“American Iconography: Assessing FSA Photographs, 1945,” Visual Resources 30/3 (2014): 239-54.

American Iconography 1

4 Sears

1



AUTHOR'S FINAL DRAFT OF PAPER PUBLISHED IN VISUAL RESOURCES


American Iconography: Assessing FSA Photographs, 1945

Elizabeth Sears

In Washington, DC, in 1945 the German émigré art historian Edgar Breitenbach, a recently naturalized American citizen, was witness to and participant in a bold experiment in the ordering of visual documents. The vast assemblage of photographs recording American ways of life that had been generated during the Great Depression and war era under the guidance of Roy E. Stryker, working for a succession of government agencies including the Farm Security Administration, was soon to be deposited in the Library of Congress. Stryker had appointed the visionary classifier Paul Vanderbilt to give shape to the archive. Vanderbilt hired Breitenbach to help, and thus a European "iconographer," trained in Hamburg by Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, and Erwin Panofsky, found himself applying his skills to contemporary American cultural documents. Eight small exhibits mounted by the staff January–July 1945, three by Breitenbach, give insight into the thoughts and aspirations of the classifiers.


Keywords: Roy E. Stryker (1893–1975); Paul Vanderbilt (1905–1992); Edgar Breitenbach (1903–1977); Farm Security Administration; Office of War Information; Library of Congress; Shooting Script



In 1945, as the second world war was nearing its end, a massive cache of photographic prints documenting American life and mores was being readied for permanent deposit at the Library of Congress. The photographs had been taken under the auspices of three government agencies—the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937), the Farm Security Administration [FSA] (1937–1942), and the Office of War Information [OWI] (1942–1944). Photographers of the caliber of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee had been sent out into the field as investigators, as fact-gatherers; and, if occasionally saddled with government assignment work, they had been encouraged all along to seize the moment, to document background conditions, to capture significant cultural detail. In 1944, by executive order, the collection was made over to the Library of Congress as a historical archive, and the task became one of assessing what had been discovered with the camera and devising a scheme of classification that would give access in perpetuity to a spectacularly wide range of serendipitously generated content. Three figures come into the present story: Roy E. Stryker, guiding genius of the project throughout its generative phase, 1935–1943; Paul Vanderbilt, system-builder, chosen by Stryker to order the corpus, 1942–1945; and Edgar Breitenbach, Hamburg-trained "iconographer," hired by Vanderbilt to assist and thus involved as witness and participant in 1945.

