Reframing Utopia and Wasteland: The Greenbelts and Photographic Traditions of the Resettlement Administration

Scholarship on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography unit has historically privileged a discussion of anthropocentric social documentary photobooks and popular press photo essays, with little acknowledgement of the 158,000 negatives that were never published in such formats.1 The FSA photography unit, founded when the Resettlement Administration (RA) was reinstated as the FSA in 1937, was made famous for its vast documentation of the American landscape from 1935 to 1944 under the purview of Roy Stryker. In particular, prominent photographers from Dorothea Lange to Walker Evans have continuously caught the attention of photography scholars, who tackle with the ethics of representing the impoverished, suffering “other” in the name of liberal social welfare programs, which offer the State as the only possible apparatus of intervening in the suffering of the citizenry. While this scholarship, including works by Ariella Azoulay, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Alan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Susan Sontag, and John Tagg, among many others, on the role of portraiture and documentary as an investigative tool proliferates in the historiography of American photography, less attention has been paid to the tens of thousands of negatives that remain delegated to the filing cabinets in the Library of Congress.2 I argue that the focus on the State as a disciplinary apparatus that precludes photographic meaning is essentializing and obscures close readings of individual photographs, against the massive FSA archive. A question, then, remains: How can we reread the sea of photographic excess that has been neglected by scholars who either focus solely on the social documentary photography (most often, portraiture), or who homogenize the function of the FSA archive as a generalized disciplinary apparatus of the New Deal?

In The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (2009), John Tagg’s post-facto response to his seminal text The Burden of Representation (1988), the photo scholar revises his previous argument from the 80s through a more careful consideration of the vast FSA file, following a moment in the field that proposed a “post-documentary” to aid the ethical pitfalls and reliance on the aesthetics of human suffering during the 30s. I focus here on Tagg’s writing over others because he adopts a rhetoric of excess in “the other documents,” or the photographs that remained outside of the purview of art photography designated by Edward Steichen and his contemporaries.3 An essentializing summary of theories of documentary rooted in the FSA, then, might claim that independently-produced social documentary photobooks generated a photographic message which demonstrated the need for the New Deal programs, later adapted into the art world’s definitions of photography. Simultaneously, government-issued photographic materials and negatives untethered to publication’s constraints, and which also facilitated the American public’s involvement in the New Deal, have been lost in the excess of photography’s history. In his books, Tagg purports to cover the vast territory of these “other documents,” but in doing so, seems to focus rather on the place of Foucauldian origin of the photographs—“Passport offices, police chare rooms, warehouses and storerooms, archives of all kinds”—than their content or context of circulation.4 This means that Tagg falls short of elucidating the specific functions of the many types of photographs that make up the vast archive, despite the fact that many projects contextualized the social documentary moment in critical ways. In this article, I seek to propose an answer to my introductory question, expanding upon Tagg’s scholarship on the FSA’s photography archive in terms of the bureaucratic dissemination of photographic visual culture that was not grouped under the label of “social documentary.” In doing so, I foreground the ecological catastrophe present in these photo-texts in my close reading of the archive’s excesses to propose an adjacent function of the FSA photograph in the 1930s: the sanitizing of the environment. Ultimately, I utilize the photographic treatments of waste during the 1930s to argue for various functions and pictorial traditions that operated during the New Deal and to explore the varied, and heterogeneous, functions of the FSA photograph.

