After a brief guest appearance at the end of the Great War the United States settled into a new decade which seemed to assure a new prosperity. The war had rescued the US from recession. Arms sales abroad and a war footing at home had boosted industry and employment. American agriculture had benefited hugely from a war that took millions of Europeans away from the land. Machinery – tractors, trucks and the Model T Ford – allowed production to increase beyond precedent as wartime prices encouraged farmers to buy out their neighbours and expand their holdings. At the same time (but with little understanding of ecology) agricultural expansion and mechanisation extended to the Great Plains, converting grassland to cropland. And although the economy took a temporary downturn when war production ceased, wartime devastation left global markets open to American companies. Confidence in the 1920s was boosted by the prospect of the ongoing repayment of war loans, and by the reforms of the ‘Progressive Movement’, which promised an end to political and corporate corruption and to the problems arising from industrialisation and urbanisation. All the signs suggested that an era of modernisation and efficiency was at hand.

In the event, many of these promises were to prove illusory.  American farmers found themselves fettered to loans that they could not service in the face of over-production, falling prices and collapsing land values. War loan repayments to the US were dependent on the receipt of war reparations that vanished with German hyperinflation. An important platform of the Progressive Movement had been Prohibition, which from 1920 had its own effect on sectors of agriculture and industry, reduced tax revenues and contributed to the disasters to come. More importantly perhaps, Prohibition opened the doors to organised crime and revitalised corruption of the police, politics and the judiciary - the opposite of the consequences intended by the Progressives. And it was seen in some quarters as the imposition of the mores of a Protestant rural America on an increasingly urbanised population, reinforcing divisions old and new: between the north and south, between city and country, between coast and hinterland. Ironically, many farmers who had fought for prohibition were to eventually argue for its repeal because of the negative effects it had on their businesses.

The illusion of stability and long term prosperity had launched the ‘Roaring Twenties’ on a raft of rampant, credit-based, consumerism and an ocean of bathtub gin. Misplaced confidence saw a booming stock market, with millions of first-time investors borrowing on the assumption of exponential growth. By 1929 production was declining and unemployment was rising, leaving vastly over-valued stocks and creditors unable to meet their commitments. The bubble burst in the autumn of that year with the US stock market crash and a global domino effect that included the final demise of a Weimar Republic that had been propped up by American loans.
 
The Great Depression was to destroy millions of American jobs in industry and construction, with a concomitant spread of urban and social decay, with destitute inner city populations looking to charities, breadlines and soup kitchens for survival. The agricultural heartlands suffered a whole different order of deprivation, where isolated or displaced families often lacked even the comfort of community. This was nowhere more true than on the Great Plains, where mortgage foreclosures and uninsured bank failures marched hand in hand with a ten year drought.  Deep ploughing had ousted the deep rooted indigenous grasses that held soil and moisture together against an arid microclimate and periodic high winds. In November 1933 a series of dust storms devastated South Dakota and were to spread to neighbouring regions in subsequent years. Worst affected were the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, where desiccation saw 100,000,000 acres of top soil disappear on the wind. The 'black blizzards' increased in frequency and intensity, spawning the largest short term migration in American history. More than 3.5 million people abandoned farms in the Dust Bowl. Unquantified numbers headed towards an unwelcoming and equally troubled California, an exodus mythologised into the stuff of literature and cinema and in the songs of Woodie Guthrie. The images persist: of starving women and children, of broken down jalopies, of work camps and police lines.
 
The germinal year of the Dust Bowl storms was a watershed in other ways. In March 1933, as the US economy hit bottom, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated on the back of a landslide and the pledge of a ‘New Deal’. His legendary “First Hundred Days”, a benchmark for his lesser successors, were spent with a compliant Congress in a flurry of lawmaking that included fiscal, banking and monetary reform, the regulation of Wall Street … and the repeal of Prohibition. Relief programmes were initiated by the National Industrial Recovery Act to help the unemployed, working in parallel with major projects under a newly formed Public Works Administration. Public works programmes were to repair, and in many cases create, essential infrastructure, ranging from roads to hospitals, schools, bridges and rural electrification. Reforestation, flood controls and dam construction were to reclaim millions of hectares of barren land. Long term as many of these programmes were, immediate action during the First Hundred Days was to produce a near miraculous economic upturn. The Federal Reserve Index rebounded by almost 60% by July 1933.
 