Three Men in Washington

Stryker moved to Washington from New York in the summer of 1935 as a protégé of Rexford Guy Tugwell—a member of Roosevelt's Brains Trust—to become Chief of the Historical Section of the Division of Information of the Resettlement Administration. A vague charge to gather informational material relating to government programs and activities gave Stryker leave to launch a photographic campaign, one that evolved rapidly, especially after the RA was transformed into the FSA in 1937. The photographers' chief and primary task was to amass visual evidence of the need for and efficacy of Roosevelt's New Deal programs, intended to alleviate suffering in rural America during the Great Depression. But even at the outset and increasingly over time, Stryker directed his people to focus not only on critical but also on typical situations, to record American modes of life, rural, small-town, and urban. He later described FSA photographs as providing what was "back of the action"—"frequently a mood, an accent, but more frequently a sketch and not infrequently a story." Much changed once the United States had entered the war. In September 1942, the photographic corpus was transferred en bloc to the OWI to be repurposed for wartime use. New photography, focusing on themes like military manufacturing and the soldier's life, became more propagandistic, less sociological, in character. Stryker resigned in September 1943. But for eight years, acting as "the Stabilizer and the Exciter," he had fought budget battles, directed the photographic campaigns, overseen the dissemination of images, and, through his efforts, educated the American public. The photographers worked for self and a cause. Vanderbilt later spoke of "the anger" that had inspired the project. From Washington Stryker guided his people to collective endeavor through instructions, verbal and written, and jointly crafted "shooting scripts." The series of images that they generated were loosely linked by a plethora of overlapping themes; this is what made the task of classification at once difficult and possible.
In Vanderbilt—art historian, librarian, bibliographer, and photographer—Stryker found a fellow visionary, one whose expertise lay in the organization of knowledge. The two men first discussed FSA "file problems" in Washington in 1941. Vanderbilt was at the time employed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, engaged in "experimental library organization." He was temperamentally disposed to tackle large problems. His CV shows him taking up one-time archiving projects, sitting on planning committees, and preparing technical reports—including one in 1939 for Archibald MacLeish, newly appointed Librarian of Congress, to lay out how, as Europe went to war, "the recorded cultural resources of the world" might be made available in America through a program of microfilming and purchase. Vanderbilt was developing in those years a "theory of total documentation," which would involve integrating for the researcher all available types of record on a given subject; he included in his lists such forms as books, statistics, maps, motion-pictures, card-indexes, diagrams, photographs, and unpublished correspondence. The class of archivable documents that, in his view, had garnered least technical attention "in proportion to its potential significance" was photography, "the nearest thing we have to the actual preservation of reality." Stryker was sufficiently impressed by Vanderbilt's thoughts on "Filing" to recommend that he write the relevant entry for Willard D. Morgan's Encyclopedia of Photography, coming out in installments in those years; Stryker himself contributed "Documentary Photography."
Vanderbilt overlapped with Stryker for a year. He came into the project at the moment when the FSA corpus was being transferred to the OWI, his initial task (October to December 1942) being to reorganize the file for wartime use. In January 1943 he became "Visual Information Specialist" and in February 1944—it having been decided that the archive would go to the Library of Congress—custodian of the collection and liaison officer for the OWI with the LC. Before August 1945 when the OWI was abolished, Vanderbilt had a classification system in place. In 1946, after a year in Berlin as Assistant Archives Officer with the U.S. War Department, he returned to Washington to become Chief of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress and thus oversaw the physical transfer of the photographic corpus.
Breitenbach arrived at the OWI in the heyday of the classifying project. A recently naturalized American citizen, he had been employed at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) monitoring German broadcasts until D-Day brought that to an end. Vanderbilt—driven and intense, working himself and his staff to exhaustion—came to realize that he needed an assistant; he hired Breitenbach, having heard the émigré was an "iconographer." This was nothing less than the truth, but Vanderbilt could scarcely have known quite all he had acquired through the appointment. Breitenbach was a product of the "Hamburg School" of art history and a member of the circle around the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for the Cultural Study), which meant he had been schooled to see images as cultural documents and inculcated in the investigation of pictorial types. He had participated in Aby Warburg's seminar on "The Significance of Antiquity for Stylistic Change in the Italian Renaissance" in 1925–26; helped arrange books in Warburg's encyclopedic library; conducted research on mythological and astrological manuscripts in London and Paris for Fritz Saxl; and worked with Saxl preparing an image-series for incorporation into Warburg's (never completed) pictorial atlas, Mnemosyne. Breitenbach completed his PhD under Erwin Panofsky, summa cum laude, at Hamburg in 1927, the year Vanderbilt received his BA in art history at Harvard. His doctoral dissertation was an exhaustive study of image cycles in manuscripts of the late medieval devotional work, the Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation): in it he had undertaken to trace the history and prehistory of each of the mages that regularly accompanied the text, thus following transformations in 168 pictorial "types" across 353 manuscripts—which he had divided into groups and subgroups on the basis of visual evidence. He would always be interested "less in the aesthetic than in the historical, sociological, and philosophical dimensions of an image."
Like Vanderbilt, Breitenbach had opted for a career in librarianship. He had trained in Göttingen and Berlin in the same years that Vanderbilt undertook relevant study in London and Lausanne. In 1933, when the National Socialists came to power, Breitenbach was serving as a high-level administrator (Bibliotheksrat) at the Frankfurt City Library, responsible for a staff of twenty. As the son of a Jewish father, though raised Lutheran, he was dismissed from his post as a "non-Aryan" and his peregrinations began: to Basel, to London, and in 1937 to San Francisco and beyond. In 1945 he worked as Vanderbilt's assistant and in 1956—after a decade in Germany with the Allied forces—succeeded him as Chief of the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress, becoming himself de facto curator of the FSA–OWI collection. Back in the day, in '45, Breitenbach brought a European eye to the piquant task of analyzing contemporary visual documents and giving contour to specifically American iconographies.



Figure 1 FSA photographers John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee studying mounted prints with Roy Stryker (far right), taken by Beaumont Newhall. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ds-01154.

