as ways to assert the cohesiveness of American society.”

As America prepared to enter the war, McDannell notes, religion “ceased to be merely one element of culture and became one of four essential freedoms upon which a moral order could be built.”

The difference in motives can be seen in McDannell’s reading of the photographs of Christian charity taken before and during the war. Before the war, she sees a near-hostility on the part of the photographers toward churches providing charity and thus undermining the dignity of the poor. But during the war, they viewed the provision of charity as a reflection of the strength and diversity of the nation.

The photographers, she argues, “like other Roosevelt New Dealers, were optimistic that the federal government could make substantial changes in the lives of the poor and the unemployed. … The ideals of the New Deal that shaped the outlook of the FSA/OWI photographers were created by men and women who believed … that private and religious charities could neither appropriately address the problems of the Depression nor act as a foundation for protecting Americans against future economic and social instability.”

It’s a perspective particularly worth noting in light of contemporary debate about faith-based charities, welfare policy and social work.

But McDannell also finds that some of the photographers _ specifically Vachon’s pictures of the City Mission in Dubuque, Iowa, and Lange’s photos of the Salvation Army in San Francisco _ refused “to accept the state’s isolation of belief rituals and supernaturalism from welfare and social reform. Evangelical social workers provided an alternative model of reform from that offered by the New Deal.”

McDannell is the curator of an exhibition of photographs from “Picturing Faith” that will travel in 2006 from Kansas City, Mo., to Grand Rapids, Mich., Syracuse, N.Y., and Kingston, R.I.

In the book, McDannell briefly but informatively sketches the background of each photographer. She interprets their religious photographs not just in the immediate context of when and where they were shot, but also in a broader economic and cultural context.

To her credit, McDannell challenges the “eye” of the photographers when their work fails to capture the fullness of faith and its expression. Yet she understands the limits of the medium.

Of Lange, for example, she writes: “There are no pictures that lead us to think that religion breaks through and breaks apart normal life.” More broadly, she adds: “Just as the FSA/OWI file does not contain pictures depicting the inflamed passions of labor meetings, it does not show religious practices that provoke extreme emotional responses. Praying, like other activities of the poor, is pictured as intense but never inflammatory. From the perspective of the file, religion does not call people to do unusual things. Faith is pictured as present but not threatening.”

“Picturing Faith” is a rich combination of sharply insightful social and religious history and sympathetic but astute aesthetic criticism. It is an essential contribution to understanding the “cultural worth” of religious life at a critical moment in the nation’s history “when Americans intensely engaged the world beyond and integrated it into their everyday lives.”

KRE/PH END ANDERSON

Editors: To obtain photos from the book and exhibit, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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