No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Unlike most Americans, the Amish do not use cameras to record their likenesses and surroundings. Posing for a photograph is a sign of pride and thus contrary to biblical injunctions against pride as well as against graven images. Visitors to Amish country, however, are not bound by these interpretations of scripture. The unique clothing and customs of the Amish make them irresistible subjects for the camera. Amateur and professional photographers have taken countless pictures of their buggies, bonnets and beards. But these photographs necessarily serve the purposes of the outside world and not those of the publicity-shy Amish themselves. (1) In the twentieth century, the ways in which outsiders used Amish photographs changed significantly. In general, the public image of rural America shifted from one of productivity and to the image of a garden spot for urban and local visitors to consume. Nostalgia for a lost rural past became an industry, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was at its center. Four sets of photographs from national and state government collections demonstrate the evolving role that the Lancaster County Amish played in the non-Amish imagination of the 1930s and 1940s. (2) The first set was published in 1940 in Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State, one of the state guidebooks produced by the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project. The mission of the unemployed writers, teachers, librarians and other white-collar workers who signed on with this project was to create accessible works that recorded and celebrated American history and culture. Most famously, project employees documented the life histories of over 2000 elderly former slaves. The Amish photography in A Guide to the Keystone State echoes the sentiments behind collection of the slave narratives: they document a disappearing way of life. Frederick W. Ritter's undated photographs and their captions depict the shy children, one-room school houses and innocent times of an idealized agrarian past. (3) The second set of photos continues the New Deal's documentary impulse, this time through the efforts of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA assigned some of the era's most talented photographers to document life in rural America and gather information about the historical, sociological and economic aspects of federal relief programs. Photographs taken in Lancaster County and surrounding counties in the 1930s portray many typical FSA subjects: farm landscapes, rural roadways, local farming methods and tenants who improved or purchased their farmsteads with FSA assistance. In the early 1940s, FSA photographers continued to focus on many of these themes, but their subject matter also reflected the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt's Dr. New Deal was making way for Dr. Win-the-War. Even prior to September 1942, when the FSA's photography unit officially transferred to the Office of War Information, photographers began producing what were essentially war propaganda pictures. As early as autumn 1940, photography section director Roy Stryker urged his team to downplay images of poverty, struggle, dust storms and soil erosion in favor of rural abundance. Prefiguring Roosevelt's call for Americans to fight for their Freedom From Want, Stryker urged FSA photographers to create more horn of plenty pictures--even if such images challenged their aesthetic sensibilities. As he told photographer Jack Delano in a September 1940 memo, know your damned photographer's soul writhes, but to hell with it. Do you think I give a damn about your photographer's soul with Hitler at our doorstep? Two months after Pearl Harbor, with the U.S. now officially at war, Stryker was even more explicit in instructing FSA photographers to create pro-American pictures. At the end of a long February 1942 memo, he described for them the ideal subject matter for war-era photographs: People--we must have at once [Stryker's emphasis]: Pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.