Picturing Poverty Print Culture and FSA Photographs

by Finnegan, Cara A.

• ISBN13: 9781588341181
• ISBN10: 1588341186
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-17
• Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press

Summary

Working for the government's Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, photographers set out across the country to capture the human face of the Depression. Picturing Poverty examines how popular magazines used these images to construct complex and often contradictory messages about poverty. By striving to understand the original context of the photographs, Finnegan shines new light on the meanings of poverty, the Depression, and the various roles of the media.

Author Biography

Cara A. Finnegan is assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Table of Contents

Preface: A Rhetorical History of Photographs	ix
Acknowledgments	xxv
Introduction: Making Rural Poverty Visible: The Depression, the New Deal, and
the Historical Section	1	(35)
ONE Imaging Poverty in the Historical Section	36	(21)
TWO Social Engineering and Photographic
Resistance: Social Science Rhetorics of
Poverty in Survey Graphic	57	(63)
THREE Intersections of Art and Documentary:
Aesthetic Rhetorics of Poverty in U.S. Camera	120	(48)
FOUR Spectacle of the Downtrodden Other:
Popular Rhetorics of Poverty in Look Magazine	168	(52)
Epilogue: Rhetorical Circulation and the Picturing of Poverty	220	(5)
Notes	225	(23)
Selected Bibliography	248	(3)
Index	251