Bank of America: Arts & Culture Online Exhibition

Creative Director and Writer

Bearing Witness: Documentary Photography of the 1930s
Works from the Bank of America Collection

“One hundred years from now my administration will be known for its art, not for its relief."
— President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Bearing Witness: Documentary Photography of the 1930s explores the extraordinary, wide-ranging legacy of images created by photographers who worked under the support of innovative New Deal programs created by the Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. The exhibition features the works of Berenice Abbott, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Edward Steichen, and Horace Bristol. Curated entirely from the Bank of America Collection, Bearing Witness reveals both celebrated and lesser-known images and highlights the successful results of the interrelationship between artist, government agency, and the public.

The exhibition opens with a brief selection of the photographs of Berenice Abbott and Ben Shahn, who produced works funded by the WPA.

The core of the exhibition is the body of work created by the artists who were employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Charged by the federal government to build a visual record of the impact of hard times in rural America, the photographers created indelible depictions of resilience in the face of poverty and disaster. Photographs such as Arthur Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm, 1936, and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, 1936, have become icons through which later generations have been able to sense what those who lived through the Great Depression and Dust Bowl must have experienced. In later years, the FSA was folded into the Office of War Information (OWI), and noted photographers went on to document America’s recovery and its mobilization for the Second World War.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project (FAP)

“The artist has always been considered an individualist. Yet this does not mean that he can exist in a condition of economic and social isolation. Art starves and dies under economic distress as surely as does industry or agriculture…. Like all other professional and skilled workers, the artist wants a job to do. He is highly trained to do that job, but unless he has a public which is sympathetic to his work, he cannot make his contribution to American culture…. Therefore, within the past few years, the United States government has assumed the responsibility of conserving our art heritage by establishing various art projects. The government assumed this responsibility because it believes that the artist is a very useful and necessary member of society.”

— Holger Cahill
Director, Federal Art Project

“The Federal Art Project has brought the artist closer to the interests of a public which needs him, and which is now learning to understand him. And it has made the artist more responsive to the inspiration of the country, and through this the artist is bringing every aspect of American life to the currency of art.”

— Holger Cahill
Director, Federal Art Project

Launched on May 6, 1935, the Works Progress Administration became the federal government’s largest undertaking to provide employment for the jobless. Under the direction of a former social worker, Harry Hopkins, the WPA would eventually employ roughly one-third of the 10,000,000 unemployed in the U.S., paying them about $50 per month.

Whereas previous programs (the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civil Works Administration) had focused more on either providing direct relief or blue-collar employment in construction, the WPA broadly expanded the definition of “worker” to include white-collar jobs—such as office workers, librarians, social scientists, nurses and doctors, teachers and professors—as well as blue-collar jobs. The WPA also recognized “cultural workers,” including writers, actors, musicians and visual artists. When federal support of artists was questioned, Hopkins countered, “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people.” v

Within the WPA was established the Federal Project Number One (called Federal One), composed of five national divisions, including the Historical Records Survey, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Art Project. The project would provide employment for nearly 40,000 artists and other cultural workers within one year of its inception.

Many WPA artists would go on to receive worldwide recognition and acclaim, including such writers as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, along with artists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans.

Holger Cahill oversaw the Federal Art Project. Artists working under the FAP created more than 2,500 murals in hospitals, schools and other public buildings; 108,000 easel paintings; 18,000 sculptures; and countless thousands of silk-screen prints, posters and other graphic works. The FAP also opened and maintained one hundred arts centers in 22 states, with galleries, classrooms and community workshops that served an estimated eight million people.

Documentary Photography:
Imbuing Fact with Feeling

“A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It’s a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode.”

— Dorothea Lange

Documentary photography is the area of photography in which images are intended to be used as historical documents. Rather than serving solely as a work of art or a source of aesthetic interest, documentary photography is often used to effect political and social change due in large part to its ability to capture the true nature of an individual, location or situation.

The term documentary was coined in the late 1920s by the British filmmaker John Grierson and stands for the truthful depiction of reality while at the same time imbuing facts with feeling. It is “an approach that makes use of the artistic faculties to give ‘vivification to facts,’” as Walt Whitman defined the place of poetry in the world.

