The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a program made at the time of the Great Depression as an effort to combat the poverty in the American rural areas. It was created in 1937 under the Department of Agriculture with the primary objective of offering to help those who needed it in rural rehabilitation, subsistence homestead programs, and farm loans. It was based on the establishment of a networking cooperation between the states and county offices in determining which clients needed loans but could not access them. The loans were meant to be used by the farmers in buying seeds, land, equipment farming materials and livestock (Olson, 2001). As such, the FSA was not a relief agency but a program to assist the families by providing the needed services such as education and health facilities to make self-sustaining families.
The FSA built a great collection of around 100,000 photographs from a documentary to capture the state of America during the Depression led by Roy Stryker. He was Rothstein’s former professor and made him the first staff photographer at the Resettlement Administration (Howe, 1998). Photographs like “Fleeing a Dust Storm” by Arthur Rothstein were taken as a means to document the era of the Great Depression. Arthur Rothstein practiced photography as a career over a period of 50 years. In his work, he documented a wide variety of subjects like war, struggling farmers, and U.S. Presidents. He also practiced as a professor and published several books on photography like ‘The Depression Years (1978)’ and ‘America in Photographs (1985)’.
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“Fleeing a Dust Storm” informed the people living in the eastern United States of the dust storms and devastation encountered by the farmers alongside all the people that lived in the Great Plains. At the time, this piece of work helped the establishment of soil conservation practices. It also went a long way in convincing Washington to send government aide to the Great Plains. The FSA photographs also had a significant impact, especially being a documentary, in promoting respect for photography as a form of art. The documentary image played a vital role as an important expression of photographic art (Freedman, 2005). The photograph represented a truthful display of sensitive events with an intelligent depiction of the people’s relationships with their environment.
Taken in April 1936 in Cimarron, 'Fleeing a Dust Storm' was taken to document the Dust Bowl. The image shows Arthur Coble, a farmer, and his two sons during a dust storm. The younger son, Darrel Coble, was three years old at the time. Rothstein took the photo to show people in the East what was happening to their fellow Americans and their farms. The people in the East did not identify with the poor farmer walking across the dusty soil on his farm which gave him a sense of identity. It was a means by which Rothstein would make the reality of the happenings in the farmers' surrounding look real to the people in the East (Marien, 2006).
Rothstein described the photo as an example of the direction in a picture story since he had more to do with the creation of the picture beyond being there to take it (Swensen, 2015). There was a limited possibility of taking a photograph in the middle of a dust storm since there was very low visibility and it was very dangerous. As such, Rothstein had to direct his subjects to produce the image. The objective of the image was to capture the severe effects that the storms had on the people and the land. This could only be done at a time when there were high visibility and low winds which would not capture the effects. Arthur may have asked the young boy in the picture on the far right-hand side of the photo to hang back putting his arms over his eyes. He may also have asked the father and the elder son to lean forward just like they normally would during a powerful dust storm. It is a way of enacting that which he would have seen had it been possible to take a photo during one of the powerful storms.
I selected this image because, even though the picture entails direction from Rothstein into the particular image, it was a correct representation of the real life happenings at the time. It is a major icon by which many years later we can sense and identify what the Great Depression must have felt like for the people that lived through it. It represents acute desperation and devastation the people went through at the time. The three-year-old running towards the shelter lagging behind everyone with his little hands trying to cover his eyes from the much dust is a representation of the hardship the children went through. The struggle the farmers went through with the land adversely affected by the dust storms is too much to bear especially with children to take care of. The living conditions were not any better; this can be decoded from the image. The family is running towards a shelter that is in terrible condition yet that was all they had.
The social documentary photographer, Arthur Rothstein did an excellent job in taking the picture. It gives a good wakeup call reality to what the people suffered at the time of the Great Depression. It is an epic and objective representation of the essence of nature and events that reveal the truth.
References
Freedman, R. (2005). Children of the Great Depression. New York: Clarion Books.
Howe, K. S. (1998). Intersections: lithography, photography and the traditions of printmaking. Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press.
Marien, M. W. (2006). Photography: a cultural history. London: Sage.
Olson, J. S. (2001). Historical dictionary of the Great Depression, 1929-1940. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Swensen, J. R. (2015). Picturing migrants: The grapes of wrath and New Deal documentary photography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
