Bringing the message home.

Roy Emerson Stryker

FDR’s cousin Teddy Roosevelt saw to it that through Jacob Riis’s pictures of the poor of New York the awful poverty of the lower classes was brought into Americans’ homes. FDR did something similar in appointing Roy Stryker, a Columbia trained economist and amateur photographer, to head the Farm Security Administration in 1935. The goal was to document and expose the plight of the poor in ‘fly over country’ to the affluent, coastal masses, and Stryker did so with aplomb.

The photographers he hired to execute this massive task read like a who’s who of the best reportage picture makers of the era: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano (no relation to FDR), Gordon Parks, John Collier and Carl Mydans. Each went on to fame and fortune and if I was forced to make choices I would have to single out Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott.

In the same way that a pre-television age saw FDR come into Americans’ living rooms through the medium of his Fireside Chats on the radio, the work of Stryker’s team of photographers brought the images of the Depression into their homes along with the daily paper. FDR never managed to turn the economy around from the Great Depression which arguably started with the Wall Street crash of 1929 but he showed that he was trying mightily hard. The Japanese solved the problem, putting Americans back to work on December 7, 1941. It was called Pearl Harbor and the economy took off on the back of government military spending that the isolationists had prevented for over a decade. Yes, they were Republicans, as cruel and grasping then as now.

The FSA was eventually folded into the War Department and Stryker moved on. But his accomplishment remains one of the most fertile in documentary photography.

Putting lipstick on a pig.

On of the more frustrating aspects of being a mechanical engineering student in London in the 1970s was that the sobriquet ‘engineer’ was applied equally to those highly educated as to those with a vocabulary of a dozen words or so. The ‘engineer’ who designed turbine blades for Rolls Royce Aircraft was described with the same noun as the moron bashing spikes into railroad ties.

Thus it is today with photography. Anyone who can post an image to Instagram is a ‘photographer’ even if the best thing that could happen for world civilization would be to keep his finger from the button for the benefit of future generations. Irving Penn and Joe Instagram are now one and the same.

But the Instagram generation could have been seen coming 50 years earlier, and was never better foretold than in the truly execrable work of one Gary Winogrand. It’s not just that Winogrand could not make a good image, it’s that he refused to do so. Thousands of times a day.

In this regard his non-existent sense of composition or timing distinguishes him from that other great fake of his generation, Diane Arbus. My sub-caption to that piece – “A cruel, exploitative photographer without a shred of decency.” – cannot be improved on, but what distinguishes Arbus’s work from that of Winogrand is that she had a clear purpose and direction, even if these were evil and corrupted. Needless to add, Winogrand’s output of noise found its apologists and just when you thought his pap was forgotten, new rumblings surface. Yes, I’m afraid Winogrand put lipstick on the pig that was his manic monochrome manglings, using color film.

Adding insult to injury, the Brooklyn Museum has a show running no fewer than nine months devoted to his color carnage. Here’s a random image from the show and in this case random selection is entirely appropriate as the result is always the same. Pure garbage.

Winogrand in color.

A 1950s photographer from Italy.

The Guardian has an illustrated piece featuring the work of 1950s Italian photographer Paolo di Paolo.

Suffused with lightness and wit, his images show an Italy recovering from the depredations of fascism to become once more the mecca of style and beauty.

Piazza Navona, Rome. 1960.

His biography appears here. Use Google’s Translate feature for an English version.

One of the great documentary photographers.

Andreas Feininger (1906-1999), though born in Paris, was a German Jew whose parents made the wise decision to move to Sweden in 1936. Feininger then immigrated to the United States in 1939. Had these moves not been made he would almost certainly have died in the German killing machine.

And Feininger’s timing could not have been better with regard to his profession of photojournalist, for LIFE magazine was in its heyday and photographs were actually of monetary value. His association with LIFE lasted almost two decades through 1962.

Feininger is noted for his city and industrial scenes as well as close-ups of plants. It’s the former which are illustrated here.

Enjoying a tremendous consumer boom, New York was never more vibrant than in the 1950s. A victorious Eisenhower was soon to be president (1952-60) after a stint fixing what ailed Columbia University as its Dean. All that mighty military production was turned to churning out cars and houses for newly affluent, young Americans and while domestic and foreign conflicts continued, America was mostly at peace with itself and with the world.

The bustle of thriving Manhattan. 1950.

Steam still dominated long distance travel, and while it may have taken a while to get to Chicago or points further west, never was long distance travel more civilized.

Union Station, Chicago. 1948.

Watch the Stanley Donen directed 1949 musical ‘On the Town’ with dancing and singing by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly and you will see some of the last images of the elevated east side subway, soon to be torn down. New York and nostalgia have never been bedmates. Doubtless, were the movie remade today, the protagonists would be homosexuals with an opioid habit. Feininger shows the EL at its best.

Beneath the EL subway, NYC, 1948.

If steam trains were the way to cross the continent, it was the great Cunard liners, joined by the SS France and the steamship The United States, which saw to it that you would cross the Atlantic safely to the new world. Never was the atmosphere better illustrated than in Stanley Donen’s (again) 1951 Royal Wedding where Fred Astaire crosses the Atlantic (going the wrong way). The movie features the famous ‘dancing on the ceiling’ number, as breathtaking today as it was over a half century ago. Feininger’s image of the west side docks shows a New York before the invasion of ghastly steel and glass buildings. Here all is united in the neo-classical style which dominated architectural high rises.

The Queen Elizabeth docked in Manhattan. 1958.

While Feininger was rarely to be found in the studio, his best known image is of Dennis Stock, one of the early members (1951) of the Magnum photo agency. This collective of photographers, whose founders (1947) include Henri Cartier-Bresson, was the gold standard in reportage.

Dennis Stock of Magnum with a Leica IIIC.

We live in a world of Instagram and Pinterest. The value of a photograph is zero unless it shows the Oval Office pig cavorting with a whore. So it’s a pleasure to share these images from a time when photography ruled reportage.

By the master.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1955.

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