Five New Deal agencies had photographic units, but the work of one specifically stands out: the expansive Farm Security Administration (FSA), which had more functions than any other agency due to its colossal mission of battling the Great Depression’s most widespread problem, rural poverty. Publicity was a key complement to FSA initiatives. But FSA photographers were charged with more than simply producing file and publicity photos. Their mission was to capture the life of a nation in all its forms.
The FSA hired the best photographers it could find—professionals and skilled amateurs, men and women—whose talents, experience, and sheer desire to capture the most iconic images ensured a uniformly high standard of work. If it could be said that their approach adhered to one adage, it was, Don’t spare the film! They didn’t.
Today, the Library of Congress archives include hundreds of thousands of pictures they took. Each photographer was a keen looker and an opportunist of the moment. Their pictures were both straightforward and peculiarly American compositions. Here were the trappings of life lived simply, of hard work, of meager living conditions by today’s standards, and yet, of quiet pride and dogged determination, too. They recorded people with a sensitive humanitarian visual rhetoric, and in so doing, portrayed the soul and spirit of the nation.
The FSA ensured its photographs were widely seen via the agency’s carefully cultivated and extensive network of contacts in journalism and publishing. The marquee magazine of the time, Life, and others such as Look, Time, and Fortune, were collectively changing the reading habits of the nation. They were full of slick photography, much of it supplied by the FSA and other New Deal agencies eager to publicize their work.
In the accompanying photos, most taken in Virginia, the camera wasn’t an aesthetic device employed to capture images for the sake of art, but rather a means to record reality as it was, sometimes unlovely, oftentimes commonplace, but with respect for the dignity of people’s lives and pursuits. As we look back from 80-plus years in the future, we see sincere, matter-of-fact glimpses, poignant glances, of ordinary people living in simpler but more challenging times who meet the camera’s gaze unselfconsciously.
Virginia then, as Virginia today, was filled with ordinary, everyday people. So, when New Deal photographers set out on the greatest social documentation project in history, their subjects were not hard to find. And, many thousands of photographs later, the simple glory of their stories—from the Great Depression through the war years—were there, in black and white, without fanfare but deserving of it for posterity’s sake.






“What does the future hold for me?” this Caroline County woman’s seems to ask in this simple yet engaging picture. Her family was being relocated; an Army training ground took priority. Photo by
Jack Delano, June 1941.

There’s nothing like refreshing honesty in a used car dealer, as this one in Bedford made plain to see in March 1941. Photo by John Vachon. At Look magazine in 1953, Vachon took the first photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio together.

Music soothes the soul of even the youngest squatter, like this boy in Corbin Hollow (now Shenandoah National Park) in 1935.



Fennel Corbin takes five on the porch of his primitive cabin in what is now Shenandoah National Park. Today, hikers can rent Corbin Cabin and live the simple life of mountain people. Sort of. Photo by Arthur Rothstein, October 1935.

Wherever work could be found in 1941, that’s where you went. Trailer parks provided quick housing for Navy Yard construction workers and their families coming to Portsmouth. Photo by John Vachon.

This Norfolk area defense worker seems to find the humor in having his picture taken in his grimy work clothes for some random government photographer, who happened to be John Vachon in March 1941.

Cultural and social touches marked Jack Delano’s photography for the Farm Security Administration. In this 1941 image, he contrasts military and civilian life via two sailors looking at the world they no longer inhabit near Yorktown.

It works! Sergeant George Camblair’s gas mask passes the test, in this 1942 Fort Belvoir shot by Jack Delano. The photographer’s unorthodox compositions dramatized his subjects in stark contrast to the work of other New Deal photographers.

Stuck at a newspaper doing photo shoots for “ladies’ stories,” Marion Post Wolcott jumped at the chance to work for a New Deal agency. She had an eye for subtle humor, such as this 1940 shot of Danville farmers waiting to sell their tobacco.

While this Radford wife of a defense worker looks passively into the camera lens for Marion Post Wolcott’s 1941 photograph, her children seem lost in their own inner worlds.

Before there were refrigerators, there were iceboxes, and companies delivered the ice, one big block hefted by one strong man at a time. John Vachon took this photo in March 1941. After WWII, he worked for Life and Look magazines.

In a single photograph, Jack Delano could speak volumes. A Caroline County family of 10 called that shack home in 1941. After the government relocated them, it was razed for an Army training ground.
Learn more about VMFA’s A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.
This article originally appeared in the February 2025 issue.