By Anna Mulrine

Walker Evans was not in Roy Stryker's good graces. Like other photographers on the Farm Security Administration's payroll between 1935 and 1943, Evans had been dispatched to chronicle the Great Depression and provide some good press for the Roosevelt administration's efforts to aid the poorest of the poor. The problem, as FSA project director Stryker saw it: "Evans thought of his work as art."

Stryker, on the other hand, hoped simply to "introduce Americans to America." He wanted his staff of 13 photographers to be sociologists, certainly. Storytellers on their best days. But not artists. "This was the built-in dilemma in the emerging field of documentary photography," says James Curtis, professor of history at the University of Delaware and author of Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth. "Too much emphasis on artistic creativity implied subjectivity and would undermine the picture." Not to say that Stryker wasn't looking for something special in the shots. "News pictures are the noun and the verb," he said. "Our kind of photography is the adjective and the adverb ... a mood, an accent, but more frequently a sketch and not infrequently a story."

The 270,000 pictures shot for the FSA were less stories than epics, chronicling the plight of starving Southern sharecroppers, migrant pea-pickers, and dust-blown Dakota farms. It was Stryker's intent not merely to capture poverty but also to show man's determination in the face of it. In the course of this pursuit, he wasn't beyond propaganda, drafting detailed scripts for his photographers to follow and, in the process, publicizing the reform works of the Roosevelt administration: "Get people with a little spirit. Pictures of men, women, and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S." Before the war, a German Nazi official had requested to see the "famous" FSA photo file, prompting Stryker's frantic instruction to his staff: "Emphasize the idea of abundance–and pour maple syrup over it. ... I know your damned photographer's soul writhes, but to hell with it."

Stryker's photographers often ignored him. Walker Evans worked, much to Stryker's consternation, slowly and deliberately to capture the stark beauty of sharecroppers' dirt-poor lives. What is less known, says Curtis, is that in his effort to ennoble the sharecroppers who later became the heroes of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans created scripts of his own. "When a scene was too cluttered to suit his intent, he removed objects," says Curtis. "He added others to achieve a certain balance to show the order that he believed lay beneath the surface of their poverty." Similarly, when shooting her most famous photo, Dorothea Lange suggested the "Migrant Mother" raise her hand to her face–a gesture that would make her appear less hard, more pensive. She turned the children, their heads on their mother's shoulders, away from the camera to reduce the likelihood, perhaps, of happy grins that might be incongruous with her message. The photographers also framed their subjects to make their plight more acceptable by mainstream norms. The migrant mother was 32 and had seven children, but Lange withheld at least one photograph of the woman with her teenage daughter from her FSA photo file. "The last thing Migrant Mother needed was middle-class America saying, 'This woman doesn't need relief–she needs birth control,' " says Curtis.

The widely circulated FSA pictures were embraceable art; the tales behind them very real. Ben Shahn recalled the plight of a farmer in an Ohio town he photographed: In search of a loan, the farmer was coldly refused by a banker. In the face of the farmer's pleas, the banker made him "a sporting offer," recalled Shahn. If the farmer could guess which of the banker's injured eyes was glass, he could have the loan. The farmer chose correctly. How did you guess? asked the banker, impressed. "It looked kinder," said the farmer. Such were the stories behind the pictures that would inspire a nation to be kinder, too.