New Deal Photography and the Campaign for Public Housing

Most of the studies that address socially effective imagery of the 1930s have come under the purview of "documentary," a term which has come to characterize the decade as a whole based on the singular example of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) photographs. This study identifies and analyzes a different body of material, the exhibitions and publications prepared for the New Deal campaign for public housing. The predominantly anonymous photographs which reformers publicized from 1934 to 1941 utilized a mode of address very different from the affective emblems the RA/FSA circulated, like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. In contrast, housing reformers employed a visual rhetoric of banality to emphasize the extent to which poor housing conditions pervaded American cities. They eliminated tenants from view to depict urban housing as an architectural and economic problem. What made an image effective in the housing campaign was not its ability to arrest a viewers' attention but its credibility as evidence. A picture's status as evidence was established in a variety of ways throughout the period. For instance, some reformers published pictures which erased the presence of the photographer at the scene, while others used technically amateurish photographs to signal that the photographer was incapable of manipulating the image. Despite the reformers' efforts to define poor housing as a ubiquitous national type, the public considered it emblematic of New York City. Once the national public housing program was instituted, the United States Housing Authority (USHA) had to re-banalize poor housing and enlisted local amateur photographers. That the USHA encouraged local communities to prepare their own promotional material shows that the New Deal government did not always authoritatively control the representation of its programs.