Roy Stryker

born may 11, 1893 great bend, kansas

died september 26, 1975 grand junction, colorado

pictorial historian, documentarian

"We introduced Americans to America. The reason we could do this, I think…was that all of us [FSA photographers] in the unit, were so personally involved in the times, and the times were so peculiarly what they were."

roy stryker

Roy Stryker was not a photographer, but he understood that pictures spoke louder than words. His talent was recognizing great photographs that told a story, then compiling and organizing those photographs. In doing so Stryker played a key role in introducing documentary photography to the people of the United States. Documentary photographs tell so much about a subject that they can serve as historical documents. They record and mirror the social and political scene of a particular time, providing images of work, play, family, church, clubs, political organizations, and war.

Stryker moved to Washington, D.C., in 1935 to head the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), which was later absorbed into the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He had been hired to increase public awareness of Great Depression conditions through still photographs—and thereby win support for New Deal programs. The New Deal programs had been introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45; see entry) beginning in 1933. They were designed to bring relief, recovery, and reform to Depression-weary America. (The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history.) Eventually Stryker's goal was to amass a collection of photographs that would provide a historical record of American life from the 1930s to the early 1940s.

Early years

Roy Emerson Stryker was born on May 11, 1893, in Great Bend, Kansas, to George and Ellen Stryker. George, a rancher, moved his family to Montrose, Colorado, when Roy was three years old. Roy later described his dad, who was a Civil War (1861–65) veteran, as a strong populist, always ready for a hearty political discussion. (Populists believe in promoting the rights and interests of the common people.) George also loved to try new things and did so with gusto. The family home was full of books, and the Stryker children were urged to thoughtfully and thoroughly pursue educational opportunities.

Roy graduated from Montrose High School, attended Colorado School of Mines for one year (1912–13), and then started his own cattle ranch with his brother. Entering the armed services during World War I (1914–18), Roy was assigned to the infantry in France. Upon returning to the United States, with the cattle business in a slump, he went back to Colorado School of Mines in 1920. After one year, Stryker's curiosity about the eastern United States he had glimpsed while traveling to and from the war got the best of him. He married Alice Frasier, and they headed for New York City, where he enrolled in Columbia University. Experiences in New York City began to deepen Stryker's social awareness. For example, having very little money, the newly married couple lived in a tenement (a run-down apartment building) and saw up close poverty-stricken people who seemed to have lost hope.

The college experience

Roy was excited about his classes at Columbia and chose to major in economics. He wanted to know why some Americans were so poor and how the geography of the United States affected economic conditions. He soon struck up a friendship with economics professor Rexford Guy Tugwell (1891–1979; see Brain Trust entry). Stryker also became aware of and studied the work of two photographers, Lewis Hine (1874–1940) and Jacob Riis (1849–1914), who had recorded life in the New York slums with their cameras. Stryker completed his bachelor's degree and was appointed in 1924 as an assistant in the economics department at Columbia. Stryker often tried new ways of teaching his students. Instead of lecturing his economics classes, he took them on field trips throughout the city to let students experience for themselves factories, slums, museums, and banks. He used photographs to show students various conditions and aspects of American life.

Aware of Stryker's interest in and knowledge of photography, Professor Tugwell asked Stryker to help him gather the pictures for a book titled American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement, which Tugwell published in 1925. This was Stryker's first experience in organizing illustrations for a specific topic. Stryker toyed with the idea of producing his own book; he hoped to present the history of agriculture in pictures. He started logically collecting and organizing photographs for the project so he would be ready if he ever got the chance to carry through with his idea. For the next ten years Stryker continued teaching his unconventional classes for Columbia and continued collecting photographs for books he never produced. Meanwhile, Professor Tugwell had become one of President Roosevelt's closest advisers and was serving as an assistant secretary of agriculture. In 1935 Roosevelt appointed Tugwell as chief administrator of the newly established Resettlement Administration (RA), whose goal was to assist the rural poor. Soon Stryker, Tugwell's former student assistant, would also head to Washington, D.C.

Historical Section of the RA/FSA/OWI

Rex Tugwell knew that if the RA program was to be successful, he would first have to educate the American public about the conditions the rural poor were facing in the 1930s. So Tugwell created the Historical Section within the RA's Division of Information and, with the power of photographs in mind, named Roy Stryker to administer the section. Tugwell defended the section from members of Congress who were determined that no pictures would come out of their districts; he allowed Stryker the freedom to run the section. Although Stryker never became a photographer himself, he was acutely aware that a camera could be a device for recording history.

Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration, and Office of War Information

One of the key purposes of the New Deal programs of the 1930s was to give economic aid to American farmers. The Resettlement Administration (RA), established in 1935, directed its efforts toward helping small farmers, who had largely been overlooked by the major New Deal farm agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. The purpose of the RA was to provide low-cost loans to impoverished farmers, relocate farmers on productive land, and allow them to eventually buy the land. The RA sponsored temporary camps for migrant farmworkers and planned model communities of self-sufficient communal farms where certain needy families could be relocated. The RA also assisted poor farmers by providing farm machinery for temporary use and government-purchased seed. The RA aided efforts to reclaim eroded land, clean up polluted rivers, and control potential flooding.

In July 1937 the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act became law. After President Roosevelt signed the measure, he established the Farm Security Administration (FSA) within the Department of Agriculture. The FSA's purpose was to carry out the act's provisions of aiding tenant farmers (farmers who rented the land they worked) with loans and with conservation programs for eroded and otherwise damaged land. The RA was absorbed into the FSA, and Roy Stryker's Historical Section of the RA simply moved intact into the FSA. Stryker's photographers became commonly known as the FSA photographers.

