Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI)
Wife of evicted sharecropper, New Madrid County, Missouri. Arthur Rothstein. 1939, Jan. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USF33-002943-M1. bibliographic record
President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration, to assist
dislocated farmers. The agency's “Historical Section” aided in this effort by documenting the need for agricultural assistance
and recording the results of the agency's efforts to address that need. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the head of the
photographic unit, the documentation effort went further than that. Images in the Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information (FSA /OWI) Collection (164,000 black-and-white film negatives, 107,000 black-and-white photographic prints, and 1,610 color transparencies, 1935-45)
show:
Americans at home, at work, and at play, with an emphasis on rural and small-town life
the adverse effects of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and increasing farm mechanization
displaced people migrating West or to industrial cities in search of work
America's mobilization for World War II
Coverage of Women's Daily Lives
Because the FSA and OWI photographers concentrated on the daily lives of ordinary people all over the United States during
the 1930s and 1940s, the images offer an unparalleled resource for glimpsing:
family life
living quarters
personal grooming
paid and unpaid labor
recreational activities
religious and organizational life.
Although biographical details on the subjects of the images are seldom available, the collection encompasses many images of
African American women, substantial documentation of Hispanic women in the Southwest, and women of various other ethnicities.
As the photographers shifted from documenting economic and agricultural crisis to promoting the war effort, they gave concerted
attention to recording the lives of members of various ethnic groups and the entry of women into the workforce.
The Photographers
Girls in two of the long line of showers at Idaho Hall, Arlington Farms, a residence for women who work in the U.S. government
for the duration of the war. Esther Bubley. 1943 June. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USW3-026005-E. bibliographic record
The collection includes the work of several outstanding women photographers, including:
Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
Esther Bubley (1921-1998)
Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990)
Marjorie Collins (1912-1985)
It also includes work by well-known male photographers such as:
Gordon Parks
Walker Evans
Russell Lee
Jack Delano
John Vachon
Arthur Rothstein
John Collier
The division also holds the unit's written records. It is not always possible to trace the intentions or working methods of
the photographers in these records, since the photographer may never have committed such information to paper or the paper
on which it was written may not have been
preserved at the unit headquarters. Nevertheless, the written material does provide insight into the operations of the photographic
unit in a way that few other photo archives do.
Jeannette Poirier looking at photograph of baking in file cabinet drawer at the Washington office of the Overseas Branch of
the U.S. Office of War Information. 1945. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ppmsca-03085. bibliographic record
There are several ways to search the overlapping elements (photographic prints and negatives) in the Farm Security Administration/Office
of War Information Collection:
PPOC: Brief online records based on caption cards drafted in the 1940s have been created for the more than 171,000 FSA/OWI negatives.
There is an extra PPOC search feature for the black-and-white negatives. Negatives that were not printed by the agency did
not get caption cards, so the only way to see these “untitled” images is to link from an image of interest to images that
neighbor it in the file, since neighboring images are frequently from the same photographic session.
Many records include a reference to the classification number under which the corresponding photographic print is filed and
the LOT with which the image is associated (see below).
FSA/OWI Reading Room File: Approximately 88,000 of the original black-and-white photographic prints (consisting of 77,000 images produced by photographers
under Roy Stryker's direction, about 11,000 of the prints acquired from other sources, and a few photographs that were not
included in the microfilmed LOTs) are available for searching in the Prints and Photographs reading room.
Sorting and packing tomatoes at the Yauco Cooperative Tomato Growers Association, Puerto Rico. Jack Delano. 1942 Jan. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-USF351-498. bibliographic record
The prints are organized by broad geographic regions (such as northeastern states or southern states) and subdivided by subject-classification
numbers representing what individual images show. Examples:
Women Sawmill Workers is .55445
Housework is .45
Photographic prints produced under the auspices of FSA were interfiled with those produced by the OWI.
A published microfiche set reproduces the FSA/OWI Reading Room File: America 1935-1946: The Photographs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Security Administration, and the U.S. Office
of War Information, Arranged by Region and by Subject (Cambridge, England: Chadwyck-Healey; Teaneck, N.J.: Somerset House, 1980); 1,637 microfiches.
LOTs: Before the photographic prints were placed in the Reading Room file, they were organized into LOTs and microfilmed. A LOT
was defined for this purpose as a “set of prints which it is desired to keep together . . . usually because it is a ‘story’
conceived and photographed as an interpretive unit.”
Use the Divisional Catalog to find LOTs by photographer, specific geographic location, and by broad subject headings. Information
in the LOT catalog records generally includes the place, date, photographer, agency for which the images were made, and a
summary of the visual subject matter.
Printed listings of the LOTs by photographer and by state are also available. The listings include information given on the
catalog cards and cite the microfilm reel, if any, on which the LOT is found.
The LOTs vary greatly in size. Examples:
Lot 345 consists of 97 photographs made by Dorothea Lange in 1937 showing migrants in Imperial Valley, California
LOT 1759 is made up of six photos made by Howard Liberman in May 1942, showing white and African American women making uniforms
in a U.S. Army quartermaster depot in Philadelphia. The photographs were made for the Office of Emergency Management, which
eventually merged with the Office of War Information.
The majority of the LOTs are available only on microfilm. About four hundred LOTs were not microfilmed. These are kept in storage areas, and may be used by researchers
in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room.
The Library of Congress does not lend FSA/OWI microfilm on Interlibrary Loan, but major research libraries may have acquired
all or sections of the microfilm set.