Stryker's Scripts

The FSA–OWI archive was susceptible to systematic classification because of convergences in form and content across the holdings. These coherences were owed in good part to Stryker's lead. Though no photographer himself, his life, as he said, had been "turned to rectangles." His biography is relevant, for the images that took shape in his mind were derived from experience. Stryker was a product of rural America, a westerner come east. Born in Kansas, raised in Colorado, the son of a Populist father, he had homesteaded and raised cattle, worked as a miner, studied at the Colorado School of Mines. After serving in the first world war, he made his way to New York and became aware of urban conditions while studying economics at Columbia University. He received a BA and worked toward an MA while teaching for Tugwell, becoming known for arranging experiential class sessions outside the classroom. Stryker's absorption with the documentary photograph dated to this time. Tugwell asked him to gather illustrations for a textbook in the making, American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement (1925); Stryker studied a lot of photographs, came to know the pioneering "social photographer" Lewis Hine, and developed a sense of the potentials of the photograph as an agent of change. Before heading to Washington he had embarked on another project, never realized: the preparation of a four-volume "Pictorial History of American Agriculture." Its table of contents would long play a shaping role in the instructions he gave his photographers: his own broad vision could be made to mesh often enough with government interests.
In Washington Stryker both generated and satisfied demands for photographs from government agencies, news services, authors, exhibitors, and the public at large. He regularly transmitted instructions, general and specific, to his photographers in the field. To Rothstein, in Nebraska, in April 1936, he gave guidance which was acted upon (Figure 2).

Wherever land pictures are taken to show bad economic adjustments, try hard to relate poor houses and barns with poor land. In the case of erosion pictures, try to show as far as possible, cultural features as well as the eroded land, e.g., gullied fields with crop land in the background, or houses and barns in the background. If possible get more stories in the pictures. The news people are running us ragged for such things as the following: (a) Debt Adjustment Committees at work (even if staged); (b) agricultural advisers talking with clients regarding planting problems, farm layout, and so on; (c) home demonstration advisers conferring with wives regarding gardens, canning, etc.; (d) health pictures such as bad sanitary conditions….



Figure 2 Arthur Rothstein, Empty barn and idle truck in drought area, Beach, North Dakota, July 1936. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-005060-D.


Stryker sent his people out into the field informed about the issues at stake; he expected them to make local contacts and exercise independent judgment. The ideal FSA photographer was described as "something of a sociologist, something of an economist," a "social investigator," one who was "forever reading." Formal criteria were articulated but kept open. One memo read: "A picture is good when it presents its ideas simply, clearly, and interestingly." "All elements should be there for a purpose." "The obviously unessential items in the picture should be, if possible, excluded." "Make the picture tell the major part of the story. Some written matter (a caption) is in a preponderant part of the cases a necessity." Certain commonalities were owed to imitation. John Vachon would remember that when he first ventured into the field, he "went around looking for Walker Evans' pictures." But most were the product of common cause and a good deal of advance planning. Stryker liked to write memoranda. With others, and in collaboration with his photographers, he generated copious numbers of "shooting scripts" that took the form of lists of subjects to be on the watch for.
Stryker saw the camera as a tool for sociological research. A conversation with Robert Lynd, author of Middletown (1929), first made him think about the character of the American "small town" (population under 5000). The developing focus would accelerate the shift away from exclusive concern with the plight of the "lower third" of the population. A seven-page memorandum dated May 2, 1939, titled "Suggestions for a Documentary Photographic Study of the Small Town in America," opened with a series of questions, among them: "What are the common denominators of life in these towns? Can they be significantly portrayed with the camera?" The idea was to launch an "experiment in photo-documentation." The accompanying outline supplied rubrics: twenty-two main headings (On the street, Stores, Theaters, Banks, etc.), some eighty subheadings, and another one hundred sub-subheadings, each describing a potential photographic subject. Various of the categories were woven into subsequent scripts, whether "Winter in New England," "Corn and Hogs," "Minnesota and Wisconsin," or "Potatoes." Stryker later reflected on the effect of his various instructions: "the pictures came back, always so surprisingly different from what I've visualized and yet so satisfyingly like the shots I'd asked for."
The photographic file saw extensive use in the day. Stryker and Edwin Rosskam, photographer and writer, his right-hand man, mobilized the material, extracting sets of photographs on given themes, generating long lists of stories that could be told through the images—in some ways anticipating Vanderbilt's work. A filing system had been developed early on to allow retrieval of images. John Vachon doubled as photographer and classifier in charge. His scheme was straightforward: mounted and captioned prints were ordered by state (all forty-eight beginning with Alabama) and by story (photos taken at a given place on a given theme). By 1941 it was becoming clear that the system was beginning to buckle under its own weight. Cross-headings sent users to unwieldy files: Rosskam complained that he was beginning to avoid "Texas" altogether as there were so many drawers headed "Texas–small town." Stryker, against some local resistance, brought in Vanderbilt to sort things out—an outsider possessed of a mind "as sharp as a razor blade."

