The FSA Eight

Tonight it was all about the women.

In this case, "Women of the FSA Working in the  South 1935-1943," the lecture topic at UR by Beverly Brannan, curator of photography at the Library of Congress.

The diminutive Brannan was a terrific speaker, full of information and clearly still wildly enthusiastic about her job tracking down information about female photographers.

She immediately put these women in context, saying that only eight women had worked for the Farm Security Administration, but those eight had created 19,318 black and white photographs, roughly 20% of the work.

The rest of the FSA's photographic output was done by a hundred men.

I could make the point that if eight women could do 20% of the work, they should have only needed 32 men to do the other 80%, but I'll let that slide.

Brannan's talk was in conjunction with the exhibit "The Social Lens: Photographs by Dorothea Lange and Her Contemporaries" so naturally she began by talking about Lange.

Practically everyone is familiar with her iconic photograph "Migrant Mother," many of us even in the audience knowing that the haggard looking women was only 32 when the picture was taken.

But what I learned from Brannan was that the woman, who was a widow, had been shunned by the other migrant women for fear she'd steal their husbands.

And that she was known as a fantastic dancer.

It's hard to tell all that from the grim image of her and her three children.

We got a lesson in the government's Resettlement Administration, the people who were trying to help destitute families find a better place to live.

People unable to make minimum wage.

Farm workers who'd been replaced by machinery.

Families who left the South because they couldn't survive.

Like the couple from Scandinavia who were resettled to Alaska, the better to use their cold farming skills.

Fortunately, Lange wrote detailed captions for every picture, thus ensuring an accurate record of  her photographic subject and their circumstances.

We heard about another female photographer, Marian Post Wolcott, who often had to charm her way out of difficult situations in rural locations where strange women were not welcome.

There were photographs of the dorms built in Arlington, Virginia to house all the women war workers.

I learned that the FSA had no pay grade for photographers, so they were paid the Clerk/Typist rate.

Not surprisingly, that rate was $2,300 for women and $3,000 for men.

After the lecture, the near capacity crowd headed over to UR's Hartnett Museum of Art to see the exhibition.

I'd already bet my date that we'd see a certain Frenchman who always seems to be at events with free food and drink (there was a reception) and sure enough, there he was, making a meal of it.

We eschewed the reception for the photographs and began making our way through the crowds.

"Out of Rear Window" showed laundry hanging on a fire escape, but the interesting part was the notation that the family who lived there had been put on a list for resettlement.

Their apartment was in NYC and they were being resettled to Highlands, New Jersey.

It didn't have quite the same resonance as the Scandinavians being resettled to Alaska, but I'm guessing they were just as eager to go.

Moving through the galleries of social documentary photography was a history lesson for the period of the late thirties and early forties.

Faces evoked desperation and there was little joy to be seen on anyone's faces, even the children.

Proud men faced the camera unflinchingly.

Men stood in bread lines for a handout from the White Angel, a rich woman doing good.

Fact is, the FSA was having this world documented so that they'd have justification for Congress of why funds needed to be allocated for aid.

The proof was all over the walls of the galleries.

Leave it to eight women to empathetically capture a country in shambles.

Not to mention that they did it for 75% of the pay.

And often they had to do it in areas where women and/or whites, much less those with a camera, were not welcome.

Luckily, they had charm to get them through.

That and womanly determination.