Farm Security Administration Photographs of Greenbelt Towns
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6012099 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jason Reblando (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 52-86 |
| Publication date | 2014-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Utopian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1045-991X • E-ISSN: 2154-9648 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/utopianstudies.25.1.0052 |
| OpenAlex | W100301777 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
In 1935, Roy Stryker, director of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA), hired some of the best professional photographic artists in the United States to document socioeconomic conditions of the Great Depression. Many of these RA/FSA images became icons of despair and catalysts for the social and economic reforms of the New Deal era. But there is a subset of photographs within the FSA archive that proposed a new American way of life: images of the Greenbelt communities that were constructed by the U.S. government in the late 1930s. In this article I argue that the images of the Greenbelt Towns were made to depict cooperation and prosperity, attributes not commonly associated with the work of the RA/FSA photographers. They present a utopian vision of architecture and community in America that challenged the economic ethos of individualism. My methods will include an analysis of RA/FSA photographs of the three Greenbelt towns, and I will compare them to photographs that have come to emblematize what the RA/FSA file represents. My treatment will complicate common assumptions about FSA photography and consider the historical and pictorial narrative of the Greenbelt program as a practical attempt at utopia in America
Aesthetics · Art · Ethos · Great Depression · Individualism · Literature · Narrative · Photography · Political science · Prosperity · Social security · Sociology · Visual arts · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Photography and Visual Culture · Public Administration
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |