Yesterday down south

The FSA photographers took about a thousand photos in Arkansas between 1935 and 1943 and two hundred are shown in these pages, mostly by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn (in other words the top FSA photographers).

Patsy Watkins writes an excellent twenty-nine page illustrated essay about the State and the economy heavily based on cotton which supported a huge sharecropper and tenant farmer population, many of which lived in dreadful poverty. The FSA photo division was created initially to record poor families living in their shacks and the agricultural work they did. The first of the book's eleven chapters deals with cotton (eleven photos). A product which relied on cheap manual labor, principally by African Americans. Washington suggested various price reforms and practical solutions to reduce the poverty but these were opposed by large Southern landowners and their friends in Congress. Change did happen, though slowly, chapter three (nineteen photos) covers rural resettlement for poor families, sixteen projects created fourteen hundred new farms with new houses and co-operatives for selling produce. It's interesting to compare the positive looking resettlement farm photos with chapter four (seventeen photos) which look at the lives of African Americans, the poorest citizens in Arkansas who had no chance of advancement because of racist laws.

Chapter five covers housing (or in some cases shacks) followed by chapters on food, children, small towns, portraits. Chapter eight reveals the devastation caused by the Mississippi River overflowing two million low-lying acres in the Arkansas Delta during 1937. The Red Cross said it affected 44,000 families. The sixteen flood photos were taken by Walker Evans and Edwin Locke. The author makes an interesting point about the tent cities erected for flood victims, incredibly basic living conditions but with food, clothing and medical care provided many landowners feared that the camps offered better conditions than the farms they had been flooded out of.

I thought the book was a first-class look at Arkansas decades ago by a particularly creative and sensitive group of photographers. The book is a nice production with a picture and caption on each page, generous margins and good quality paper. My only criticism is that the photos have a slight greyness about them and lack the blackness that would give the photos that contrast to make them shine out on the page.