Through these images and their publication in mass media, the public gathers information about cultural, political and environmental situations. The history of documentary photography presents us with the most accurate records that we have of past events, and the documentary photograph has been used to record everything from cataclysmic world-scale events down to the minutiae of people’s everyday lives.

Documentary photography in America began with war reportage in the 1850s. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century documentary photography focused on industrial and urban settings, and often photographers used their craft as a tool for social reform. It is no surprise, then, that documentary photography exploded into the American consciousness during the 1930s, when photographers were recording the pervasive poverty throughout the country. In the 1930s, the photographic essay was born as the concept of a story told through a series of photographs. It is this ability to work in series that separates documentary photography from photojournalism, often coupled with a moral stance on the part of the photographer, who hopes to impart to the viewer a greater understanding of how his or her subjects live. The photo essay is often more powerful in conveying a story than is a single image. Many of the photographs in Bearing Witness were originally published or exhibited as part of photo essays.

Like many governmental agencies, the FSA set up a publicity department to help explain to the public and Congress what its programs were trying to accomplish and the problems it was trying to solve. However, the FSA went far beyond almost any other agency before (or since) in documenting its era, implementing the most ambitious photographic project of that period—and one of the most ambitious of all time.

The FSA built a remarkable collection of more than 164,000 photographs of America during the 1930s. As a voluminous number of photos began to come back from the field, the FSA worked to get them published. Newspapers across the nation ran series of photographs from the FSA along with stories that talked about the causes of dust storms and the plight of migrant farmworkers. Influential magazines of the time, including Life, Look and Survey Graphic, published the photographs. Galleries and organizations, such as New York’s Photo League, mounted shows of FSA work. As a result, the American public responded positively to government programs, and city dwellers got a first-hand account of what it was like to live on the farm.

The FSA Photography Project

“To do this kind of job the photographer has to be more than an artist—more than an adequate mechanic. He must be something of a sociologist, something of an economist; he must be a good deal of a wrangler, equally at home with a hostess or a farmer’s wife; he must have a healthy nose for news coupled with thorough skepticism of biased information; and more than anything else, he must have a basic understanding for the meaning of his story.”

— from a Farm Security Administration Job Description

Roy Stryker would ultimately find these traits and more in the group of photographers hired for the FSA’s photography project. Collectively, these photographers captured almost a quarter-million images and printed nearly 80,000 photographs of life in Depression-era America between 1935 and 1943. It is believed to be the largest documentary photography project in history.

Though their backgrounds and experiences were diverse, Stryker recognized that, in addition to “curiosity…a desire to know…and the eye to see the significance around them,” they shared “above all else…passionate love of people, and respect for people.”

“Photography has taken a new and important place in modern life in the role of disseminating information. Evidence of this new position can be found in such magazines as “Life” and “Look”; in the improved photo sections of some of our best newspapers; in picture books for youth and for adults; in profusely illustrated reports and monographs. The photograph is no longer merely an illustration. Groups of photographs properly selected, edited, and captioned, are giving a new turn to modern journalism.”

— Farm Security Administration

Stryker and the FSA recognized the relative “newness” of photography and the increasingly significant role it was playing in society.

“The Farm Security Administration has recognized this new trend in photography. It has accepted the camera as an essential aid in presenting the problems with which it has to work; and to convey to interested persons the progress made in dealing with these problems. In short, it has accepted the camera as a first-class reporting mechanism.”

— Farm Security Administration

The Historical Section of the Information Division was headquartered in Washington, D.C. The office distributed photographic equipment and film; drew up budgets, allocated travel funds and hired staff; developed, printed and numbered most negatives; reviewed developed film; edited photographers’ captions; and maintained an archive of negatives, prints and captions. Photographers did not have to worry about budgets. Although they were required to adhere to the content outlined in their assignments, they were free to shoot many rolls of film, often exploring the same subject in detail from several angles.

The main office also distributed images to newspapers, magazines and book publishers and supplied photographs to exhibitions. FSA photographers were given specific subjects and/or geographic areas to cover, and their field assignments often lasted several months. Stryker would provide the photographers with relevant reports, local newspapers and books in order to help them prepare for each assignment. He would also craft shooting scripts that outlined the ideal subject matter to be captured.

