Look Book: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, 1988

... Michael L. Carlebach is ... the organized dissemination of information and ideas for the purpose of influencing attitudes and behavior, is vital to the proper functioning of democracy. ... 9. OliverThompson, Mass Persuasion in History (New York: Crane, Russak and Co., 1977), p. 6. 10 ...

L'Atalante. International Film Studies Journal, 2013

The relationship between journalists, writers, photographers and filmmakers during the Great Depression in the 1930s in the U.S. gave rise to a fertile climate for the production of a powerful and recurring interweaving of text and image. The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) affected the writers of the time and vice versa. Cinema would adapt the language of writers, journalists and photographers in its own way. Through a study of The Grapes of Wrath (novel by Steinbeck, film by Ford), the article focuses on the influence the FSA aesthetic had on modes of cinematic representation both during the period and today.

L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, 2011

La relación entre periodistas, escritores, fotógrafos y cineastas durante la Gran Depresión de los años treinta en Estados Unidos dio lugar a un clima fértil para que se produjera una poderosa y recurrente imbricación entre el texto y la imagen. Las fotografías de la Farm Security Administration (FSA) afectaron a los escritores de la época y viceversa. El cine adaptaría en la forma que le es propia el lenguaje de escritores, periodistas y fotógrafos. A través del estudio de Las uvas de la ira (novela de Steinbeck, película de Ford), el artículo centra su atención en la influencia que ha ejercido la estética de la FSA en los modos de representación cinematográfica coetáneos y contemporáneos.

The Public Historian, Vol 36, No. 2 pp. 8-25, 2014

Taken by a host of talented photographers, the Farm Security Administration photographs have become the defining visual imagery of the Great Depression. Familiar, beautifully composed, and free from reproduction copyright, these photographs have become an essential tool for interpreting a number of facets of the 1930s, especially that of poverty. As useful as the images are, the nature of their creation and the embedded messages regarding hardship mean that they are not as universal as is sometimes presumed. This article examines how the images facilitate interpretation of Great Depression history, particularly that which pertains to the experience of poverty, and the repercussions and limitations of their use.

New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

This lecture on photographer Louise Rosskam was originally delivered at the Monmouth County Library in Manalapan on June 10, 2013. Minor revisions have been made to the text and expanded notes with citations included as appropriate for an academic journal. The permission of Ani Rosskam to reproduce her mother’s photographs is gratefully acknowledged.

History of Photography, 2003

The 'American Dream' briefly changed character in the decade of the Great Depression. Shifting from a belief grounded in the frontier myth and the mystical power of the yeoman farmer to one that expressed the cooperative ideal, millions of Americans reevaluated their commitment to rugged individualism, an ideology that had dominated the decade of 1920s. Social documentary photography played an important role in that transformation. I believe that describing this change is another way to interpret the phenomenon described by Michael Denning in The Cultural Front as 'the laboring of American culture'.1 The thesis underlying this revisit to the American Dream is that there has been a sibling rivalry in the history of American ideas: the struggle for the definition of what is 'American' has fluctuated between a basis in cooperation and in competition. The history of this rivalry is manifest in a wide range of intellectual histories and debates, including Daniel Rodgers's 'Republicanism: the career of a concept', which examines the swing between libertarianism and egalitarianism in American historiography. The tension between the collective and the private, the whole and the one, the right and the duty-the greatest good for the greatest number versus individual license-is an old one in American history.2 Daniel Rodgers charts in his landmark essay an intellectual paradigm shift. 3 According to Rodgers, American historiography underwent an intellectual realignment in the period of the Great Depression and World War II. Rodgers does not identity a specific event or catalyst in the Depression as initiating the change. However, he does place the shift as occurring from the pre-Depression Charles Beard economic analysis of American history to the post-World War II Louis Hartz ideology, which located John Locke's 'liberal' version of freedom at the centre of the revised American canon. 4 Rodgers does not substantively analyse the reasons for the shift to new core ideas. I argue here that the history of how the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (hereafter RA/FSA/OWI) archive at