One Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1946 in the Howard Greenberg Online Gallery

Carl Mydans, Untitled, c.1936, Gelatin silver print; printed later, 16 x 20 inches, Mounted. Signed in in on mount recto. $8,000.00. Image courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Depicting challenges impoverished Americans were enduring at the time, with photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks, among others, the exhibition, One Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration, demonstrates the extraordinary power of photography to define an era and inspire social change. Although the exhibition was planned months before the current pandemic situation, the images now take on a new relevance. The exhibition is now in the Howard Greenberg Gallery Viewing Room.

As the consequences of the Great Depression, unemployment, poverty and the effects of the Dust Bowl ravaged the country in the 1930s, government programs such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) were established. The powerful work of the FSA photographers under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs ushered in an unprecedented new era for the medium: across the entire nation photography was communicating what words could not.

Peter Sekaer, Pearlstine Alley, Charleston, South Carolina, c.1939
Gelatin silver print; printed c.1939, 6 5/8 x 9 inches, Signed and dated by Christina Sekaer in pencil on print verso. $7,500.00. Image courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Imbued in the nation’s social consciousness, the images that illustrate the history of the Great Depression originated in presidential action. In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt poignantly stated, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

In establishing the Resettlement Administration in 1935 – later renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937 – Roosevelt created a robust response to help America’s poor farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers. Roy Stryker, an economist, was hired to document the situation and quickly developed an extraordinary roster of young photographers.

Dorothea Lange, Greek migratory woman living in a cotton camp near Exeter, California., c.1935, Gelatin silver print, printed c.1935, 7 1/8 x 9 1/2 inches, Titled in pencil and ink with notations in pencil, and Resettlement Administration Credit stamp on print verso. $12,000.00. Image courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

One Third of a Nation: The Photographs of the Farm Security Administration presents more than 50 photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, David Robbins, Arthur Rothstein, Peter Sekaer, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott. From 1935 to 1946, the photographers of the FSA shot nearly 80,000 photographs traveling the country on assignments that could last for months at a time. Their touching portraits of children, concerned parents, struggling workers, and difficult living situations are regarded as some of the finest examples of modern documentary photography. The images proved in no uncertain terms that the nation needed to act.

More than 80 years later, the photographs from the New Deal programs of the FSA share a remarkable ability to capture the human spirit whether in spite of intolerable conditions. One Third of a Nation shows how the medium of photography changed the trajectory of both social documentation and photographic history.