Vanderbilt's Systems

Vanderbilt was attracted by the scale of the undertaking. 88,000 photographic prints had been generated during Stryker's time (77,000 from FSA–OWI negatives and 10,000 acquired from outside sources). This gave scope for experiment. His would be a system with no empty categories, developed out of the visual stock, which he set out to know. Shortly after Vanderbilt arrived, Jack Delano delivered a series of images taken in Puerto Rico, December 1941–January 1942, and he worked through them one by one. Over time he apprised himself of the history of the FSA–OWI project and came to detect five phases in its evolution. He saw his task as one of constructing the visual equivalent of a bibliography; later he would define an iconographic collection (or "iconography") as a "gathering of images or representations which show some stated subject or person or place or symbol, so that the subject may be studied in the light of the various ways in which it has been recorded by artists and photographers." The overriding purpose of such collections, he felt, was to support comparative study. "Ideally," he wrote, "an iconography assembles enough pictures to exemplify adequately all the significant changes and variations in a pattern of environment and behavior as well as all the more subtly significant changes and variations in ways that pattern is observed and interpreted."
In building his system, because he had but one print of each photograph, Vanderbilt was obliged to think in very concrete terms. Secondary headings could be recorded in a card index, but the scheme had to offer each image its optimal, most logical position in a file drawer. Breitenbach would later say that it was not so much a cataloguing job as one of "arranging." And he would add that the subject was never so much the ostensible theme ("landscape") as that which had drawn the photographer to the scene, the reason he took the picture. Vanderbilt had to decide in tens of thousands of cases what a given photograph was most about. Like Vachon before him, he arranged the corpus by geography and subject. The first ordering was now by region (Northeast, Midwest, Northwest, South, Southwest, Farwest), then by subject, and within each subject by state. He drew on the Dewey Decimal system, then favored in libraries, and developed nested categories and subcategories, all subdivisible, using numbers to generate the outline. Category 4, for example, was devoted to Homes and living conditions; subcategory 45 collected images on Housework, a surprisingly colorful category, and this was variously subdivided: 4506 was given over to Water supply (wells, pumps, buckets); 451 to Food preparation, 453 to Canning and preserving, 45315 to Community Canning Centers, 454 to Eating.
The overarching scheme began with "the land," went on to cities and towns, and thence to people, homes, transportation, work, organized society, war, medicine and health, individual and creative activity, social and personal activity. Breitenbach later describing the flow, said it was almost as if one began with Genesis, the creation. First there were pictures of sky and clouds, then the earth, trees and plants, and only then did mankind come on the scene—"in various sexes, various categories, various age groups, but not in any professional aspect, just as a type." Home life followed, and then, transportation—for this brings people from home to work—and then the full gamut of occupations, which led on to the organization of society, government, religion and rest. Like encyclopedists of old, Vanderbilt tried to bring categorical order to the chaos of the perceived world. He came to hope that his scheme might be applied to all the holdings of the Prints and Photographs Division; Breitenbach commented: "It is not surprising that it just did not work."
One component of Vanderbilt's system, that of the "lot," had a long life at the LC. It was clear from the outset that, unless countermeasures were taken, the reordering of prints by subject would cause contextual data to be lost. To preserve a record of the relations among individual photographs in any series, Vanderbilt instituted the practice of making microfilmed records of one-time assemblages of photographs and giving each a lot number. Thus Rothstein's photograph of barn and land (Figure 2), wherever it appeared in the file drawers, would be documented as having belonged to a series of fifty-four photographs of drought taken in North Dakota, July 1936 (Lot 386). Any ephemeral constellation could be documented as a lot, e.g. forty-three prints illustrating "Negro Achievements" (Lot 2312) or forty-eight showing "Varied Uses of Stainless Steel" (Lot 2317), collected respectively by representatives of the Southern Publishing Association (Seventh Day Adventists) and the Electro-Metallurgical Company. In his day, Vanderbilt had some 1800 lots microfilmed.
Vanderbilt would later say of himself that his specialty lay in "the use of photographs after they are made," and that he designed collections in such a way that "creative selections and combinations can be made and re-made in infinite variety." It was in this spirit that, from January to July 1945, while the archive was still housed at the OWI, the staff mounted eight small exhibits in its future home, the file room of the Photograph Section of the Library of Congress. Each exhibit was microfilmed and preserved as a lot. Breitenbach arranged three.