My reading of the excess photographs from the FSA file departs from the anthropocentric view and turns to the multi-varied functions of the FSA/RA itself, namely, to relocate impoverished farmers and other middle-class Americans whose lifestyles were disrupted by ecological disaster and to present a photographic documentation of New Deal programs. Housed in the same governmental branch as the photography unit, the role of each program shared similarities in their strategies for communicating with the wider American public, namely through the language of photography. This has often been discounted in writing on the FSA, but it brings historians to a crucial connection between the apparatus of photography and the role of urban planning during the New Deal—the Greenbelt Towns. The Greenbelts were a form of utopia that burgeoned during the New Deal era as part of the programming of the RA through suburban housing projects, envisioned to relocate low-income groups in urban and rural areas to cooperative, utopian communities organized around a crescent-shaped green space.5 At the time of the project’s conception, Rexford Tugwell, the director of the RA, was a socialist who saw the Greenbelts as a fresh approach to urban planning based on Ebenezer Howard’s English Garden Cities from the early 20th century. Howard’s ambitions provided precedent for a plan which, for Tugwell’s conservative counterparts in Congress, appeared socialistic and unfounded in American history, much less amidst a nationwide economic crisis. Particularly ingrained in the language of the Greenbelt program was a sanitization of the dirt and disease of the Hooverville slums, which was subsequently combated with a sanitary utopianism that reunited modern lifestyles—defined by their separation from nature—with natural spaces through providing each town with a greenbelt crescent. In this sense, the RA’s multiple functions are not so disparate after all; each was a utopian attempt to re-envision American life amidst catastrophe.

To expand on the notions of utopia and excess during New Deal America, I take as my primary objects of analysis an RA-issued pamphlet that advertised the Greenbelt towns, as well as the individual negatives that documented the towns’ functions at their inception. My argument emerges from a close reading of landscape photography from Dorothea Lange’s prominent social documentary photobook American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, which displays the desecration of farmlands, connecting it to the socio-political struggles of the moment. I then depart from this extensively studied text to the critical object of my concern, the photography around the Greenbelts, in order to explain how image-text relationships contributed to a rhetoric of sanitization that relied on the FSA photography apparatus. At the center of my argument is the expansion of Tagg's idea of the necessity of accounting for “the other documents,” as I propose that excess can be read into the functions of the photographs themselves, which in this case, facilitated the sanitization of physical space through the bolstering of welfare programs. Lastly, I focus on individual negatives from the Library of Congress archive, which show daily life in the Greenbelt, and were not necessarily published in print format. Each example contributes to the bureaucratic machine that institutionalized photographic production in the 1930s, but, as I argue, these many functions of the photograph must be more carefully elucidated than they have been in other scholarship at this moment in photography’s history.

The final intervention this article makes is the bridging of the theory of FSA photography with the emerging field of waste studies, alongside a broader consideration of the environmental humanities, to complicate Tagg’s vocabulary of waste. Of the 158,000 FSA negatives, around 107,000 were actually made into prints, with many never published and even deliberately destroyed or “killed” with a hole punch method.6 This means that tens of thousands of photographs remain unanalyzed and are therefore classified as excess, or wasted documents. Meaning that, apart from photography scholarship, waste studies aids in theorizing the theory of wasted photography itself, as well as the use of FSA photography in an environmental context. In particular, my approach is informed by Bruno Latour’s theory of hybridity to deconstruct the binaries between human and non-human ontologies, as well as Jane Bennett’s notion of material agency. Alongside Latour and Bennett, Mary Douglas’ notions of purity’s relationship to governing order, and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics anchor my analysis that privileges the non-human as an agent, and therefore expands the body of what can be studied as “documentary.” Waste studies particularly allows situating the New Deal infrastructures and utopian ideas of the period in a disciplinary apparatus that specifically sought to contain the unsightly and the unsanitary. Lastly, waste studies allows an expansion of documentary ethics to include other photo theorists’, including Alan Tracthenberg’s work on landscape photography towards a more overtly political end.

Using both photography scholarship and waste studies as my theoretical underpinning, I have classified at least three types of imagery in the Greenbelt context to present a closer reading of individual images. These three functions include, but are not limited to, the infrastructural/propagandistic image, the domestic/consumer image, and the aerial image. Further scholarship could, for example, delve into the intricacies of gendered and racialized labor. The resulting aesthetic formulation was one which sought to visually combat the waste seeping into the public eye via the dust bowl, and instead envision a new commons where poverty and destitution were eliminated through liberal government programs. Further, this new function that departs from the “social,” represents the bridging of the RA’s bipartite structure, making them exemplary for visualizing how photography aided the period’s sanitization projects, and vice versa. By applying these theories to the FSA photographs, I demonstrate how alternate methods of uncovering the photography archive might offer new insights for the history of Depression-era photography that embraces the forgotten excess of photography’s boundless history.

