Christmas Shopping during Wartime: Macy's
When most people think of the photographs created by the Farm Security Administration, they remember the iconic images of Dust Bowl America—Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” Walker Evans portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, and other similar images that starkly captured the deprivations of the Great Depression on farming communities across the country. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937 to aid poor farmers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant workers, by resettling poor farmers onto more productive land, promoting soil conservation, providing emergency relief, and loaning money to help farmers buy and improve farms. To defend and promote the FSA (and its predecessor, the Resettlement Administration or RA) against conservative attacks of being “socialistic,” the RA director Rexford Tugwell created a “publicity department to document rural poverty and government efforts to alleviate it.” Within it was a photographic unit, the “Historical Section” whose goal was to introduce “America to Americans." In 1937, the RA and its Historical Section were merged into the newly created FSA. Under Roy Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University, the Historical Section employed a large group of documentary photographers including Evans, Lange, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans. These photographers produced 175,000 black-and-white film negatives and transparencies and 1,610 color transparencies of life in Depression-era America between 1935 and 1943; the FSA project remains “the largest documentary photography project of a people ever undertaken.”
With the outbreak of World War II, the scope of the project changed from strictly rural locales and inhabitants to a broader focus on urban conditions, as well as mobilization efforts for World War II. The FSA merged with the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942, leading Stryker to encourage “his photographers to take more ‘positive’ images of American life to bolster America's war effort. And while FSA photographers continued to document poverty and inequality, they were told to increase their output of photographs featuring reassuring images of American life.” Among the aspects of American life that they began to document were both shopping and holiday celebrations—parts of life that found little joy in the farming and migrant communities photographed during the early years of the project (though some photos of Christmas dinner 1936 in an Iowa shack are particularly moving).
Looking through the FSA/OWI collection (housed since 1944 in the Library of Congress), two photographic series stood out to me: Christmas shopping at Macy’s Herald Square and a Washington D.C. Woolworth's five- and ten-cent store.
New York City-born Marjory Collins joined the FSA/OWI team in January 1942, shooting approximately fifty different assignments over the following eighteen months. According to the Library of Congress, “Her upbeat, harmonious images reflected the OWI editorial requests for visual stories about the ideal American way of life and stories that showed the commitment of ordinary citizens in supporting the war effort.” The images she photographed at Macy’s flagship in Herald Square during the run-up to Christmas 1942 show citizens supporting the war effort by stimulating the economy through retail. As documentary photographs, they capture the hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping rush awash with fed-up faces, messy counters, and long-suffering sales assistants.
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