Breitenbach's Exhibits

Vanderbilt opened the series of exhibits in January 1945 with one entitled "The American Language." For it he extracted twenty-two photographs of people talking. Two or more figures sit, squat, or stand, heads together, sometimes gesturing, the tenor of the conversation suggested through body language. He had thus defined the pictorial type of verbal interchange and signaled a potential for study. Back in 1923 in Hamburg, Saxl had fixed upon the very same motif at the time he and Panofsky were working through the implications of the "type-historical" method. Saxl used diachronic study of images of persons in dialogue to distinguish pagan from early Christian mentalities. Vanderbilt drew no implications, though he may have meant the comparison among images generated synchronically from Texas to Vermont to reveal commonalities, or subtle distinctions, across class, race, and gender. Two others of the eight exhibits similarly focused on expressive figural types: one on "Sleep" (category 465 in Vanderbilt's scheme) and another "America Sings," drawing from "Music" (category 916). Another exhibit, "Main Street," presented photographs Stryker had specifically encouraged his photographers to explore, and "Barn Architecture" sifted out relevant images from the extensive files on farms and farm life. Breitenbach's three exhibits, like these, offer reports on holdings, but his seem more like interpretive essays; or at least, it is not hard to discover an animating purpose in line with his particular art historical training. Recent experience seems also to have played its part in his choices.
Breitenbach came to the task of analyzing FSA images with more direct knowledge of American life than might be expected of an émigré. He had entered the United States "by the back door," as he said, landing in California rather than New York. He settled first in Oakland, where he taught for four years at Mills College, till the position folded. He then moved north, to Aberdeen, Washington, to a junior college housed in a condemned elementary school building in a depressed lumber town, where he taught German and French to exhausted young lumberjacks. At the end of the year, he and his British wife bought a Studebaker and started driving, stopping to pick peaches with migrant workers. Landing in Colorado Springs, Breitenbach was about to take up a job as carpenter's mate with the crew building the Minnequa Canal, when, at a cocktail party, he met the director of the new Taylor Museum, Mitchell Wilder, who invited him, as an "iconographer," to co-write a book on a museum collection, and in 1943, Santos: the Religious Folk Art of New Mexico appeared. And so Vanderbilt had found himself once again tracing the life of pictorial types, in this instance types that had migrated from Europe to America—some very old or very strange, e.g. the Trinity in three persons bound by a chain. Soon on the move again, he worked in Texas as a route man for Texaco, riding fences; and then he sorted and stamped mail as a temporary postal clerk. Once he had acquired citizenship, he made his way to Washington, and ultimately onto Vanderbilt's staff.
Breitenbach's first exhibit, mounted in February 1945, was an extension of the work for Santos. There he had studied religious artifacts displayed in a museum; now he could use photographs as ethnographical witnesses and discover ceremonial contexts in which such items were used. The show was entitled "Religious Folklore" and described as: "Photographs of unusual religious objects and customs, Catholic and Protestant, from various parts of the United States and Puerto Rico." Breitenbach started with symbols discovered in photographs ostensibly about other things: the hand of God at the top of a steeple, the eye of God overlooking a court room in Rustberg, Virginia. From symbols he proceeded to the housing of holy images and the handling of santos, through to rituals surrounding relics. FSA photographs were thus shown to serve the enmeshed study of art and religion, a quintessentially Warburgian pursuit.
Breitenbach's next venture had him asking questions about pictorial structure. At issue was the implied presence or absence of a spectator, and it may be significant that Breitenbach's colleague at Mills College, the émigré art historian Alfred Neumeyer, who had studied in Hamburg 1926–27, was then working on the phenomenon of the "gaze out from within the image." Breitenbach developed the exhibit "Animals Looking at You," finding a means from choosing among the overwhelmingly plenteous pictures of livestock: cows and sheep, hogs and horses (Vanderbilt's category 54). Described as "A selection of en-face and profile portraits of domesticated animals," it brought together images of animals brightly, quizzically, or lazily fastening their regard on the figure with the camera, and so too establishing a link with the viewer (Figure 3). The collected images create a hilarious display—Breitenbach had a mischievous sense of humor; but it was a form of serious play.



Figure 3 Jack Delano, Cows on the farm of an FSA client near Cheshire, Connecticut, September 1940. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-041681-D.


Breitenbach's final exhibit, "Barber shops and barber poles," displayed in July 1945, focused on a secular ritual and a secular symbol. Given that the barber pole is a shop sign of medieval European origin, that it dates back to the days when barber–surgeons cut hair, extracted teeth, let blood, and advertised their services by means of a pole encircled by bloody rags—the image would have appeal to the iconographer. Photographs were plenteous (Vanderbilt's category 6488), as Stryker had included barbershops and haircutting in many of his small-town shooting scripts. Breitenbach selected out images of makeshift and professional haircutting and photographs of crafted three-dimensional poles (authentic folk art) and their surrogates: a painted tree masquerading as a pole (Figure 4) or two-dimensional representations on storefronts. One photograph he chose, a detail of a storefront in a small town in Texas (Figure 5), documented an iconographic program. The complex of images suggests that, as in days of old, this was a multi-purpose shop: health tonic was sold and hair was cut, the latter service advertised by the representation of a pole and the silhouetted image of barber and barber chair, itself a new pictorial type of recognizable contour.