1. Expanding Dorothea Lange’s Landscapes in American Exodus

Perhaps the most famous image of the New Deal era is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, a portrait of a migrant sharecropper mother striking a Madonna-like pose, with her young children acting as the photograph’s frame. This photograph has often been the subject of critique and the site of discourse around ethical constructions of the other for a social end; however, a more complex discourse around the ethics of human and non-human representation is most apparent in her documentary photobook, American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, that she and her husband, Paul Taylor, published in 1939.7 In this text, Lange’s photographs are paired with Taylor’s sociological explanations for the vast migration spurred by the environmental and economic crises of the 1930s.8 Often, images in the book are paired with captions—explanatory blurbs or quotes from the dust bowl migrants that Lange and Taylor came across while traveling through the United States. Image-text combinations were utilized as a formal tool for educating middle-class Americans about the circumstances surrounding the Depression and its effects on the American public, while simultaneously promoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. That is, Lange’s representation of waste and environmental decay provided the impetus for the welfare programs the RA was advertising in these pamphlets. As explained in the introduction, the photography unit operated under the purview of the RA, and therefore the photo-texts were concerned with the migration and resettlement of workers across the dust belt. Photography was therefore the driver of the call for a government-supplied solution, as well as the means of providing such solutions. Aesthetically, these works reformulated the relationship of image and text through developing the rise of the photo essay and long-form documentary works that reified and transformed these categories outside of traditional journalism outlets.9

Although Lange is remembered primarily for her portraiture, the photobook’s landscapes of abandoned farmlands remain equally as pervasive in American conceptualizations of how the land was treated preceding the collapse of the stock market in 1929. Take for example a photograph of an abandoned house in a field in Childress County, Texas (fig. 2). Taylor elaborates on the implications for the replacement of the human body with the machine in reference to this image: “Tractors replace not only mules, but people. They cultivate to the very door of the houses of those whom they replace.”10 As viewers scan the image for any semblance of life, all that remains is the occasional upright branch, but no vegetation survives as over-farming destroys man-made home and natural landscape. This image was placed in the larger subsection “Plains,” which features a series of desolate landscapes and explicates the development of new machinery and the subsequent migration of sharecroppers from their farms. Importantly, Lange and Taylor relate this rise of machinery to the 18^th century Enclosure Movement, in which the commons were stripped from the English peasants by an aristocratic reframing of them as private enclosures.11 Meaning, Lange’s landscape and its accompanying text illustrate an America that has been desecrated by the industrialization of agriculture by way of machine against the backdrop of a revolution that relied exclusively on human actors. Unlike 18^th century England, Lange’s photography balances the culpability of both human and non-human actors in the production of the photographic image. Thus, American Exodus, with its myriad landscapes of emptied-out farmlands, projects a vision of a future United States where scarcity is the norm and the environment is emptied of its functionality and humanity, and the commons is transformed into wasteland by means of Biblical myths of exodus.12

The above image defines the primary function of the FSA photograph during the New Deal; that is, a social documentary function that was primarily intended to treat human subjects, whether or not a human presence was visible (fig. 2). Early formulations of how documentary worked rhetorically in the 1930s similarly prioritized the humanist reading of the FSA photobooks, even in the body of scholarship that sought to contest humanism. William Stott, in his seminal text Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973), defines the era’s social documentaries as composed of two kinds of essential “documents.”13 The first document is the material constituting objective proof—what we might see in the courtroom or city archive, for example—and the second concerns what Stott terms the “human” document. He writes the following: “A document, when human, is the opposite of the official kind; it is not objective but thoroughly personal [...] a human document carries and communicates feeling, the raw material of drama.”14 He further notes that “a human document deals with natural phenomena, and social documentary with man-made,” yet these distinctions are slightly misguided at a moment in history where environmental devastation was the direct result of human intervention in the land.15 Stott classifies the American photobook tradition of the 1930s, including Lange’s American Exodus, as a social documentary rooted in one’s subjectivity and affective relationship with the lived experiences or the landscapes of the American plains. For Stott, this subjectivity arose primarily through human documents, or in this case, portrait photography of sharecroppers and their textual testimonials, and not through photography of the environmental devastation. Even when the environment is highlighted, as it is above, the devastation is situated as concerning only when the human reaction is clarified through portraiture and a caption that reiterates the human impact of over-farming. On the other hand, the rest of the FSA archive, untethered from any textual context would adopt the opposite function of the human document, constituting instead the “objective” view of New Deal America as institutionalized, archival documents. Later in Stott’s text, he argues that social documentary utilizes the extremes of both human and factual documents. The result being a combination of forms that are both temporally specific and relevant to the socio-political atmosphere in which it is created. In other words, the subjective and objective merge to “increase our knowledge of public facts but sharpen [them] with feeling.”16