The Resettlement Administration (RA) and The Farm Security Administration (FSA)

“It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them.”

— Arthur Rothstein
FSA Photographer

“The Resettlement Administration…was the companion piece to the WPA. We operated in the rural areas. What we had in mind was largely the rehabilitation of the poor farmers, but we had a great many jobs to do which were of the relief sort, because we not only had the emergency of the Depression, but we had, while this was going on, two very serious years of drought, which created what was then called the Dust Bowl, and blew away a lot of soil in the West which had come into use unwisely during the war, and left the people really stranded, and they began to drift away.

“The drought in ’34 started all this, but the drought in ’36 completed it. This was so extensive, that the people simply couldn’t all leave. It would have taken all the people in Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, part of Nebraska and Colorado. We had millions of them, of course, on relief, on account of the drought, and this was quite aside from our problem of rehabilitation, and resettlement.

“Because this was so dramatic, and because it meant misery and tragedy for so many families, and because we hoped it would never happen again, at least, not in the same way, we thought not only that we ought to have a record of it, for future generations—that is the historical part—but also to show people who weren’t involved in it, how extremely serious it was.”

— Rexford Tugwell
Undersecretary of Agriculture

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order consolidating several earlier New Deal farm programs into the Resettlement Administration (RA). Under the direction of Rexford G. Tugwell, a former professor of economics at Columbia University, presidential campaign advisor and Roosevelt’s Undersecretary of Agriculture, the RA was tasked with the following functions and duties:

(a) To administer approved projects involving resettlement of destitute or low-income families from rural and urban areas, including the establishment, maintenance and operation, in such connection, of communities in rural and suburban areas.

(b) To initiate and administer a program of approved projects with respect to soil erosion, stream pollution, seacoast erosion, reforestation, forestation and flood control.

(c) To make loans as authorized under the said Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, to finance, in whole or in part, the purchase of farmlands and necessary equipment by farmers, farm tenants, croppers or farm laborers.

With the onset of the “Dust Bowl,” the RA also set out to build camps with clean living accommodations for migrant workers in the Southwest. In 1937, Congress passed the Farm Security Act to provide loans to farmers to help them transition from being tenants of government-owned lands to owning those parcels themselves. The Resettlement Administration was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

To maintain support for the FSA during these years, documenting and making Congress and the public aware of its work and its achievements was of great importance to Tugwell.

In 1935, Tugwell appointed Roy Stryker, a former student and colleague at Columbia University, to head the Historical Section of the (then) RA’s Information Division and assigned him the job of overseeing the documenting of the land and people that the RA and the FSA were trying to help.

The FSA was tasked with documenting the impact of loans made to farmers and investments in government-planned suburban communities, as well as how the agency improved the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the Midwestern and Western states.

The FSA’s vast pictorial undertaking, as Stryker later recalled, endeavored to introduce “Americans to America,” with a specific audience in mind: the American middle class. These individuals lived in areas far from the locales depicted in the photographs and comprised the vast majority of the readers of the newspapers and magazines in which the FSA pictures were reproduced.

Regarding the FSA photographers, Tugwell noted, “These people who had all these skills in order to do this, were mostly unemployed themselves and they were delighted to get the opportunity to work…. It wasn’t any soft job for them, either. They had very small allowances and quite small pay, and yet they did this enormous, wonderful job—record making. I know we were all very proud of them later.”

Entering The Second World War:
Documentary Photographers and the War Effort

“This is a people’s war, and the people are entitled to know as much as possible about it.

— Elmer Davis
Director of the Office of War Information

“Ideally people should wake up to find a visual message everywhere like news snow—every man, woman and child should be reached and moved by the message.”

— Spokesperson
Office of War Information

Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of War Information (OWI) “in recognition of the right of the American people and of all other peoples opposing the Axis aggressors to be truthfully informed about the common war effort.”

The OWI, with more than 10,000 employees, supported America’s mobilization for the war effort in films, texts, photographs, radio programs and posters. Within the OWI was established the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) to network with Hollywood filmmakers, along with the Voice of America (VOA) radio network, which broadcast to the world in 24 languages, and the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC), with 76 branches worldwide. Also created under the OWI was the Farm Security Administration’s photographic unit, whose photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano and Marion Post Wolcott, were tasked with the new documentary mission.

