UA professor studies depression-era photos

Kody Ford

Issue date: 8/27/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Courtesy Shiloh Museum of Ozark History / Katie McCoy Collection

Depression era photos on display at the Shiloh Museum of the Ozarks have contributed important information to a UA professor's study of that time period.

Patsy Watkins, chair of the Lemke department of journalism, studied the photographs for her paper "The Nicholson Photographs: A Federal Relief Caseworker's Visual Record of Rural Clients in the South During the Depression," which was presented to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication during its August 2007 meeting in Washington, D.C.

"The Nicholson photographs are different from other Farms Service Agency photographs because they are more of a direct record with no attempt to present the people in any ideological way," Watkins said.

During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt commissioned the FSA to take photographs of impoverished Americans who were benefiting from the New Deal, according to the Shiloh Museum Web site.

"President Roosevelt felt the need to change the public perception about poverty," Watkins said. "The FSA hired people to travel and take pictures of people in poverty and make them look respectable and decent and worthy of public support."

Notable photographers Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn traveled the country capturing iconic images of the poor. However, their photos were meant to appeal to emotions unlike the Nicholson photographs, which served as records.

Nicholson and his wife, Opal, worked with FSA caseworkers in Boone and Newton counties to ensure that those receiving government assistance were having their needs met and making progress.

"The Nicholson pictures could have been taken back to a county commission to argue for further financial assistance for the subjects," Watkins said.

The Shiloh Museum received the Nicholson pictures during the mid-90s after they were donated by a relative of the Nicholsons who found them hidden in the attic of a house in Prairie Grove. Although the museum holds hundreds of thousands of photographs, the captions written by the Nicholsons set the pictures apart, said Marie Demeroukas, photo archivist- librarian for the Shiloh Museum.

"The neat thing about the photos was that the voice of the people was already there," said Demeroukas. "The captions Mrs. Nicholson wrote give you an idea of the language and the writer's biases. You get a real sense of what they thought about the people they were working with-both good and bad," she said.

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