Artists' Biographies
Jack Delano (1914 - )
Delano's interest in photography began when, as a student at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he began photographing in
Pennsylvania and New York City. His work won him a traveling
scholarship to study in Europe. When he returned, he earned money as
a commercial photographer. In 1939, he submitted a proposal to the
Federal Arts Program to photograph the coal miners in Pottsville,
Pennsylvania. FSA director Roy Stryker liked the project that
resulted, but he was not able to hire Delano until Arthur Rothstein
left the agency in 1940. Stryker said of him, "Jack was the artist,
and being an artist would say, 'What one picture could I take that
would say Vermont?'"
Delano photographed extensively in the South and New England, where he covered Portuguese fishermen and the beginnings of the war build-up at the Pratt-Whitney airplane factory. A 1941 assignment took him to Puerto Rico. After the war he became director of the Puerto Rican government's radio and television network. He continued to photograph, receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1981. He also composed symphonic music and wrote and designed books for children.
Walker Evans (1903 - 1975)
Evans, who had the title of senior information specialist, is
universally regarded as the premier photographic artist among the FSA
staff. In the 1920s, he led the expatriate's life in Paris, where he
was influenced by the photography of Eugene Atget and the novels of
Gustave Flaubert. His tenure with the agency was short and his
relationship with Stryker, stormy. Evans wanted autonomy and artistic
control. In later years, he insisted he had never embraced the FSA's
social objectives, considering them incompatible with making art.
Stryker wanted more production and the courtesy of being informed of
where Evans was and what he was doing. Although Stryker called Evans
his "problem child," he also "recognized the exceptional quality" of
his photographs and was proud to have them in the collection.
Evans took a leave from the agency in the summer of 1936 to photograph sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. This work, published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was the high point of his FSA tenure. The next year Stryker fired Evans, citing budgetary problems. After freelancing, he was hired in 1943 by Time magazine and in 1945 by Fortune. He had numerous exhibitions of his photography in museums and galleries including several at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1965 to his death in 1975 he taught photography at Yale University. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1973.
Dorothea Lange (1895 - 1965)
While also enjoying a reputation as an artist, Lange is most renowned
for the humanistic qualities of her photographs. She began her career
assisting portrait photographers but went on to study with Arnold
Genthe and Clarence White, two important photographers from the early
decades of the century. Lange started on an around-the-world trip,
but ran out of money and settled in San Francisco in 1918. She set up
shop as a studio portraitist, but in the early 1930s began to
photograph the strikes and bread lines caused by the Great
Depression. The University of California sociologist Paul Taylor
hired her to photograph illustrations for his reports on the plight
of migrant workers. Later, they married and continued to collaborate
on projects, including the book American Exodus. Rexford Tugwell saw
Lange's work and called it to the attention of Stryker, who hired her
in July 1935. In March 1936, on her way home from an extended
photographing campaign in Arizona and New Mexico, she stopped at a
camp for pea pickers in Nipoma, California, and made six exposures of
Florence Thompson and her children. One of them, later entitled
Migrant Mother, became the quintessential icon of the Great
Depression and one of the most frequently published photographs of
all time.
When the FSA project ended, Lange photographed for the Office of War Information, including an extended project on Japanese Americans who were interned in camps in California during World War II. She freelanced for Life and other magazines, producing photographic essays in a variety of countries such as Ireland, Venezuela, and Egypt. She collaborated with John Szarkowski, director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, on a retrospective exhibition of her work, which opened not long after her death in 1965.
Russell Lee (1903 - 1986)
Around 1929, Lee abandoned a successful career as a chemical engineer
to study art at Woodstock in upstate New York. He first used the
camera to make studies for his paintings, but soon discovered he
liked telling photographic stories more than he did painting. His
early work included projects on bootleg mining in Pennsylvania and on
the Father Devine cult. When a staff photographer quit, Stryker hired
Lee to freelance a story on a homestead housing project in New
Jersey. Stryker liked the photographs so much he hired Lee full time.