By 1941 the United States was gearing up to enter World War II (1939–45). The Office of War Information (OWI) was created in 1942, and Stryker and several of his photographers were moved into the OWI to photograph the nation's preparations for war. Hence the FSA collection of photographs became known as the FSA/OWI collection.

Stryker's first duty at the Historical Section was to gather a staff of photographers. He did not seek out famous photographers; he simply looked for talent and idealism. These men and women photographers of the Historical Section would eventually take 270,000 pictures that set the standard for modern-day visual (pictorial) history. At first Stryker was not sure exactly how the project would go. He explains in
"The FSA Collection of Photographs," published in In This Proud Land:

i had no idea what was going to happen. i expected competence. i did not expect to be shocked at what began to come across my desk. the first three men who went out—carl mydans, walker evans and ben shahn—began sending in some astounding stuff that first fall, about the same time that i saw the great work dorothea lange[1895–1965; see entry] was doing in california and decided to hire her. then arthur rothstein, who had set up the lab, started taking pictures. every day was for me an education and a revelation. i could hardly wait to get to the mail in the morning.

Stryker received negatives in the mail, had them developed, and took the pictures home each night to pore over them. Then the next morning he would let the photographers know how they were doing. Before the photographers went out on assignments, which often lasted months at a time, Stryker demanded that they thoroughly understand the situation of the area they were going to document. He delighted in teaching them important information about the areas and often gave the photographers pep talks just before they left. Stryker also sent them with "shooting scripts," outlining the kinds of pictures he needed. However, he made it clear that photographers had the freedom to shoot anything that seemed important. At first the photographers focused on rural poverty, and their photos helped increase the public's awareness of those in need. Congress was compelled to act to relieve the suffering. Later the photographs reflected every aspect of small-town and rural life, and the entire collection became a national treasure documenting the 1930s.

Photographs On-Line

Many of the photographs made by the Historical Section photographers of the Resettlement Administration (RA), Farm Security Administration (FSA), and Office of War Information (OWI) can be viewed on the Library of Congress web site. The collection is part of the library's American Memory program. In all, about 270,000 RA/FSA/OWI exposures were made. Roy Stryker, who led the project, punched holes in up to 100,000 negatives that he felt were inferior. Therefore, the main part of the collection includes approximately 164,000 black-and-white negatives and 1,600 color negatives, the latter taken during the last days of the project. Color photography became widespread late in the 1930s with the development of Kodachrome and other color films. The FSA/OWI photographers secured a limited number of color images near the end of the Great Depression. In 2001 over 112,000 of the black-and-white and color images were available online. The images may be found at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowho me.html.

By 1941 the FSA budget was slashed as the United States prepared to enter World War II (1939–45). The Historical Section was transferred to the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942. Stryker continued to head the section and took a few FSA photographers with him. The OWI was charged with photographing America's war preparation, showing the positive side of America's industrial might. Aircraft factories, shipyards, oil refineries, and women in the labor force were all subjects. Stryker liked to show the role of factory workers, but his bosses at the OWI did not always select the pictures he would have chosen. By 1943 Stryker was ready to leave the OWI. For a time the fate of the RA/FSA/OWI negatives and photographs was in question. Some in Congress wanted the entire collection destroyed. Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982), then head of the Library of Congress, rescued the collection and had it brought to the library. At the start of the twenty-first century, most Americans base their images of 1930s America on the remarkable collection of RA/FSA/OWI photographs.

Standard Oil of New Jersey

On October 4, 1943, Stryker left the OWI to work full-time for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Between 1943 and 1950 Standard Oil sponsored a documentary project to compile a photographic record of the oil industry. Stryker was hired to head the project, which was patterned after the FSA project. As he had done with the FSA, Stryker hired a diverse group of talented photographers, who documented not only the complex oil industry but also much of small-town America in the 1940s. Sixty-seven thousand black-and-white photos and one thousand color photos were produced by 1950. Money for the project was cut back starting in 1948, and Stryker resigned in 1950. From July 1950 through 1951 Stryker was director of the Pittsburgh Photographic Project, an ambitious project designed to create a collection of photographs about the city of Pittsburgh and its people during a time of dramatic change for the community. By the time Stryker left, his staff had produced over 18,000 photographs. From 1952 to 1958 he directed a photographic project documenting steel production for Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation. Stryker then moved back to Colorado and occasionally took consulting jobs.

In 1962 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented two hundred of the FSA photographs in an exhibition titled The Bitter Years. The exhibition set off a round of books and articles and more exhibitions of the FSA photographs. In 1972 while living in Grand Junction, Colorado, Stryker chose about two hundred photos that he considered the essence of the FSA project. That was less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the 270,000 photos taken. He published the selected photos in 1973 in his book In This Proud Land. Stryker died two years later at the age of eighty-two.

For More Information

Books

garver, thomas h. just before the war: urban america from 1935 to 1941as seen by photographers of the farm security administration. new york, ny: october house, 1968.

hurley, f. jack. portrait of a decade: roy stryker and the development of documentary photography in the thirties. baton rouge, la: louisiana state university press, 1972.

o'neal, hank. a vision shared: a classic portrait of america and its people,1935–1943. new york, ny: st. martin's press, 1976.

plattner, steven w. roy stryker: u.s.a., 1943–1950. austin, tx: university of texas press, 1983.

stryker, roy e., and nancy wood, eds. in this proud land: america1935–1943 as seen in the fsa photographs. greenwich, ct: new york graphic society, 1973.

Web Sites

"america from the great depression to world war ii: photographs from the fsa-owi, 1935–1945." library of congress.http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html (accessed on september 10, 2002).