What Is This a Picture Of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives

Abstract

It is a hot August day in Washington, DC, but I am freezing cold. For the better part of a week I have spent eight hours a day in the Prints and Photographs Room of the Library of Congress, where temperature control is in place not to freeze out researchers like me but to protect the photographs and negatives stored here. Lips blue and teeth chattering, I move among hundreds of bureaucratically gray file cabinets, trying to track down photographs in the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) file. From the mid1930s until the middle of World War II, the U.S. government sponsored this massive documentary photography project to chronicle American life in a time of great social upheaval. Photographers such as Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange produced thousands of photographs under the auspices of the FSA-OWI; these images and related records are now archived in the Library of Congress. My research project is a study of how magazines of the 1930s used FSA photographs to frame discussions of rural poverty.1 I came to the Library of Congress carrying a sheaf of photocopies of FSA images as they appeared in magazines like U.S. Camera and Survey Graphic. My goal is to locate their original versions in the file. This is sometimes a difficult task. The magazines often did not give the name of the photographer or offer information about where the photograph was made. I need this information, as well as negative numbers, in order to identify accurately the images I am using. More importantly, I want to compare the magazine versions of the photographs to the versions cataloged in the FSA file. I will make inferences about cropping, for example, to show how magazine editors framed certain images to make particular ideas about poverty more or less rhetorically available. The search is slow going, yet even with incomplete information I have been modestly successful at tracking down most of what I need. One photograph, however, remains elusive. It features a ragged, middle-aged white man standing on the porch of a rough-hewn cabin in a rural area. His shirt and coveralls have stains and holes, yet the man stands confidently with his hands on his hips, gazing past the right edge of the frame.2 As published in the