Lee, who stayed with the FSA from 1936 to its demise in 1943, was
extremely prolific. He embraced Stryker's objective of documenting
the American way of life, and his pictures show a wide range of
economic and cultural activities. His most concentrated project was
on the homesteading community of Pie Town, New Mexico, which he and
his wife, Jean, decided to investigate "because the name of the place
struck their fancy."
After doing aerial photography for the Army during World War II, Lee worked for Stryker again on the Standard Oil Company documentary project. He taught at the University of Missouri and the University of Texas at Austin.
Arthur Rothstein (1915 - 1985)
As a student at Columbia University, Rothstein founded a campus
photography club and also did photographic work for Roy Stryker. He
was the first staffer Stryker hired and was given the job of setting
up the darkroom facilities and purchasing the necessary cameras and
equipment. Within a year, however, he took one of the most famous and
one of the most controversial photographs in the FSA's history. His
1936 photograph of a farmer and his two sons in Cimerron County made
the Oklahoma panhandle the visual symbol of the dust storms that
devastated farmers in several Plains states. On the same trip, he
photographed several frames of a steer's skull in the badlands of
South Dakota. A comparison of the images showed that he picked up the
skull and moved it to a patch of cracked earth to make it more
symbolic of the drought. Opponents in the press and Congress seized
on this to attack the agency's credibility, calling the picture a
fake. The incident caused minor embarrassment to President Roosevelt
when The Fargo Forum broke the story as he was campaigning in the
Dakotas.
In 1940, Rothstein became a staff photographer for Look, magazine. He photographed for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in China during World War II, then returned to Look, where he became director of photography. When the magazine stopped publication in 1971, he became picture editor of Parade magazine. He also taught for many years at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and was a judge for the Pulitzer Prizes in Photography.
Ben Shahn (1898 - 1969)
During the 1920s and early 1930s, Shahn earned a national reputation
as a painter and graphic designer who used his art to promote social
justice and political change. Among his most famous paintings was an
indictment of the 1927 execution of two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 1935 he began working as an artist for the
Resettlement Administration. His friend and former roommate Walker
Evans recommended him to Stryker, who hired him as a staff
photographer.
Shahn was never a great photographic technician, but his artistic eye and his deep humanism made his photographs powerful and visually interesting. In addition, he frequently used the camera as a sketchbook to record people and settings that he would turn into drawings and paintings. He did little photography after leaving the FSA in 1938, but The Photographic Eye of Ben Shahn, a collection of his work, was published by Harvard University Press in 1975.
John Vachon (1914 - 1975)
Vachon was a graduate student in English literature when Stryker
hired him and gave him the lowly title of "assistant messenger,"
purportedly because he had no ambitions to become a photographer.
After a year of looking at the staff's work, however, Vachon
persuaded Stryker to let him document scenes in the District of
Columbia that would make a contribution to the collection. After the
Washington Post published some of his photographs, Stryker began to
give him assignments. While on an extended campaign in the Plains
states, Vachon "decided that he would photograph only what pleased or
astonished him, and in the way he wanted to see it."
After serving in World War II, he joined the staff of Look. In 1974 his proposal to photograph North Dakota during the winter earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Marion Post Walcott (1910 - 1990)
Wolcott discovered photography when a friend gave her a Rolliflex
while she was studying at the University of Vienna in the early
1930s. After teaching in upstate New York, she became a staff
photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. Through a lecture
at the Photo League, she became friends with the photographer Ralph
Steiner, who introduced her to Stryker. He hired her in 1938, sending
her to photograph West Virginia coal miners as her first assignment.
Post Wolcott is known for the beauty of her landscapes and her
pictures of African Americans. One of her most famous photographs
shows an African American man climbing the outside staircase of a
movie theater to the "Colored Only" entrance.
In 1941, not long after her wedding, she left the FSA and devoted herself to raising her children. She took relatively few photographs until 1976, when she resumed photographing and became interested in color.
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