Postmodern Historiography and the Visual Record: Picturing Faith with Colleen McDannell

Picturing Faith by Colleen McDannell is as much a history of a particular perspective on religion during the Great Depression as of the thing perceived. It chronicles the picture-snapping exploits of the irreligious, modernist photographers of the Farm Security Administration. In particular, it documents their biases and their methods. McDannell’s careful attention to the agenda of the FSA photographers makes for an interesting human interest story, but more than that, it enables us to sift the documentary evidence they collected and to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate representations of American religion. McDannell believes that photographs can connect us powerfully to historical American religion and its adherents, but she has also carefully documented the limitations of photographic evidence. During the process of selection and composition of subject-matter, photographers consciously shape their subjects. Their claims to objectivity, therefore, are as misleading as those made by the authors of textual sources. Indeed, McDannell believes that it is only by carefully examining both textual and photographic evidence and allowing them to mutually correct each other that we can begin to construct an accurate portrait of the past.

Much of McDannell’s analysis focuses on the photographers themselves as representatives of a secular, modernist intellectual culture that grew increasingly skeptical of religion in the first decades of the twentieth century (4,16-7,216). The photographers harbored cynicism especially about religious leaders (118), revivalist enthusiasm (33,97), and faith-based efforts to reform society (10,114,130). These photographers had abandoned religion and turned the task of social justice over to the state (115). But if the photographers were not religious, neither were they unspiritual. They had that appreciation of the visual, ancient, and mysterious elements of religious culture that is typical of artists and Romantics. So for example Catholic piety in New Mexico appealed to John Collier because of the “folkloric quality” of its visual culture: it seemed to exist “in a time and space separate from our modern world.” McDannell places Collier’s sentiments in the tradition of early twentieth-century nostalgia for noble savagery, typified by artists’ and writers’ obsession with Native Americans and Africans (73). Modernists reduced religious images to mere “art”, and in so doing domesticated them and emptied them of their religious significance, thereby creating a spirituality that transcends sectarian, creedal bigotry (74-7). The photographers expended a significant quantity of film photographing empty churches as an expression of “desire…for a pure sacredness that is not profaned by the pettiness of people.” They also captured church exteriors whose architecture adheres to the modernist ideal of austere “restraint, functionality, and efficiency” (56). McDannell’s portrait of the photographers’ perspective on religion is by far the most compelling element of Picturing Faith.

The fact that the FSA photographs can tell us so much about the ideology of the photographers, however, is not entirely to our advantage; it means that the photographs tell us that much less about their subject matter. The pictures were supposed to promote a particular agenda: namely, to marshal popular support for Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms (5). Later, when Roosevelt wanted to convince Americans of the necessity for intervention in World War II, the emphasis shifted to a portrayal of religion and religious freedom as a “strength” of America (137,142). Although not all the photographs successfully accomplished these ends (40), and although the photographers resisted the push to create government propaganda (20), the truth is that they consciously shaped their subjects (34). Roy Stryker was painfully aware of the fact that photographers’ intentional “composition” of a photograph and emphasis on photography as “art” could foster distrust of its portrayal of reality (60). Indeed, some people felt that the FSA project was creating “subversive propaganda” and demanded that Roosevelt stop spending taxpayer dollars on film (9). Stryker and his photographers portrayed themselves as objective reporters engaged in “‘honest’ photography” rather than art (7,33,60), but the truth is that several of them actually conceived of themselves first and foremost as artists (54). And while their pictures were not propaganda in, say, the Nazi sense of the term, they still tended to select images and to appropriate cultural themes that furthered the government’s agenda (142).

McDannell uses textual evidence to sort fact from fiction in the photographers’ portrayal of religion. In the first stage of the FSA effort, with its reform orientation, she identifies several misleading tendencies among the photographs. For example, selection of subject matter means we get only part of the story (105,109,130). Although there were religious people in the United States who were not part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, they are entirely ignored by the FSA (19). The photographs also, in keeping with the photographers’ modernist perspective, tend to stress ordinary, communal piety but to ignore radical faith expressions and faith-based efforts at social reform (20,33,98,102-3,114,130). McDannell also observes that use of a harsh flash indoors tends to exaggerate the squalor of poor people’s living conditions (28). In the later period, when pursuing Roosevelt’s war agenda, there are also misleading elements. The photographs emphasize religious cohesion and strength (139). They particularly celebrate America’s religious diversity, conceived largely in religious terms, by stressing that Americans of all religious perspectives share a patriotic common ground and a commitment to the principles of freedom (142,144-145,152,176,194). There may be some truth to this portrayal, but the photographers also tended to elide religious division and the exercise of authority by clergymen (160-1,165). Carefully posed photographs stressed a somewhat artificial connection between religion and modernism, progressivism, technology, masculinity, and abudance (145,158-9). A Jewish farming community was photographed in an attempt to destroy stereotypes of Jews as crooked businessmen, despite the fact that farming Jews were a tiny minority (168). And as a final caution against assuming that a collection of photographs tells the whole story, McDannell juxtaposes three very different—even contradictory—portraits of urban African-American piety (209,224-5,236).

At the same time, however, McDannell sees important ways in which photographs can serve as a corrective to textual records. For example, the fact that photographs tell us little about the content of preaching or theology is actually an advantage in their portrayal of southern religion. Whereas textual sources are full of stereotypes of southern emotionalism and racism, they tell us little about why southern evangelicalism was appealing to so many people. The photographers answer that question for us by recording its powerful visual appeal (83-4). McDannell says that Marion Post “photographed what she saw, rather than what she thought” about southern religion and in so doing “discovered new and surprising aspects of southern religious experience” (84,89,101). A major emphasis in the book, including the section on the South, is what photography can tell us about religious “material culture” (37,43,50,83,108,237,240). McDannell also believes that part of the “importance of photography” is that behind the images “stand real people” (266). Photography can humanize the past (3,43) and, when supplemented by biography, can “open a wider world,” “direct us toward remarkable lives,” and lend “texture to stories that tend not to be told” (255). Indeed, McDannell feels that it is when the visual and written records are taken together that we most clearly “see the thirties and forties as a dynamic period of religious history in the United States” (277).

McDannell’s book is ultimately more convincing in its portrayal of the ideology of the FSA photographers and in its discussion of the limitations of photography than in its argument for the power of photography to provide unique information about the past. But I think her brief comments about photography providing “texture” and connecting us to “real people” in the past cut to the heart of the matter. Photography imparts to the past a concreteness that transports viewers into another time and place and that ushers them into the presence of other times, other cultures, and other expressions of faith. In our decidedly visual postmodern culture, images allow us to participate in historic American religion in a way that textual evidence simply does not. McDannell’s commentary stresses the limits of photography’s ability to provide us with complete information about the past, but in truth I think that few postmodern men and women really expect to have complete information about anything. Ours is a more romantic enterprise; what we lack in information we make up for in identification and intuitive understanding. Seeing the people and events of the past—sensing them—allows our collective imagination to journey among them. Picturing Faith offers sensory experience in spades, and in that sense I think it is the best portrait of the past a postmodern America could hope for.