Styles / Documentary & reportage
FSA/OWI documentary photography
- Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.
Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down. Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
Sharecropper Bud Fields and his family at home, Hale County, Alabama
Walker Evans for the Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-fsa-8c52407. Source: Sharecropper Bud Fields and his family at home, Hale County, Alabama at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection
Negro going in colored entrance of movie house on Saturday afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi
Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-fsa-8a41115. Source: Negro going in colored entrance of movie house on Saturday afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection
Black-and-white photographs made for a US government agency in 1935–1944 to show what the Depression did to rural America and what the New Deal was doing about it: sharecroppers in their houses, migrants at roadside camps, eroded farms, small-town streets. People are seen at eye level inside the setting that explains them, often looking back at the camera. Prints are sharp, full-toned and unmanipulated, and every picture was filed with a caption and sent out to magazines, newspapers and books.
How the look is made
- Show people inside the setting that explains them: the bare room, the tent camp, the field, the sign over the door.
- Stand at eye level and at a middle distance, and let people look back at the camera if they want to.
- Print straight, sharp, full-toned black and white; never soften, montage or dramatise the picture.
- Write down names, places, dates and what people say, and caption every frame.
- Work to an assignment and in series, so the pictures can be published together with text as a case.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the sun, about 45° to the camera’s left, high, hard.
- Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky. Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
- Highlights
- Even the brightest parts (clouds, white cloth, snow) keep texture and detail.
How the style is lit
- Available daylight, overcast or hard rural sun, with no reflector or fill.
- Window light falling across a bare room or porch.
- A flashbulb on the camera for dark interiors.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/16 on 4 × 5 in gives about the depth of field of f/4.5 on full frame.
- Then
- 35–55 mm · f/8–f/32 · 1/250–0.5 s · ISO 25–200 on 4 × 5 in, inferred from the gear and the look. Lange's 4 × 5 Graflex, Evans's 8 × 10 view camera and 35 mm cameras (Post Wolcott), all with normal lenses, about 35–55 mm equivalent. Apertures and times are inferred: f/8–f/16 at 1/100–1/250 s handheld, f/16–f/32 and slower on the tripod, flashbulbs indoors.
- Focal length
- Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
- Focus
- Everything sharp from the nearest stone to the horizon.
- Angle
- The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
- Distance
- Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
- Balance
- The subject faces the lens; planes run parallel to the picture. The subject in the middle, the frame balanced around it.
- Crop & fill
- The subject shown small within its setting, which explains it.
- Duration
- An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.
Direct
Families stand or sit in a row in their own room, doorway or yard, square to the camera, arms at their sides or hands in the lap, and look straight into the lens with grave, unsmiling faces; workers stay absorbed in their task; a worried mother sits with a hand at her chin, looking away. Nothing is acted; a few portraits are directed with a prop.
- Turn to the camera
- Shoulders and hips face the lens straight on: direct, symmetrical, sometimes confrontational.
- Head & gaze
- Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye. Attention on what the hands are doing or on a thing (working, reading, eating, playing), not on the camera.
- Arms & hands
- Arms by the sides, hands folded in the lap or resting on a chair: quiet and formal.
- Expression
- Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
- Several people
- One or more seated in front and others standing behind, all facing the camera: from a seated-and-standing couple to a team in tiers.
- The moment
- People photographed as they are, unaware or unconcerned.
- With the sitter
- The sitter arranged and still, facing the camera.
Style the set
Nothing is styled: people wear their own worn, patched work clothes and no make-up, in their own bare rooms, porches, tent camps and fields, among their few possessions as they are; at most the photographer moves an object or hands a sitter the tools of their work.
- Clothes
- What people happened to be wearing; nothing chosen for the picture.
- Hair & make-up
- No visible make-up; skin, hair and blemishes as they are.
- Set & props
- A real home, workplace or street that belongs to the people in it, not a set, with their own things and traces of use.
- How much is styled
- Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Monochrome
- Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between.
- Film
- A view camera on a tripod: great detail, slow and deliberate.
- Post-production
- Nothing changed beyond exposure and development.
- Shown as
- A sequence with text that tells a story.
- Shown in
- Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads. The book as the main form of the work.
Stay away from soft focus & diffusion, composite & montage, painted, scratched or drawn on, coloured gels, tilted angle, glamour & aspiration, studio backdrop, fully art-directed, full glamour make-up, theatrical & acted and key & fill.