The reason behind referencing Stott is to demonstrate that human sensibility is always what made social documentary effective on a public scale for early theorists of the FSA. To contrast this notion, my article seeks to foreground waste studies as a means of possibly expanding this definition of the FSA photograph’s function towards visualizing the non-human. While an anthropocentric view of FSA photo-documentary has been privileged, there is an impulse in Tagg’s update in his critique of the FSA archive—within a Foucauldian lineage—towards the non-human. In 1988, Tagg lapsed into an argument that the 158,000 images in the archive each sought to reify the liberal state image that was central to the New Deal’s rhetoric.17 Yet, in 2009, he seems to shift towards a more explicit embrace of the excess of the FSA bureaucracy, and the minute meanings present in a variety of types of images, and therefore prioritizes analyses of the banal “objective document.” Still, Tagg falls short of attending to non-human actors in the FSA archive to shift the disciplinary function of the image, which forecloses a new reading of social documentaries, such as American Exodus. As stated in my introduction, the rhetoric of waste that Tagg adopts is productive for elucidating this type of reading. Without referencing waste studies, Tagg importantly theorizes photography as a “stain” or a “dirty deposit” of light that transforms the emulsion into a discernable image.18 He writes: “If there is always something wanting in the photographic record and the photographic archive, then there is also something more than desired, and this excess of photographic meaning must be brought within bounds [by the disciplinary State].”19 This stain then transforms into a “capture” that relies on careful geometric and archival inscription, but as I argue, is limited when the excess is repeatedly reincorporated in the dominant argument of FSA photography practices, as Tagg concludes in this chapter. Is it possible to read an alternative meaning into this excess?

For Tagg, the dirty stain of the photographic emulsion embraces the “hideous miscellaneousness of American life,” while remaining trapped in the “enumerated, inventoried, logged on a list” mode of the FSA photograph that he ascribes to the project in both 1988 and 2009.20 I counter this generalization with the below archival photograph of a Hooverville taken from the Seattle Municipal Archives, the namesake of the Depression-era slums that popped up across the United States and were characterized by rampant filth and poverty (fig. 3). In the photograph, factories loom on the horizon, power lines litter the skyline, and the detritus of human living obscures a lone tree in the foreground. This image is markedly different from Lange’s photographs in American Exodus that seek to aestheticize the landscape towards a documentary end in its attempt to objectively picture the infrastructural failures faced by the impoverished Hooverville tenants, while communicating a subjective loss of one’s homeland. On the other hand, the Hooverville image rejects Lange’s aestheticization of carefully composed wasteland that, without textual intervention, threatens to obscure the primary factor responsible for the environmental destruction of the 1930’s—over-farming and mismanagement of land by a capitalist propagation of agricultural machinery. In other words, the landscapes in American Exodus hinge on caption-based contextualizing to situate the human within a barren landscape, and thus, become human documents despite lacking visible human presence.21 The Hooverville photograph, on the other hand, centers human waste as integral to the destruction of the pictured environment. The trash pick adopts the “agency of the things that produce (helpful, harmful) effects in human and other bodies,” and therefore reverses the structure of latent human content to privilege instead the resulting agency of non-human materials.22 In this photograph, the non-human actors recreate a public citizenry that relies on the land, which has subsequently been destroyed by human action.