Another famed photographer enlisted by the government during World War II was Edward Steichen. During World War I, Steichen had served as an aerial photographer in the U.S. Navy. At the outbreak of World War II, Steichen accepted a commission by the Navy to organize and command a team of photographers for the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, which documented aircraft carriers and naval officers in action. The naval officer responsible for the unit’s establishment believed that superior photographic work placed in the press and in other marketing material, such as posters and flyers, would help the Navy to achieve its annual recruitment goal of 30,000 pilots.

By directing the visual presentation of the war, the OWI could focus public attention on particular themes: military industrialization and the armed forces; civilian training for war; and the expanding role of women in the workforce. Home front duties often were compared to a soldier’s to ensure a connection between the war effort at home and the fighting on the front lines.

Collectively, thousands of documentary photographs captured at home and abroad were commissioned by the federal government to support understanding of and engender support for America’s war effort.

Most historians agree that, though the New Deal programs helped alleviate some of the problems during the Great Depression, they did not end the economic downturn. In 1939, one in five Americans remained out of work.

Ultimately, it was the onset of World War II that led to a reinvigorated economy—fed by the need for the United States to invest heavily in military industrialization and deploy a fighting force of twelve million Americans.

Biographies & Gallery Selects

Berenice Abbott Biography

After graduating from Ohio State University, Berenice Abbott moved to New York to study journalism but eventually decided to pursue a career in sculpture and painting. From 1921 to 1929, she lived and worked in Paris—first as a model for well-known artists, then as a darkroom assistant for photographer Man Ray and finally as a highly regarded and successful portrait photographer. In 1926, Abbott mounted her first solo exhibition at the Galerie au Sacre du Printemps, Paris.

In 1929, Abbott returned to New York. During her absence, hundreds of 19th-century buildings had been razed to make way for dozens of skyscrapers. The unprecedented building boom inspired Abbott to give up her thriving Parisian portrait practice to photograph the new face of New York. For four years, between her freelance work and college teaching position at The New School, Abbott struggled to pursue and finance her project independently. In 1935, when the Federal Art Project of the WPA was established, Abbott submitted her proposal for support. The WPA gave her a $145 monthly salary, a field assistant, research assistants, a secretary and a car. By 1940, she had completed Changing New York, one of the monumental achievements of twentieth-century photography. Changing New York was an effort to “preserve for the future an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world’s greatest metropolis.”

In 1936, Abbott joined with Paul Strand to establish the Photo League, whose initial purpose was to provide progressive newspapers and magazines with photographs of labor union activities and political protests. Later, the group focused on photographing working-class communities.

Ben Shahn Biography

One of the most admired and collected artists of his generation, Ben Shahn was a painter, photographer, printmaker and political activist known for his poignant narratives of American life. Born in Kaunas, Lithuania, Shahn immigrated with his family to the United States in 1906. During his teenage years, Shahn was apprenticed to a New York lithographer. In 1919, he enrolled at New York University, eventually completing his studies at the City College of New York in 1924. After two years studying at the National Academy of Design, he traveled in Europe and North Africa.

In 1934, Ben Shahn was working as an artist producing murals for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (which would become part of the Works Progress Administration). In 1935, Shahn was recommended by Walker Evans, a friend and former roommate, for a job with the photographic group at the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA). For the FSA, Shahn roamed and documented the American South together with Evans and Dorothea Lange. Like his earlier photography of New York City, Shahn’s FSA work can be viewed as social documentary. He shed light on difficult living and working conditions, believing that artists have a moral obligation to express their social and political views through art.

Gallery Selects

Walker Evans Biography

Walker Evans began taking snapshots during a trip to Europe in the 1920s and published his first images a decade later. Soon an established photographer, he contributed photographs to a book of poetry by Hart Crane,
The Bridge, 1930, and photographed in Cuba on assignment by publisher Carleton Beals for a book entitled
The Crime of Cuba, 1933. Evans photographed for the U.S. Department of the Interior and was transferred to the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), in late 1935. During the Great Depression, he photographed workers and architecture in the Southeastern United States. In 1936, he traveled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when, in 1941, their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published to enormous critical acclaim.

