Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression.

Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression. By Colleen McDannell. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, c. 2004. Pp [x], 319. $45.00, ISBN 0-300-10430-8.)

Scholars researching the 1930s and early 1940s depend heavily on the photographs from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information, sponsored by the U.S. government, to put faces on American poverty and the war effort. Compelling, detailed, and carefully considered, many of the images have developed iconic qualities. But the images have never been without problems in their portrayal of American-and southern--life. In Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression, Colleen McDannell analyzes FSA depictions of religious faith in the U.S., particularly in the South, and finds a story of considerable complexity.

When FSA director Roy E. Stryker deployed his corps of talented photographers, he realized that a thorough documentation of America would necessarily include religion. Despite their passion for social justice, neither Stryker nor the photographers under his supervision were religious people. As a result, they "filtered religion through the aesthetic lenses of abstract modernism and American regionalism," producing technically excellent photographs with selected messages about religion (p. 5).

To analyze such a voluminous and varied record, McDannell groups the photographs by region and topic, examining portrayals of urban religious missions, Roman Catholicism in New Mexico, and Jewish farmers in the Northeast. Depictions of southerners--residents and emigrants alike--appropriately represent the largest portion of her study, for the FSA took more photos of religious expression in the South than elsewhere.

The FSA photographers who documented churches throughout the South "were artist outsiders" who knew the region only through their reading (p. 80). Non-southerners believed southern religion, exemplified by the Scopes trial and Prohibition, to be "the opposite of progressive America" (p. 85). As outsiders, the FSA photographers could depict "a religious world not bound up in biblicism and moralism" (p. 84). As a result, their work often is beautiful but detached. Jack Delano's photographs of an African American congregation in Heard County, Georgia, for example, depict the dignity of the congregation but provide no "real details" about the people in the photographs (p. 80). By stressing the formal beauty of church buildings and rituals, FSA photographers rendered southern religion more palatable to non-southerners. Walker Evans's exquisite images of southern churches are of buildings without people, "studies in light and form" rather than religious experience (p. 57).

FSA photographs of migrant southerners depicted them as resilient, strong, and faithful people. Dorothea Lange's photographs taken in California portray a "deeply religious people who belonged to a wide array of Protestant churches," showing nothing controversial, nothing threatening (p. 31). Russell Lee's photographs of Mexican migrants in Texas focus on individuals and their home altars. The fragments of religion in these photographs depict the poor "as dignified and worthy of governmental aid" (p. 49).

A chapter entitled "The Negro Church" discusses photographs of southern migrants to Chicago taken in collaboration with Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York, 1941), which told the story of African Americans being transformed from rural people to "urban proletarians" (p. 198). McDannell notes inaccuracies in the photographs and in Wright's narrative, which elides differences between denominations and fails to account for changes in black Protestant worship. Washington, D.C., proved fertile ground for documenting the religious experiences of African Americans affected by World War II, and McDannell analyzes the photographs of individual congregations. The church members in the photographs by Russell Lee and Jack Delano are "calm and focused," fully in control of their situation and capable of surviving a war (p. 225). Gordon Parks, the only African American FSA photographer, took multiple images of a domestic worker named Ella Watson, including her membership in the Verbycke Spiritual Church, a movement that thrived in urban black neighborhoods between 1920 and 1950. The message of the photographers contradicts Wright's conclusion that the church cannot survive in the city. Rather, they indicate that "African American religion was invigorated by its engagement with urban life" (p. 266).

Their work concluded in 1943, FSA photographers portrayed "the stable nature of belief" through difficult times by showing the "very ordinary, domesticated nature of religious life in America" (p. 273). In depicting the South, McDannell finds, the photographers "engaged southern Christianity on its own terms" and "pull[ed] secular people into religion--if only for a moment" (p. 111).

McDannell has produced a beautiful, complex book. Researched in FSA papers and secondary sources, Picturing Faith relies most heavily on McDannell's knowledge of American religious history and her very discerning eye. The reader comes away with a deepened sense of just how difficult it is both to understand religious expression and to portray it through the visual arts. The FSA photographers succeeded on many levels. McDannell has succeeded in her analysis of their attempt.

REBECCA SHARPLESS

Baylor University