Returning to Tagg, it is clear that rendering the Hooverville image, as excessive but nevertheless bound by the disciplinary categories of the archive, essentializes it as a primarily human document, rather than the resulting landscape in a post-human world. This destruction was the felt, immediate effects of an ecological crisis that made the development of social documentary possible. While this photograph lacks the charge of affect that Lange’s photographs possess, it supports the disintegration of the human and non-human categories as applied to the FSA photography archive, particularly in relation to what Stott would describe as factual documents, or Tagg’s photographs of excess. This dismantling of categories is critical because scholars and critics of the FSA have since based their discussion of social documentary on this binary without understanding the capacity for the FSA archive as a whole to treat ecological catastrophe, as opposed to solely social welfare. This example demonstrates how the non-human should be considered in any ethical writing against the era’s social documentaries and the U.S. government’s response to widespread human or non-human hardship. Thus, the Seattle Hooverville image blurs the documentary functions seized upon by both Tagg and Stott, offering an opportunity to explore excess in its many functions that may or may not be adjacent to documentary’s early categories.

Following a close reading of the Seattle Hooverville photograph, it is possible to return to American Exodus with a refreshed perspective, informed by waste studies. In the photobook, Paul Taylor explains that the creation of wasteland is a byproduct of widespread mechanization of agricultural practices, but without explicitly blaming the destructive forces of industrial capitalism and the capitalists who were culpable in the market crash and the subsequent environmental degradation. In other words, Lange’s wasteland, contextualized by Taylor’s writing, lacks the explicit anthropocentric culpability of the Hooverville image. It is implied that these makeshift villages for the unhoused were a direct product of the factories that forebodingly scatter the horizon, complicating the spontaneity of the Biblical associations with myth presented in American Exodus. As it were, this photograph asserts that capitalism is a totalizing mode of production, making visible the systems that create what Michelle Yates explains as the outcast proletariat, or the human waste byproduct of surplus capitalism.23 This photograph, in presenting only the discards of humanity and the makeshift trash pick of the Hooverville, and not humans themselves, provides a view of life outside of capitalist systems—the direct result of the neglect of a subsection of the American public that would need to be relocated and managed by the RA lest vast groups of Americans (and non-Americans) be converted into an unmoored surplus.24 Ultimately, the comparison between these two images demonstrates to contemporary viewers that not all landscapes serve similar functions in terms of situating the environment’s relationship to capitalism’s exploitation of both land and citizens, and that the resuscitated photograph of excess imbricates the State’s liberal support of capitalism in the destruction of the landscape.

The Hooverville image challenges the conception of a human document, and thereby expands photographic documentation to a realm of hybrids where the manmade and natural interact in multiple socio-political formulations. American Exodus, in its categorization as a social documentary, is contrarily limited in its ability to embrace the non-human. Through this comparison, I open the following sections of my argument with the notion that the non-human possesses equal agency to the human in the FSA file, and that the non-human subject has historically been rendered excess. The non-human can resist and utilize the cataloging for a more pointed critique of the state and capitalist actors than what Tagg and other theorists of FSA documentary would like to admit. I argue that the function of these images is not limited to a subservience to the FSA, Roy Stryker, Tugwell, or the RA as discrete entities. Rather, the archival context as well as the content of each image grant viewers a theory against such reductive critiques of the era’s many photographic traditions or regimes. The following sections of my argument elaborate on this claim through a closer look at how photography functioned for the Greenbelts, as part of a specific RA and larger New Deal program, not limited to the social document.