Figures 4, 5 Russell Lee, Barber pole on tree, Kenner, Louisiana, September 1938. Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF33-011623-M5. Russell Lee, Front of Mexican barbershop, San Antonio, Texas, March 1939. Photos: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USF33-012079-M2.


Breitenbach's exhibits, each in turn, point at a conceptual problem that the FSA–OWI photographs might be called upon to tackle: the place of sacred symbols and artifacts in popular religious practice; the relation of photographer and subject; the adaptation and use of an old symbol and the generation of a new pictorial type from lived experience. Whether consciously articulated or not, it is an expansive view, rooted in a Warburgian training.

Epilogue

Vanderbilt's and Breitenbach's lives continued interlinked for a time. Both went overseas with the U.S. forces, Vanderbilt for a year and Breitenbach, recommended by Vanderbilt, for ten. Breitenbach's adventures continued: he worked with the Allied forces in Germany, first tracking down art looted by the Nazis with the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Section and then helping to reorganize the postwar library system and set up the American Memorial Library in Berlin. In 1954 Vanderbilt left the Library of Congress to take up a gentler position at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, where he would long curate the "iconographical collections"; Breitenbach served as a dynamic Chief of the Print and Photograph Division until 1973. Vanderbilt kept thinking and writing about visual archives, their purpose and organization, and whenever a retrospective eye was cast on the FSA project, he was a man to contact. The success of the exhibition, "The Bitter Years, 1935–1941: Rural America Seen by the Photographers of the Farm Security," mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, organized by Edward Steichen, caused a resurgence of interest. In 1963, during the Kennedy administration, when Stewart Udall was Secretary of the Interior, there was a call to reinvigorate federal photographic work on the model of the FSA. Vanderbilt was asked to prepare a report, and his seven-page memorandum, providing history, setting out principles, supplying cautions, was circulated among interested parties. The need for a "living file of American photography" was widely acknowledged. But the project came to naught. The times were deemed unpropitious, and there was no Stryker to make it work.



ELIZABETH SEARS is George H. Forsyth Jr. Collegiate Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan. Trained in the Warburgian tradition, she specializes in western medieval representational arts—especially manuscript illumination—and disciplinary historiography. She has investigated the life and work of figures including Aby Warburg, Adolph Goldschmidt, Edgar Wind, W. S. Heckscher, Jean Seznec, and H. W. Janson and is now completing a book set in the years 1929–1964 treating the intellectual movement that traced its origins to the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg. Her recent work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and residential fellowships in Rome, Hamburg, Berlin, and Washington.


Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my colleague Rebecca Zurier for generous guidance; to Alan Fern, who worked with Breitenbach at the Library of Congress for twelve years and succeeded him in 1973, for illuminating conversations; and to Jennifer B. Shank, Breitenbach's daughter, for kind permission to draw upon her father's papers.