FDR’s visionary administration was to produce a tranche of organisations  – dubbed the alphabet agencies – that hinted at a new, social democratic, order and through their various incarnations were to add to the foundations of a liberal, progressive, sustainable and civilised civic society; institutions and functions that the current administration is systematically dismantling. Then as now, the spectre of such a social order was not universally welcomed where rampant individualism was prized above community and compassion. As always, the merest sniff of public benevolence brought on paranoid cries of “socialism”. Law enforcement, freed from prosecuting trivial infringements of Prohibition and not yet fully engaged with residual organised crime, was antagonistic towards unionisation and industrial action. The Red Menace was a bigger threat than Fascism and the legacies of this antagonism were the House Un-American Activities Committee, the junior Senator from Wisconsin and the dark obsessive empire of J Edgar Hoover.
 
Subsumed within the Public Works Administration was the much smaller Federal Project Number One, created in 1935 to provide employment for artists, writers, musicians and actors. Federal One worked on the principle that the artist, like the manual worker, should be entitled to employment through public programmes; and that the arts should be the concern of an ideal commonwealth, no less than agriculture, industry and commerce. By 1936 more than 40,000 creative workers were employed across the United States, in activities that ranged from public performances to public art to the Historical Records Survey. The impact of Federal One cannot be overstated, laying down as it did the groundworks for the cultural life of the half-century to come. Direct beneficiaries of Federal One are too numerous to list but a smattering of names including John Steinbeck, F Scott Fitzgerald, Orson Wells, John Huston and James Agee gives a flavour.
 
Arguably the most enduring legacy for the public perception was that created by the Farm Security Administration’s photography project, headed by Roy E Stryker. Stryker recruited eleven photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, to chronicle the lives of sharecroppers and migrant workers and to report the condition of rural communities. Stryker’s office in Washington DC provided full back office, processing, editorial and distributive support; this last servicing the main function of the project: to provide content to magazines, newspapers, book publishers and public information exhibitions.
 
The photography project was the main component in a programme of benevolent propaganda that set out to justify and promote FDR’s administration and initiatives, not least through emotional appeal: high drama, ravaged landscapes and the haunting dignity of the displaced and dispossessed.

"The democracies were (relatively) free from the coercion of totalitarianism, free to explore, record and criticise the effects of political insouciance and economic decline. Photographers were influenced by documentary filmmakers like John Grierson and Robert Flaherty and were drawn to communities in distress ..."

Britain’s gradual economic recovery from the Great War was slowed in 1925 when Churchill, the Conservative Chancellor, restored Sterling to the gold standard. The new exchange rate increased the price of British exports, especially by the country’s core heavy industries. Owners tried to hold down export prices by lowering workers’ wages; industry was starved of investment and modernisation; and unemployment in the 1920s rose to a high plateau of 1 million. Unfortunate as the effects were on British workers, there was far worse to come.

In 1929 infectious speculation by the US “share-owning democracy” led to the collapse of the New York Stock Market and the Great Depression. World trade shrank as the nations affected by the American crisis erected trade barriers and tariffs. Governments faced financial disruption when the supply of credit from a reeling American banking system withered. The adherence to ‘classical’ economics – a balanced budget at any cost – by the new Labour government of Ramsey MacDonald was followed by pressure from the Liberals and the Conservative opposition to cut public sector wages and to reduce public sector spending. Two thirds of the proposed savings were to be garnered from unemployment benefit.
 
