Passing through a storm, U.S. 60,
Torrance County, NewMexico
by Bruce Berman©2011/RLR Project
Second Amendment Kid with plastic rifle, Magdalena, NM by Bruce Berman ©2011
Clyde Barrow with two Browning Automatic Rifles (BAR), a shotgun, and lots of attitude, photographer unknown (probably Bonnie)
In 1930′s America, as in 2011 America, violence was a public problem. As the depression deepened, the crime rate rose. The main increase in crime came in the category of armed robbery. The big news in crime, in the 1930′s was in the cities in the aftermath of Prohibition, gangs were consolidating and becoming crime families. In the small towns of Depression era America, however, there was economic lawlessness and desperate people did desperate things.
No one more personified this than Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker who became legendary for their bank-robbing exploits (actually they preferred grocery stores and gas stations but, perhaps, then as now, banks seemed to be, in the public’s mind, better targets). Many of their exploits overlapped the territory where the FSA photographers worked: the rural heartland of the country. The couple were Texans through and through (Big City Texan in the case of Bonnie. She was from Dallas). Barrow and Parker centered their activities around the Lone Star State and Oklahoma but later branched out to the Midwest.
They were, whether by self invention or as newspaper-selling darlings, Gansta before there were Ganstas. (more…)
Photo By Jack Delano- Library of Congress/OWI, Dec. 1942
Article by Bruce Berman
This image is of a General view of one of the yards of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, Chicago, Ill.
Notice the film’s edges, indicating it was shot with a “4X5″ camera, probably a Speed Graphic which was the “Go To” press camera of the era.
Also, notice, it was shot in color, a rarity in this era. Since it was a “positive,” meaning that the image was not reversed (a “negative”) but positive (the image showed correctly) , it was, undoubtedly shot on Kodak’s Kodachrome film.
This was not as easy a photograph to make as it first appears. (more…)
Omar, West Virginia
by Ben Shahn American (b. Lithuania, 1898-1969)
1938 One Page Beginning
Article by Bruce Berman
When Russell Lee and the other Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers set out on the American Highway of the 1930′s, the country was stuck between a deep and intractable Depression and distant rumblings of a growing doom coming from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Unemployment hovered around 20% for most of the decade. The “have’s” were recovering, but the “Common Man,” still often found himself (or herself) living a subsistence lifestyle. By 1938, the roiling anger of the decade had turned to dejection. The Depression, it seemed, would go on forever.
The beginning of FDR’s New Deal was based on the belief that changing America for the better was possible and that by informing the general public of the plight of the average American, things could change, justice could be found, that all could end well.
The FSA and its photographers had set out with this belief and undertook the task of informing the general public of the plight of the average American.
But the Depression ground on.
By 1938, the country was still nowhere near out of the Great Depression. Officially begun at the end of the last decade, America had not yet begun it’s industrial expansion -and, thus, its rise from the ashes- and the cumulative effect of devaluation, dislocation and uncertainty had demoralized the national soul.
America was looking for a hero.
Someone super. (more…)
The NBC Control Room in NYC, 1936
(photographer unknown)
Article by Bruce Berman
What did Russell Lee do when he was on the road? His notes indicate that he did a lot of thinking about what he had shot at the last stop and what he needed to shoot at the next stop. However, in the thousands of miles that he logged in for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) he must have found “blank spaces” in his travels, times when he was bored with the road, even the job and its mission.
Did he have a radio in his old Ford? He was an innovator and, as a photographer, he was up on the latest technology, being one of the first photojournalists of his day to use the Rollieflex Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) camera (which had a 2 1/4inch square negative and, thus, was small and mobile). This would lead one to speculate that, perhaps Lee was also interested in other technologies and, when he “hit the road” for the FSA, radios and radio networks were a fairly recent innovation.
There were 599 radio stations in 1936.
Broadcasting of the 599 broadcasting stations in the United States, approximately 500 were licensed to different individuals or corporations. There were two major network organizations–the National Broadcasting Company, operating two national networks linking in whole or part a total of about eighty stations, and the Columbia Broadcasting System, also linking about eighty stations but in a single network in whole or part. Most of these stations were individually owned by private enterprises.
News to people along Russell Lee’s Road, and other rural locations, could get there news more rapidly from radio than they could from print media and, once the radio had been purchased, the news was free if you were anywhere near a broadcasting tower or had a radio in your car. (more…)
1937 Dodge Sedan, Southern New Mexico
RLR Project ©2011
Article and photograph by Bruce Berman
Garfield, NM —–
It’s going going almost gone. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. Paint to rust.
The thing about the West, still, is there’s still lots of space, in the land and in the brain. Enough space to not become everything we left behind, a continent or a government (or two) ago. Earth migrants we are, one step ahead of a rabid reality. We have artifacts and clues that this history of ours is circular and not linear. Things like this Dodge remind us that there was another time of economic freak out. Another time of political terrorism. Another time of slogging onward, toward the light (which turned out to arrive at four or five years of the dark: WW II). Funny how the “dark,” also had a lot of light in it. What a battered generation the people from 1930s were: Depression, World War, the Cold War. Yet, they created the “modern era” we have lived in and off of for these seventy some years.
We pine for them and, in some cases -mine- then. But, they are just rust now. “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana. What if you want to repeat it, I ask myself, in my endless mucking around in the dust and rust.
Maybe this car has to fade away so we can move onward. Maybe there has to be no trace of the past to have a truly new future. Or maybe, it’s these artifacts of time that keeps us straight. (more…)
Sights & Sounds of the Farm Security Administration 19335-1943 Part 1 by the Pare Lorenzt Center
Radio with ornaments and decorations in home of
FSA client (Farm Security Administration) client
near Caruthersville, Missouri, by Russell Lee/FSA
The 1930’s and Cultural Expansion
Part One: Music
Article by Bruce Berman
Russell Lee’s 1930’s –The Great Depression- was a time of hardship and scarcity and fear. One might think that these facts would engender an atmosphere of emotional darkness and gloom. Indeed, in the early years of the Depression -1929-1933- there were few indicators that anything good could come out of this disaster. The Stock Market had crashed, the Dust Bowl had devastated several states, reducing agriculture (and, thus, farming) to an unsustainable means of living, forcing major waves of migration in pursuit of better opportunities. There was political uncertainty as the country moved from the passive but seemingly robust Republicanism of the 1920’s, (in which many Americans had to believe they, to, were too become rich) and the uncertain experimentation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s bold but unproven neo-Socialism, had not yet been proven. (more…)
Preacher in the park, Portales – July 2011
©Bruce Berman
Main Street, Elida, New Mexico – July 2011
RLR Project©2011
Article and photograph by Bruce Berman
The middle-of-nowhere can sometimes be somewhere.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers spent a lot of time on the road. They -like the increasingly migrant population of the country- spent a lot of time between places. I, like them, spend a lot of times between places. It’s there that I -and the FSA shooters, apparently- find clarity, quiet, time and silence.
But… (more…)