Most of the FSA–OWI collection (77,000 original prints,175,000 negatives, 1600 color transparencies) and certain key documents (Lot 12024) have been digitized and can be accessed on the Library of Congress website. Scholarly studies, extensive, include: 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); Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); as well as many studies of individual photographers, e.g. Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
For Stryker see: Roy E. Stryker papers, 1912–1972, preserved at the University of Louisville, microfilm edition in fifteen reels, ed. David Horvath (Teaneck, NJ: Chadwyck-Healey, 1982); Oral History Interview by Richard Doud, 1963–1965 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution [AAA], online); Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, essays in In this Proud Land: America 1935–1943 as seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973).
Stryker, In this Proud Land, 8.
Stryker, In this Proud Land, 9.
Vanderbilt to Stryker, October 1, 1963 (Stryker papers, ser. I, microfilm).
Vanderbilt's papers, extensive, are deposited at the AAA; they include numerous biographical resumés (Box 1); Oral History Interview with Richard Doud, November 10, 1964 (AAA). See also Paul Vanderbilt, ed. Jerry Dell and Sheri Fredrickson, exh. cat. (Green Bay: Midwest Region of the Society for Photographic Education, 1984) with essays by Dell, "Introduction"; and Vanderbilt, "Discovering Implications."
See correspondence between Stryker and Vanderbilt, before August 8–October 6, 1941 (Vanderbilt papers, Box 1, AAA); Vanderbilt to Stryker, October 1, 1963 (Stryker papers, ser. I, microfilm).
"Resumé of Professional Experience" (1942), 1; "Chronology and Professional Experience" (1944), 3 (Vanderbilt papers, Box 1, AAA).
"Biographical chronology, in connection with the Fine Arts" (1941), 3; and "Resumé" (1942), 1 (Vanderbilt papers, Box 1, AAA).
"Resumé" (1942) (Vanderbilt papers, Box 1, AAA)
The FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein, Stryker's student and protégé, wrote the entry "Direction in the Picture Story." All three entries appeared in 1942 in the journal The Complete Photographer; Stryker's alone seems to have made it into the revised Encyclopedia of Photography in 20 vols. (New York: Greystone Press, 1964), vol. 7, 1179–83.
Vanderbilt, "Preliminary Report," October 31, 1942 (thirty-one pages) (Vanderbilt papers, Box 3, AAA), and resumés (Box 1). On the OWI, established in June 1942, abolished August 31, 1945, see Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
Stryker, Doud Interview, 1964. The Librarian of Congress was a friend to the project: in 1938 MacLeish had published a volume of poetry based on FSA photographs, Land of the Free.
Vanderbilt to Sargeant Child, August 21, 1945; resumés (Box 1, AAA). Vanderbilt had full access to past memoranda, shooting scripts and the like; part of his task was to order written documents produced during Stryker's regime for deposit at the LC (Lot 12024). Certain of these documents and Vanderbilt's own working drafts are preserved among his papers at the AAA.
Biographical materials on Breitenbach include papers at the New York Public Library (Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, Box 46, f. 41); correspondence, Warburg Institute Archive, London; Oral History Interview by Paul Cummings, February 18, 1975 (AAA); Breitenbach's "Erinnerungen" in Bibliothek '76 international. Rückschau und Ausblick: eine Freundesgabe für Werner Mevissen zu seinem 65. Geburtstag (Bremen: Stadtbibliothek, 1976), 40–46. See also essays by Wolf Von Eckardt and Alan Fern in In Memoriam Edgar Breitenbach, June 26, 1903–October 12, 1977 (Waldkirch: Waldkircher Verlagsgesellschaft, 1978); Gisela von Busse, "Edgar Breitenbach in memoriam (1903–1977): Zugleich Bruchstücke aus einem Kapitel deutscher Nachkriegs-Bibliotheksgeschichte," Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 25 (1978): 167–79.
Breitenbach, Cummings interview, 47 (AAA). On Breitenbach'see memos from Vanderbilt, January 6 and June 19, 1945 (Vanderbilt papers, Box 3, AAA); and letters from Breitenbach to Saxl, June 19 and August 15, 1945 (WIA).
For this tradition, one may start with E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970). On the immigration of the KBW to London, see Elizabeth Sears, "The Warburg Institute, 1933–1944: A Precarious Experiment in Amalgamation," Art Libraries Journal 38, no. 4 (2013): 7–15.
Speculum Humanae Salvationis: Eine typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Strassburg: Heitz, 1930).
Breitenbach, Cummings interview, 10 (AAA).
Stryker, Doud interview, 1965 (AAA, online).
On the textbook, co-authored by Tugwell and Thomas Munro, and Stryker's relations with Hine, see, Stange, Symbols, 89–105.
Two book proposals with a posited completion date of 1940 survive (Stryker papers, ser. II, pt. B, microfilm); see also letter to collaborator Prof. Harry J. Carman, November 1, 1935 (ser. I). Stryker, assisted by Rothstein, collected some 3000 photographs for the book. See Doud interview, 1964 (AAA, online).
Stryker to Rothstein, April 29, 1936 (Stryker papers, ser. I, microfilm).
"The F. S. A. Photographer," Memorandum, n. d. (LC website, lot 12024: "FSA–OWI documents"; http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/fsawr/fsawr.html#shooting