The hammer fell hardest on those areas to the west and north of the Jurassic limestone ridge that ran from Lyme Bay to the Humber and divided barren uplands, dependent on extraction and manufacturing, from the fecund lowlands of the south. The south and the Midlands fared comparatively well through the 1930s, with agriculture, the motor industry, house-building and developing light industries supplying a closed loop of local consumer markets. But the effects on the already-reeling industrial areas of the United Kingdom were immediate. Coal mining, steel, textiles, ship building suffered from lack of investment and demand. The north east and the South Wales Valleys were especially vulnerable to laissez-faire economics grounded in mass unemployment, destitution, soup kitchens and the humiliation of the means test. Economic turmoil was matched by political turmoil, with a so-called ‘National Government’ dominated by Conservatives, with Oswald Mosely quitting the Labour Party to found the British Union of Fascists and, as the governing class shifted generally to the right, with an unhealthy and sometimes treasonous pandering to ideologues in Italy and Germany. Social turmoil was not far behind as racism and antisemitism followed fascism and the political left rose in opposition.
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Photography, and particularly film, was proving a potent tool in the hands of European fascism. Leni Riefenstahl’s official record of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally re-enforced the choreography of symbols and massed ranks that was at the core of Adolf Hitler’s appeal to national pride and solidarity. The sinister magnetism of ‘Triumph of the Will’ is still apparent. Her subsequent offerings in support of the National Socialist state celebrated ethnic superiority and communal well-being; the corollary of Aryan self-glorification was the denigration of ‘the other’. The set pieces of cinema were transmuted to seductive still photographs; and venomous imagery of ‘the other’ created scapegoats that distracted the populace from political reality.
 
The democracies were (relatively) free from the coercion of totalitarianism, free to explore, record and criticise the effects of political insouciance and economic decline. Photographers were influenced by documentary filmmakers like John Grierson and Robert Flaherty and were drawn to communities in distress (while posing the same questions about ethics and authenticity). Documentary photography flourished through magazines dedicated to dynamic photo-journalism.  In the United Kingdom photographers were instrumental in raising public awareness as the government floundered through half-hearted attempts to stimulate recovery by public works, loans and tariffs. In the USA they were an integral part of an holistic New Deal for devastated industrial regions and for a rural America ravaged by poverty and environmental catastrophes.

In Britain the scene was set for the coming World War, the London Blitz and for the bombsites of the dismal 1950s when the nation struggled through reconstruction and slow recovery – subjects that led to an emphasis on the microcosm and the local. In America, the documentary efforts of the 1930s laid the foundations for a very different post-war reportage, dictated by a very different, continental, geography.

In 1851 Henry Mayhew, co-founder of Punch magazine, published London Labour and the London Poor. His richly detailed social research, first serialised in the Morning Chronicle, was a major influence on the fiction of Charles Dickens and, more widely, on the thinking of social reformers and legislators. Mayhew chronicled a population with no fixed place of work and, often, no fixed abode, where the safety nets were thievery, beggary and prostitution.

Mayhew had already spent time in Paris, and his work characterises the emerging world of the metropolis, fuelled by the industrial revolution and industrial exploitation and fed by the movement of people from countryside to town, from the Old World to the New. This was fertile ground for the artists and illustrators of the day; and as the new century loomed there were photographers waiting in the wings who shared many of the pre-occupations of the fin de siècle cultural environment. Photographers followed in the footsteps of the light-obsessed Impressionists and, as side effect, freed the avant-garde from the straightjacket of the figurative.
 
Photography first approached the urban environment with specific points of focus. Cities were generators of nostalgia, as well-loved street patterns and streetscapes were sacrificed to modernity. Cities were magnets for close observers of the human condition, where disparate groups and classes were brought into uncomfortable proximity. And cities offered an unequalled range of subjects to curious journalists, sociologists and photographers, not least in Mayhew’s ecosphere of characters and crooks; and not least as the streets were surrendered to the denizens of the night.
 
