In 2019, at Fotofestiwal Łódź, I curated an exhibition with my vernacular collection of photography called American Revelations, which dealt with the concept of early twentieth-century America through the Second World War. It was a time in which the country was in flux, still finding its identity as immigrants from Europe and elsewhere made their way to America. After 1918, the country was also trying to make sense of the horrors of the First World War. Death, high infant mortality rates, and the burgeoning understanding of sepsis and other sickness, such as the Spanish Flu, put the country into a condition of hard work but also uncertainty.
This was followed by a period of prosperity in the 1920s at the cusp of Modernism. Automobiles and industrialized labor provided a rapid transformation of the country, amongst other boons in finance and technology. Race relations were still poor, but women gained the right to vote. Then, overnight, the stock market crashed, and the great depression began, rekindling the enormity of doubt that the country thought went out with the roaring twenties. With this came high unemployment and poverty. Sustainability, at risk, forced people to reassess their homestead, home life, and hometowns to move West and begin the life of itinerant migrant farming to sustain their family. The hardships endured in such a moment are unfathomable.
From the moment the FSA was established, the Farm Security Administration was formed to document the life of migrant farmers and the conditions of their travels Westward. Numerous photographs from Arthur Rothstein’s team of photographers returned with exemplary images of Dust Bowl America, arguably giving newspapers, magazines, and the government insight into the everyday plight of Americans. In this, a new mythology of America formed, again arguably, through the photographs of photographers like Dorothea Lange Rothstein, Ben Shan, Jack Delano, and others, would precedent the American moment with pictures that often showed their resilience. Whereas it was not precisely propaganda, it was a calculated effort by the FSA to document (and invent) the lives of America’s lower classes to provide proof to put people to work to get the economy and lives back on track.
With the photographs the FSA put together, a grand narrative of America and its resilience formed. This archive is now lodged in the Library of Congress but has also been digitized and is accessible through the New York Public Library. It is open for usage and has been used several times in recent years as a source of inspiration for artists and academics. Unburying previously unseen images and investigating which images were used in campaigns has been the subject of several books. There is a large volume of photos and material to sift through, providing a tidy amount of material for those willing to investigate its holdings. By and large, I have been skeptical of the artistic use of such projects as they end up feeling novel. I have seen very little that raises the material to a level past its initial use, and such ventures feel less genuine than another archive project. They even seem apparent.
With Omen Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive 1935-1944, a project realized by León Muñoz Santini and Jorge Panchoaga, co-published by Editorial RM and Gato Negro Ediciones, with a substantial text by Lucy Ives, I find myself excited by the effort, which seems to spring from seeing images that match their intended haunting of the FSA archive. I will argue that properly using the word phantasmagoria is a slight stretch, but I understand why they have been employed. I would have liked more reference to why they chose this with Marina Werner’s critically important book of the same name as a source. Still, I can accept the loose canonizing of Omen as having a haunted air, a ghostly air about it serviced in principle through an editorial effort more than anything that exists outright in the archive, which is fine. The effort of cropping these images and looking for parts of the images that carry the fear, angst, and uncertainty of the original photographs, whereas not unique, is genuine and conducted with exemplary detail.
Whereas the photographs themselves are uncut and do not present as phantasmagoric, the FSA archive haunts the idea of America through the lens of its photographic life. This is where the haunting occurs, speculative fear, and uncertainty remain. The artists/editors have produced a book that does cut the American myth of itself down and, in turn, presents, if not a documentary case, a sincere re-examination of how we view photographs in their position of studium or other. I was prepared to dislike the book for the above reason, but I admit that when viewing it in person at Paris Photo, it kept clinging to my thoughts like some corrosive mental webbing. Perhaps it did haunt me a bit. Apart from the artists ‘ gesture, I returned because the uncoated paper stock used, size, and design were compelling, presumably handled in collaboration with Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, the celebrated Mexican photographer and editor. The dark black of the blacks and the light grain associated pushed it back into the realm of gravure, or as close as one can approximate it these days.
It is also worth pointing out that the acidic, often darker aspects of America in the book have been handled by non-Americans who more than likely have a better outside view of the realities of the country during that timeframe and are likely, if interested in America, skeptical of how it portrays itself. Having fresh sets of eyes on a project like this from the outside is where the value is. If Americans continually recycle their mythology and export without artists like Robert Frank, Muñoz Santini, Ponchoaga, and Monasterio revisit it, what good is the mythology if it is not questioned? All in all, it is a book that I expected to roll my eyes at, and, instead, I have found a deeper connection to how others see the FSA images and how the use of such an archive can happen without reaching for cliches at every conceivable turn. If you like this, you will also like David Thomson’s Dry Hole (2022), co-published by the Archive of Modern Conflict and Mörel.
Highly Recommended.
León Muñoz Santini and Jorge Panchoaga
Omen
Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration Archive 1935-1944
Editorial RM and Gato Negro Ediciones