Before you shoot it
These are photographs of real, often destitute people, made for a government programme that meant them to persuade; many sitters were not asked their names, were not paid and had no say in how the pictures were used (Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in Migrant Mother, later said Lange did not ask her name and had told her the pictures would not be sold). Use the real public-domain photographs, credit the photographers and name the sitters where captions or later research do; for new documentary work, ask consent, record names and words, and give people a copy.
Photographs that define it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
Washington, D.C. Government charwoman
Gordon Parks for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-013407-C (LC-DIG-fsa-8b14845). Source: Washington, D.C. Government charwoman at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection
Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California (Migrant Mother)
Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-009058-C (LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516). Source: Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California (Migrant Mother) at Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection
With other styles
Pairs with New Topographics. Borrow its level, far, evenly lit view of built land when the place matters more than the people, then add the inhabitants and the caption that FSA work always carries.
The opposite: French humanist photography. Humanist pictures look for a tender, witty instant in the city while FSA pictures gather evidence in the countryside, so choose by whether the brief wants charm or a case.
The opposite: New York street photography. Where FSA work is level, captioned and made to argue for reform, the New York school tilts, snaps and refuses to reform anything; use the contrast to decide how openly the photographer takes sides.
Sources
- Farm Security Administration, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Security_Administration (programme 1935–1944 under Stryker through RA, FSA and OWI; photographers and hire years; about 77,000 press prints and 644 colour images; publicity use in magazines; Twelve Million Black Voices 1941; collection at the Library of Congress)
- Roy Stryker, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Stryker (head of the Historical Section from 1935; photographers hired; transfer to OWI and its propaganda role; punching holes in rejected negatives)
- Migrant Mother, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Mother (March 1936, Nipomo; sequence of exposures moving closer; thumb retouched out of the negative)
- Florence Owens Thompson, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson (Thompson's 1978 statements that Lange did not ask her name and said the pictures would not be sold; no payment)
- Walker Evans, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Evans (RA/FSA 1935–1938; 8×10 view camera for most New Deal work; Hale County 1936 and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1941; influences included Atget and August Sander)
- Dorothea Lange, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange (hired 1935; Graflex 4×5; An American Exodus 1939 with Paul Taylor; talked with sitters and recorded their words in captions)
- Russell Lee (photographer), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Lee_(photographer) (hired 1936; direct flash for interiors; Pie Town 1940 on Kodachrome)
- Arthur Rothstein, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rothstein (first photographer sent out by Stryker, 1935; dust storm photograph, Cimarron County, April 1936)
- Wikimedia Commons file pages for LOC fsa.8b29516, fsa.8c52407, fsa.8a41115 and fsa.8b14845: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg (LOC captions, reproduction and call numbers, negative formats: 35 mm nitrate for Post Wolcott, 4×5 safety film for Parks)
- 'Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother"', Library of Congress research guide: https://guides.loc.gov/migrant-mother ('The images were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4x5" film'; Lange: 'I made five exposures, working closer and closer')
- Migrant Mother, Library of Congress record transcribed on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Migrant_Mother_(LOC_fsa.8b29516).jpg ('1 negative : nitrate', '4 x 5 in.', LC-USF34-009058-C)
- John Loengard, 'Celebrating the Negative: Walker Evans', L'Œil de la photographie: https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/celebrating-the-negative-walker-evans-by-john-loengard/ (Bud Fields and his family sat for Evans in summer 1936; 'His thin ... 8 x 10 inch negative remains at the Library of Congress')
- Negro going in colored entrance of movie house ..., Belzoni, Library of Congress record on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Negro_going_in_colored_entrance_of_movie_house_on_Saturday_afternoon,_Belzoni,_Mississippi_Delta,_Mississippi_LOC_3549667550.jpg ('1 negative : nitrate ; 35 mm', call number LC-USF33- 030577-M2); the fsa.8a41115 file: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Negro_going_in_colored_entrance_of_movie_house_on_Saturday_afternoon,_Belzoni,_Mississippi_Delta,_Mississippi.jpg ('35mm nitrate negative')
- Washington, D.C. Government charwoman, Library of Congress record on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington,_D.C._Government_charwoman_LOC_3549663490.jpg ('1 negative : safety ; 4 x 5 inches or smaller', LC-USF34- 013407-C)
- Walker Evans, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Evans (an 8×10 view camera for most of his New Deal work)
- Russell Lee (photographer), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Lee_(photographer) (direct flash for interiors)
- Kodak Tri-X, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Tri-X (introduced around 1940 in sheets rated ASA 200 daylight; released in 35 mm and 120 in 1954; usually rated ISO 400; pushing to EI 800 gives very good results, EI 1600 needs more sophisticated processing, stand development reaches EI 3200)