Evans was best known for his photographs of American life between the world wars. Everyday objects and people—the urban and rural poor, abandoned buildings, storefronts, street signs and the like—are encapsulated in his iconic images of the 1930s and 1940s. From 1945 to 1965, Evans was an associate editor of Fortune, and from 1965 until his death in 1975, he taught a course at Yale University, which he called “Seeing.”

Arthur Rothstein Biography

Arthur Rothstein was born in Manhattan, grew up in the Bronx and later attended Columbia University, where he founded the camera club. His photographic expertise won the admiration of two professors, Guy Tugwell and Roy Stryker, who were later beckoned to Washington to work for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. Rothstein worked for the government under a program administered by the National Youth Administration and hoped to attend medical school, but when Stryker offered him a good-paying job—a rarity during the Great Depression—he took it. In Washington, Rothstein set up the darkroom for the Photo Unit of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937.

Rothstein was sent out on his first assignment as a photographer in the summer of 1935. He traveled the country documenting the plight of Americans trying to survive the Depression. After five long years on the road, he took a job as a staff photographer for Look magazine. Rothstein became known for his technical innovations and his passionate use of documentary photography for the betterment of society. He was a founding member of New York’s Photo League, which was dedicated to the use of photography to effect social change.

Gallery Selects

Dorothea Lange Biography

Dorothea Lange began her career in New York, later migrating to San Francisco, where she opened a portrait studio in 1918. Her personal interest in social issues led her to photograph some of the city’s dispossessed, and her photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.

Lange’s searing studies of homelessness caught the attention of a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who asked her to help him document the plight of migrant farm workers in Nipomo and the Imperial Valley for the California State Emergency Relief Administration. In 1935, Lange became a photographer
for the Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her work for these agencies helped to bring the plight of displaced farm families and migrant workers to the attention of the public. Lange employed modernist design elements such as close-up views and sharp cropping to enhance the emotional intensity of her images. Distributed free of charge to newspapers across the country, her poignant photographs quickly became icons of the era.

Gallery Selects

Marion Post Wolcott Biography

Before taking a job as a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, where she was relegated to work on fashion and society news, Marion Post Wolcott had been living in New York City, working as a freelance photographer. She was active in several political and social organizations, including the American League Against War and Fascism and New York’s Photo League. It was through the Photo League’s founders, Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner, that Wolcott was introduced to Roy Stryker, the director of the photography project at the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Stryker hired her in 1938.

Wolcott is best known for the more than 9,000 photographs she produced for the FSA from 1938 to 1942. She covered thousands of miles of the United States with her camera to document and publicize the need for federal assistance to those hardest hit by the Great Depression. Her images challenged social mores about the propriety of young women living away from the family home and traveling on their own. Although she worked professionally for only a few years, her artistry and perseverance inspired numerous articles, books and exhibitions, and her photographs created a lasting record of American life on the eve of World War II.

Gallery Selects

Russell Lee Biography

Russell Lee grew up in Ottawa, Illinois. Although he received a degree in chemical engineering from Lehigh University, he gave up a career as a chemist to become a painter. In 1927, Lee married painter Doris Emrick and moved to a small artists’ community in Woodstock, New York. Lee struggled with painting for several years. In 1935, he bought a camera and fell in love with photography.

In Woodstock, Lee began taking photographs that reflected his concerns for the beleaguered working class and then went to Pennsylvania to photograph bootleg coal miners. The winter of 1935 found him in New York City documenting the poor and their living conditions. In 1936, he became interested in a group of photographers in Washington, D.C., who were doing social documentary work.

As a result, Lee met with Roy Stryker, the director of the photography project at the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Stryker hired Lee as well as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein to document the success of federal rural relief projects. Lee took photographs throughout the Midwest for the FSA that depicted the plight of farmers during the Great Depression. In 1938, Lee’s marriage ended, and within the same year he met and married newspaper reporter Jean Smith. They worked together, Lee taking photographs and Jean writing short essays to accompany the images. Lee’s images evoke the idea that people might have been laid low by the Depression, but had not given up.