"Criteria to Guide Field Information in the Taking and Selection of Photographs," n. d. (Vanderbilt papers, Box 3, AAA).
Oral History Interview with John Vachon, by Richard Doud, April 28, 1964 (AAA, online). 
Stryker preserved a memo generated after a conversation with Lynd in New York City in 1936, listing "things which should be photographed as American Background" (Stryker papers, ser. II, pt. C, sect. 3a). Talks with Ruth Goodhue, managing editor of Architectural Forum, also played a role. See Doud interview, 1964 (AAA, online).
LC website, lot 12024 (as n. 24). For further scripts, see Stryker papers, ser. II, pt. C, sect. 3, microfilm).
Stryker, "The Thirties, with Love: A Personal Account of the Farm Security Administration's Photographic Unit, as told to Calvin Kytle," 1; ca. 1962 (Stryker papers, ser. II, pt. B, microfilm.
See, for example, "General Memo of Special Sets of Picture Portfolios on Exhibits to be Developed from the Files," January 18, 1941 (Stryker papers, ser. II, pt. C, sect. 3); and lists of stories (ser. II, pt. C, sect. 1). Also "Picture Stories available in the FSA Collection," August 1, 1939; "Picture Requests" (Vanderbilt papers, Box 3, AAA).
Vachon, Doud interview, 1964 (AAA, online). The negative number served to link components: negative, caption, mounted photo, and duplicate prints.
Memo from Rosskam to Stryker, July 5, 1941 (Vanderbilt papers, Box 3, AAA); he went on to list "stories" that could be pulled out for the convenience of the customer. On Rosskam, see Oral History Interview with Richard Doud, August 5, 1965 (AAA, online).
Stryker, Doud interview, 1964 (AAA, online). When Vanderbilt came, Vachon felt that his "beautiful instrument was totally destroyed." Vachon, Doud interview, 1964 (AAA, online).
Vanderbilt to Stryker, October 1, 1963 (Stryker papers, ser. 1, microfilm).
Vanderbilt, Guide to the Special Collections of Prints & Photographs in the Library of Congress (Washington, 1955), 54.
Vanderbilt, "Iconography: A Definition and Interpretation," Wisconsin Magazine of History 41 (Winter 1957–58): 107–12, at 107.
Vanderbilt, "Iconography," 112.
Breitenbach, Cummings interview, 47 (AAA).
The relevant LC files—87,000 captioned prints in Vanderbilt's sequences—have been photographed and are available on microfiche: America, 1935–1946 (Teaneck, NJ: Chadwyck-Healey, 1980).
Breitenbach, Cummings interview, 47–48 (AAA).
Breitenbach, Cummings interview, 47 (AAA).
On "lots," see LC website, "FSA–OWI Collection."
Dell, quoting Vanderbilt, in Paul Vanderbilt, Introduction, n. p.
There is no documentation on the exhibits, to my knowledge, aside from the LC "lots" records.
LC, Lot 2306 (online), 22 photographs. See Saxl, "Frühes Christentum und spätes Heidentum in ihren künstlerischen Ausdrucksformen" (1923), rpt. in Fritz Saxl, Gebärde, Form, Ausdruck: Zwei Untersuchungen, ed. Pablo Schneider (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 11–93.
In his essay, "Documentary Photography," 1181, Stryker used the example of the silo to distinguish FSA pictures from "salon prints": the FSA photographer resists the temptation to go for the dramatic angle shot from below but tells the story of the silo by shooting the structure "so that it stands in proper size relationship to the farmhouse and the fields behind, with the light used to bring out the texture of the structure and the quality of the day, and with the farmer and his hired man unloading corn in the foreground."
Breitenbach, Cummings interview, 23–41, at 23 (AAA).
In those months Breitenbach contacted both his Hamburg teachers, Panofsky and Saxl, on iconographic matters; Panofsky's opinions are cited three times in Santos, n. p.
LC, Lot 2313 (online), 22 photos.
Neumeyer had been working on the subject in Germany before 1933, but only three decades later published his book Der Blick aus dem Bilde (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1964).
LC, Lot 2321 (online), 22 photos.
LC, Lot 2322 (online), 22 photos.
Vanderbilt to Sargeant Child, August 21, 1945 (Box 1, AAA).
See Breitenbach, "Historical Survey of the Activities of the Intelligence Department, MFA & A Section, OMBG, 1946–1949," College Art Journal 9 (Winter 1949–50): 192–98; Busse, "Edgar Breitenbach."
Breitenbach, in a letter (in German) to Panofsky, June 30, 1957, described how Vanderbilt, "full of ideas" but a poor administrator, drowned in the flood of documentary photographs that came into the Division under his watch and had a nervous breakdown—at which point he was given a mercy post as "Consultant on Iconography" at the LC (1950–1954). Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz, ed. Dieter Wuttke, vol. 3 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 134–37. Vanderbilt's system proved to be too intricate for average use. Alan Fern in conversation (May 7, 2013) recalled that one staff member, Leroy Bellamy, who worked in Prints and Photographs for decades, could "mind read" Vanderbilt and came to know where every picture was located.
The show's fifty-year anniversary, 2012, was marked with publications and the permanent installation of the exhibition in the Waassertuerm Gallery in Dudelange, Luxembourg.
Vanderbilt, "Memorandum on the Photography of America," February 7, 1963; circulated by Franklin Wallick, Washington Legislative Representative of the UAW; letters and response, May–September 1963 (Stryker papers, ser. I, microfilm).
See minutes of meeting, July 23, 1963, 11 (Stryker papers, ser. I, microfilm).