2. The Resettlement Administration and a Brief History of the Greenbelts

A pamphlet, simply titled “Greenbelt Towns,” published by the RA in 1936, is exemplary of the dual function of the RA—to resettle at-risk Americans and to document the plight of migrants through implementing a newly formed discursive function reliant on photography.25 The pamphlet’s use of photography echoes layouts seen in popular print magazines such as Life and Fortune, but with explicit advertising aims that propagated the government relief program. This pamphlet traces a genealogy of the towns from their conceptual birth in Howard’s utopian idealism to the beginnings of construction in Maryland as part of the RA’s main project. The pamphlet addresses participant eligibility, the intended mapping of the Greenbelts (fig. 1), and the state’s responsibility in providing public housing during economic crises. Most significantly, it adopts a rhetoric premised on sanitization, and reconstructing “American” ways of life through housing programs that propose cleanliness and order as requisite for utopian conceptions of civic life. Although the photographs in “Greenbelt Towns” were never utilized in any major photobooks from the 1930s and were shot by lesser-known photographers, they constitute a comprehensive archive documenting the radical visions of a utopia within the New Deal’s bureaucracy. Further, the government’s deployment of such images as overt advertising objects warrants a reading that demonstrates a new avenue of interpretation for the Resettlement Administration’s use of photography to render utopia real in a moment before the rhetorical strategies of the documentary photobook were fully fleshed out.26

What is at stake in reading this pamphlet into the history of the FSA and other government-distributed printed materials is the site of understanding they provide for reshaping the idea of the FSA as a solely disciplinary project, both with and against much scholarship of 1930s photography that exclusively focus on photobooks. The distribution of such pamphlets can be situated in a period of American history where communication was an integral part of the American political apparatus, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats to the emerging photo essay in popular magazines such as Life and Fortune magazines.27 It is important to note, however, that RA-issued pamphlets act more overtly as propaganda than photo essays in 1930s print culture due to their distribution and publication being entirely handled by the New Deal administration.28 In this sense, some of the design decisions and rhetorical language used in the pamphlet may be clarified. For instance, the pamphlet strangely neglects an emphasis on the crescent-shaped green space and the cooperative, and potentially anti-capitalist aspects of life in the communities. Rather, the document highlights the sturdiness of the RA’s urban planning, as evidenced by preceding European projects, the cleanliness of the Greenbelts, and the obligation for the state to provide access to public housing when necessitated by economic downturns. This focus on cleanliness remains at the forefront of its textual aims, and mirrors the New Deal administration’s desire to clean up the American wasteland.

The first instance in which waste is referenced is on the fourth page under the heading “Tested by Experience,” where the RA writes: “[Ebenezer Howard] pictured a union of city and country life in which every foot of land was planned to eliminate waste and to provide its inhabitants with pleasant and spacious living.”29 The section following this statement is titled “Waste, Ugliness, Congestion” and is placed under a photograph captioned “The penalty of bad planning” (fig. 4).30 This section explicates the failure of the U.S. government in managing the rapidly expanding American city, which has resulted in slums and “decaying residential districts.”31 These unwanted byproducts of urbanization have created “wasted land” and have left millions of Americans in “tumble-down insanitary homes.”32 The result of lack of access to affordable housing leads to “disease, suffering, and crime,” therefore presenting a threat to rights to life and citizenship.33 The pamphlet explains that what is at stake in letting waste swell in urban areas is tripartite in the form of a social, economic, and human cost. The most effective means of mitigating such costs would be for the RA to extend its authority to offering public housing projects, such as the Greenbelts, that ensure access to sanitary and affordable housing for all.