Gallery Selects

Jack Delano Biography

Jack Delano was born Jacob Ovcharov in Kiev, Ukraine, and immigrated to Philadelphia with his family in 1923. In 1932, he began his study of drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1936, he first took up photography while studying art in Europe on a scholarship.

Upon returning to the U.S., Delano applied for a grant from the Federal Art Project to study mining conditions in Pennsylvania. Delano sent his photos to Roy Stryker, the director of the photography project at the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), who was eventually able to hire Delano in 1940. Delano set out to document the human condition and address social issues with his photography and became known for his strong compositions and sensitivity to his subjects.

Like other FSA photographers, Delano traveled throughout the United States depicting American culture while also completing specific assignments. One of his most famous projects involved the nation’s train system. In 1941, he traveled to Puerto Rico as a part of the FSA photography project and was so touched by the experience that he settled there permanently in 1946.

Gallery Selects

Edward Steichen Biography

Edward Steichen was an American photographer, painter and museum curator who helped transform photography into an art form. Born in Bivange, Luxembourg, Steichen moved with his family to Hancock, Michigan, in 1881. He took up photography in 1895, at the age of sixteen, and was self-taught. In 1900, while en route to study painting in Paris, Steichen met Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz praised Steichen’s painting and also bought three of his photographic prints. In 1902, when Stieglitz was formulating what would become Camera Work, a quarterly photographic journal, he had Steichen design the logo. In 1904, Steichen was one of the first people in the United States to use the Autochrome Lumière color process. He also produced a new style of fashion illustration and portraiture for magazines in the 1920s.

At 38 years of age, Steichen joined the U.S. Army’s photography division during World War I. He had been living in France when the war began and, beyond his ambition to be a war photographer, wanted to help in the fight against German aggression. Specializing in aerial reconnaissance, he finished his commission with the rank of colonel. When the United States entered World War II, Steichen tried to reenlist but was turned down because of his age; he was 61.

Finally, in 1943, he was asked if he would like to help with the Navy’s effort to recruit young pilots. He was given the title of Director of the U.S. Naval Photographic Institute. He and his handpicked unit created images of goodwill and patriotism. Steichen was proud of his service. For years after WWII, he listed himself in the New York telephone directory as “Steichen, Col. Edward J.”

At the age of 68, Steichen was named Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Of the many exhibitions he curated, the largest and most famous was The Family of Man, 1955. This exhibition of
503 photographs toured throughout America and overseas, and the book of the same title became a bestseller. Steichen’s involvement as a curator helped elevate photography to the status of an acknowledged art form. In 1961, he held an exhibition of his own photography at the Museum of Modern Art. He retired a year later in Connecticut. His autobiography, A Life in Photography, appeared in 1963, the same year he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy

Horace Bristol Biography

Horace Bristol studied at the Art Center Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco in 1933 to pursue a career in photography. While renting a studio near Ansel Adams’ gallery, Bristol befriended members of Group f/64, including Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange. In 1937, he accompanied Lange on expeditions to California’s Central Valley to document the plight of migrant farm workers.

In 1941, Edward Steichen recruited Bristol to work in the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit—a select group of photographers hired to document World War II. Bristol photographed key battles, including the invasions of North Africa, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Following the war, Bristol brought his family to Japan, where he photographed the war’s aftermath as well as traditional Japanese life. In Tokyo, he established the East-West Photo Agency and began selling his photographs of Southeast Asia to virtually every pictorial magazine in Europe and the United States. He also published several books under the East-West name focusing on Pacific Rim countries in transition. In 1956, devastated by his wife’s suicide, Bristol burned most of his photographs and negatives and retired his camera. His remaining photographs were stored and left untouched for nearly thirty years.

Bristol remarried and settled in Ojai, California, where in 1985 his youngest son came home from high school with an assignment to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Only then, upon recalling the plight of migrant farm workers, did Bristol open the footlockers that held a career’s worth of images. When he saw the tired, dignified faces in his photographs, he couldn’t help but regret that his life’s work had been forgotten. Bristol died in August 1997, but not before seeing his photographs exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe.

Gallery Selects