Crafting Sanctuaries: Photographer Biographies

Jack Delano (1914-1997)and his family immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in 1923. He grew up taking art and music classes in Philadelphia, and after graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he took photography jobs with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the United Fund, and the Farm Security Administration, where he began in 1940. Delano’s photographs are best known for their unconventional use of scale, which dramatized the subjects of his images and set his work apart from other FSA photographers. After the FSA’s photography project ended in 1943, Delano completed multiple photo essays on the US wartime industries before being drafted to serve in the army in 1943. After the war, Delano and his wife moved to Puerto Rico, a place he first visited under assignment for the FSA in 1941. There, he brought his photography skills to public education and spent the rest of his days documenting life on the island and composing classical music for the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra.

Walker Evans (1903-1975) began his artistic career with ambitions to be a writer before experimenting with photography as an artistic medium. Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration from 1935-1937. Inspired by his experiences photographing rural life, Evans took a leave from the administration to independently document life in the rural South, working alongside writer James Agee to create a book, titled Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, on the lives of tenant farmers in Alabama. Evans achieved great fame through his work, which included prolific publications in magazines and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. Evans is also well known for his photos of the New York subway, his work as a staff photographer at Time magazine, and his role as an art professor at Yale University.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) is the photographer behind perhaps the most famous photo from the Great Depression, an image now known as “Migrant Mother.” In the 1920s, before working for the government, Lange was a successful portrait photographer in San Francisco. In 1935, she began working for the California State Emergency Relief Administration, a department which was later transferred to the Farm Security Administration. Lange worked for the FSA periodically between 1935-1939, but her commitment to the political potential of photography remained throughout her life. During World War II (WWII), Lange worked for the War Relocation Authority and documented the incarceration of Japanese Americans, a policy she strongly opposed. The government impounded these images during the war because of the sobering reality of the injustice they portrayed. Following WWII, Lange taught photography at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). She also co-founded the prominent photography magazine Aperture.

Russell Lee (1903-1986) first experimented with photography when capturing images to reference as source materials in his painting practice. Once he shifted his focus to photography entirely, his interest in social issues led him to document Pennsylvania coal mines before starting his 1936-1942 career at the Farm Security Administration. Lee was the longest-tenured and most prolific FSA photographer. He visited 29 states and photographed over 19,000 images as part of his employment. Once World War II began, Lee became a captain of the Air Transport Command and took aerial photos as well as images from the ground of the units supplying the armed forces. After the war, he returned to documenting labor conditions in coal mines before retiring from government work and teaching photography at the University of Texas at Austin.

Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990) was trained as a teacher before picking up photography while studying in Europe alongside her sister, who was working with Viennese photographer Trude Fleischmann. Upon returning to the US, Wolcott contributed to various magazines and newspapers as a freelance photographer. In 1938, she began working for the Farm Security Administration after friends she had met at the New York Photo League showed her work to Roy Stryker. Her FSA photos, spanning1938-1942, are her most famous works.

Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) was passionate about photography from a young age and met Roy Stryker, then an economics professor, while he was a student at Columbia University. Rothstein was the first staff photographer hired by Stryker in 1935, and he worked with the Farm Security Administration until he joined the Office of War Information. Following the end of the war in 1945, Rothstein took a role as a photographer for theUnited Nations, and in 1947, he became the director of photography at Look magazine. In the latter decades of his life, Rothstein prolifically wrote and published about photography, and he served on the faculty at Columbia University and Syracuse University.

Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was born in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1906. Shahn first trained as a lithographer before beginning his painting career and rising to fame for his politically engaged works of social realist paintings. Shahn ran in circles with other leftist artists like Diego Rivera, and throughout the 1930s, he was employed as a painter in multiple New Deal programs. In 1935, he joined the Farm Security Administration and traveled throughout the South, documenting rural America with particular attention toward labor. Like many FSA photographers, once World War II broke out, Shahn worked in the graphic arts division of the Office of War Information, though few of the posters he created for the office were published. Shahn had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, and he represented the US at the 1954 Venice Biennale.