By 1878 electric street lighting was appearing in Paris and London and by the turn of the century was widespread in the developed world. Increased luminance coupled with technical improvements brought photographic imagery of beauty, mood and mystery: wet streets, reflected light and ominous shadows. Drama was implicit in pictorial narratives as photographers explored the nocturnal world: back alleys, cafes, music halls, the breath of subversion, the hint of the illicit, the whiff of simmering sexuality. Nothing drew the voyeuristic middle classes like the fringes of the night. Nothing appealed more to the salacious consumer than the demimonde. And nothing appealed more to the adrenaline-seeking urbanista than the mean and dangerous streets.
 
Even the architecturally-inclined Eugene Atget was tempted by Paris at night. He was followed by a whole interwar generation, when Paris was a multicultural hub of artistic innovation.  Where Man Ray led and Bill Brandt followed. Where Brassai immortalised Montparnasse and the Left Bank. And from where the fascination for metropolitan grit spread to the streets of London, New York and Chicago and to the prophets and the celebrants of urban decay - fitting succesors to Henry Mayhew.

In March 1854 William Howard Russell, ‘special correspondent of The Times’, sailed with men of the Rifle Brigade from Malta to the Crimea. Russian encroachment on the western shore of the Black Sea and the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Sinope in 1853 had made war with the Ottoman Empire inevitable. Britain was fearful of the potential Russian threat to overland communications with India; Napoleon III, newly enthroned, was looking for an imperial adventure. England and France chose to support Turkey and oppose Russian expansionism. The belligerents met on the Crimean Peninsula.
 
William Russell was to provide eye-witness accounts of all the major actions: Alma, the long siege of Sebastopol, Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade, Inkerman, Redan and the rest. Russell’s telegraphic dispatches brought home to the British public the reality of war and, in no small degree, the failings of the British military command: in organising proper supply of food, clothing and equipment; in communications through the hierarchy of command; and in care of the casualties of battle and the much greater casualties that were wasted through disease.

It was perhaps in reaction to Russell that Roger Fenton, the recent founder of the Photographic Society, was encouraged to go to the Crimea by friends and patrons that included the Secretary of State for War and Prince Albert. His images were intended to counter the unpopularity of the war. They were published as woodblocks in the far less critical Illustrated London News.

William Russell went on to India to witness the re-capture of Lucknow and thence to Washington, where he stayed from 1867 to 1863. He would later publish his diaries of India, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
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In the year that William Russell arrived in the Crimea, Alexander Gardner, sometime owner and editor of the Glasgow Sentinel, moved with his family to the United States. Pursuing an interest in photography, he was well placed to create a photographic record of the Civil War and was soon accorded an official capacity.  A two volume edition of hand-mounted prints, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, was published in 1866. By this time Gardner had photographed Abraham Lincoln on several occasions and had documented the President’s funeral.  He photographed the conspirators involved with the assassination and was the only photographer allowed at their execution.

Russell laid the foundations of an honourable, if intermittent, tradition of speaking truth to power. Fenton and Gardner played a more questionable role, where the boundaries between reportage and propaganda were blurred. Interestingly, both photographers have been accused of manipulation and fabrication.

Russell, Fenton and Gardner are significant figures in the development of a journalism on the cusp of technological progress. The electric telegraph lent the written word a new immediacy, although photography as reportage was more constrained, by process, distance and reprographics. Both Fenton and Gardner worked from horse-drawn workshops. Materials required long exposures: the action shot was some way off! The results in whatever form had to be transported physically from battlefield to point of distribution. And there was as yet no way of translating continuous tone to half-tone other than through the intermediary of the engraver.

But photo-journalism had begun the long path towards maturity. Cameras became smaller and more portable. Film replaced glass, roll film replaced dark slides, colour sensitivity and emulsion speeds increased. Aspiration was supported by scientific method. New processes allowed direct reproduction of photographic images in the print media of the day. Photography itself matured through the efforts of inspirational practitioners and through cross-fertilisation with a vibrant and multifarious 20th Century art scene. Magazines dedicated to photo-journalism helped develop a pictorial story-telling culture through social awareness, a humanistic ethos and a muscular aesthetic. By the 1930s these elements had fused into a powerful tool for mass communication … in time for the Spanish Civil War and the wars and turmoil that followed. 

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