What “Greenbelt Towns” seeks to propose is that potential utopia cannot be conceptualized without visions of a sanitized environment, in line with Thomas More’s conception of the idea. More’s Utopia, written in 1516, helps situate the RA’s application of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City planning in the American context as the foundational articulation of the ideal city and what constitutes its success. Despite its temporal distance from the New Deal, Utopia is concerned with similar issues regarding the renegotiation of a social contract and peasants’ rights at critical socio-economic turning points in history. In fact, More’s city planning model has an explicit response to the 1604 enclosure acts in Britain, which subsequently influenced the 18^th century Enclosure Movement. In Utopia, More writes of resisting feudal lords who demolish towns for capital gain, resulting in the transformation of farmland into wilderness and “hundreds of farmers [being] evicted.”34 These pitfalls in society led More to conclude that the abolition of property is the main proponent of a utopian society.35 Alongside relinquishing property, a subset of rules constituting a social contract he mentions echoes my earlier questions concerning infrastructure and cleanliness: “It’s also forbidden to bring anything dirty or unhygienic inside the town, for fear of polluting the atmosphere and so causing disease.”36 Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger further situates More’s ideals in the New Deal context. She theorizes the role of dirt in society in its ability to “offend against order,” that in turn results in governmental structures enacted to contain dirt through re-order.37 The organization of public housing in the form of Greenbelts and other New Deal housing projects are means of re-ordering the environment in line with the fears of dirt and contamination, which were real threats in the grassroots production of Hoovervilles and tenant camps, and the literal dust flying around in the 1930s.38 The final and most explicit connection to the New Deal is the fact that the Enclosure Movement is referenced in American Exodus, and Ebenezer Howard’s model employs More’s structures in his planning, notably with the use of green crescent-shaped spaces as public gardens.39

The two distinguishing features of the Greenbelts were the incorporation of a greenbelt and a cooperative model for participatory citizenship. The greenbelt was a crescent-shaped green space about a half-mile wide intended to “provide a land reserve for expansion of the community [...] and to provide a rural environment for the townspeople,” which served to redraw the rural-urban divide.40 In theory, the greenbelt could never be encroached upon by corporations and industrial planners, but because the U.S. government sold the Greenbelts in the 1950s, the entirety of this greenspace has since been developed. The second factor was an unusual sense of authority granted to citizens of the Greenbelt towns, who were expected to fulfill the vision of the planned communities through cooperative local government structures like town councils and mutual aid programs such as co-op grocery stores.41 Ultimately, these defining characteristics were indicative of the RA’s redefining of citizenship and the role of the government to a large extent through urban experimentation. They are additionally indicative of the role the environment played in the New Deal administration’s policymaking, which sought to recenter nature as part of American life. Although only four towns were given funding by the U.S. government, they were intended to serve as blueprint model-cities as the RA hoped to apply these ideals at a much larger scale.42

Because the RA envisioned these towns around utopian ideals of public property and communal sociality, they were incredibly controversial amongst conservative members of the government. For example, the RA was accused of enacting socialistic and communistic policies that overextended the jurisdiction of government rule and were therefore deemed unconstitutional. The same year “Greenbelt Towns” was published, the director of the RA, Rexford Tugwell, was compelled to resign for accusations of integrating communist ideals into his policies. This accusation was part of the larger controversy around the New Deal and FDR’s widening scope of power from Executive Order 7027 that established the RA to the Emergency Relief Act of 1935. In turn, conservative politicians were able to mount paranoia around the costliness of the Greenbelts, meaning members of the communities surrounding them turned towards a parochial outlook of the potential adverse effects on their local economies.43 Government representatives and tax-paying citizens alike worried about the low-income tenants who were able to live a middle-class lifestyle through the Greenbelts, and were accused of “sitting pretty at the taxpayers’ expense.”44 In other words, the Greenbelts were seen as “wasteful utopian schemes,” depleting taxpayer dollars for the sake of a social experiment that did not adequately address the suffering of those displaced and disenfranchised by the Depression.45 Because members of the public were turned against the RA’s experimentative tendencies, the department ran education campaigns and carefully advertised their projects. As print media was popularized around the early 20th century, print photography and pamphlets were an obvious solution for reaching large swaths of the American public.

The Greenbelts served to re-order the environment by realizing the blueprints of a utopian society, but this necessarily relied upon the separation of the towns from the rest of the United States’ non-cooperative townships. Douglas emphasizes the importance of separation as “the essential idea” for maintaining order between the clean and unclean, which creates a system of governing structures from the federal to local levels.46 The use of the green crescent in these towns separates the cooperative society from the rest of capitalist America by means of creating a secular Garden of Eden that must remain untouched lest it be contaminated by outside “dirt.” Contrary to the destitute landscapes of Lange’s oeuvre, the Greenbelts offered a sanitized retreat for lower-income urbanites, relying on reconnections with nature and other subjects. Jameson similarly points out that utopias are necessarily “a result of spatial and social differentiation,” meaning the Greenbelt, although a socialist experiment, relied on the exclusion of many Americans who were suffering from extreme poverty and the loss of their own farmland to over-farming.47 In fact, the Greenbelts had extreme selection criteria and rules that were enacted to instill “cleanliness and order,” such as pet bans, a ban on pregnant women wearing shorts, hedge trims were maintained at the same height, and laundry to be out of view by 4 P.M.48 Non-white citizens were ineligible for the Greenbelt program, and while the program appealed to low-income individuals, those falling below a certain bracket were similarly denied access.49

Through establishing this brief history of the Greenbelts and their relationship to (un)clean spaces, I hope to elaborate on the New Deal bureaucracy’s many uses of visual culture to enhance the vision of such urban planning projects. To do so, I provide three case studies of how photography functioned as a sanitary measure in three very different photographic contexts: the infrastructural, the domestic, and the aerial. In delving out these analyses, I do not propose that these three functions solely define the FSA archive, but I rather open up the possibilities of understanding the era’s photography in all its excesses and within the wasteland of the archival photograph.

3. The Infrastructural Photograph

Photography was used alongside other rhetorical measures taken by the RA in establishing order against dirt in the Greenbelt urban planning to emphasize the importance of sanitary infrastructures in mediating the effects of the Depression. The photographs in the RA pamphlet serve to emphasize cleanliness, or at least provide a vision of what life looks like in the resistance towards disorder. Above is an image taken from “Greenbelt Towns” of an outhouse in a tenant farmer camp, defiled with layers of dirt that obscure the toilet’s infrastructural service, rendering it obsolete (fig. 5). The door hangs open, inviting viewers into a space that festers with bacteria and disease, ultimately expressing the inability for the migrant farmworker to access infrastructures critical for any quality of life. Here, the photograph acts as evidence of the abjection faced in urban and slum living in the 1930s. This photograph is paired with the RA pamphlet’s section on disease and sanitation, illustrating the potential dangers in “poor” urban planning illuminated by the infrastructural decay initiated by the Depression. The ontological qualities of photography reassert the temporal urgency present in what the pamphlet illustrates: ultimately, what is at stake in ignoring the infrastructural plights of urban America is death by dirt and disease. Stott explains the illuminating qualities of social documentary’s use of print media, from Life to this pamphlet, to spread information, stating that for most Americans, the Depression was invisible before the formation of the photography unit.50 Through making governmental failures visual on a large scale, the photography unit and the FSA archive implicate citizens in the dirt infecting American life.51

I now turn to an alternate context from the RA pamphlet, the individual negatives in the Library of Congress that evoke what I term an “infrastructural purpose,” which served to visualize the New Deal’s biopolitical power as a promising quality of the Greenbelts. This collection of over one-thousand images of the Greenbelt towns, their construction, infrastructure, laborers, and building plans, serve to document the conception of these new cities.52 These images are only a tiny sliver of the photographic excess in the FSA’s archive, as they acted as government-funded archival documentation. Due to a lack of publication in major emerging photo magazines—including Life and Fortune—they were less publicly visible than American Exodus and its contemporaries, and even less than “Greenbelt Towns.” The implications of this lack of visibility include the necessity of considering the photographs in an alternative public context, since the knowledge around their publication is limited, and it is likely they were never seen at all. Turning to Foucault’s idea of resuscitating the archive, both with and against John Tagg’s critique of New Deal photography, highlights these archival photographs of the Greenbelts as an alternative to social documentary that embraces their institutional housing in a different manner.53 The images possess a sanitary quality explicitly in dialogue with a utopianism that presented the opportunity for clean living against the rampant poverty experienced by migrant workers during the Depression.

Given the limited knowledge of these photographs, little has been written on them, aside from Jason Reblando’s article on Greenbelt photography published in a non-photographic journal, Utopian Studies, and that provides a groundbreaking entry into this collection.54 Reblando defines the photographs’ function against popular social documentary—as I will—as he centers the FSA archive’s ability to visualize radical social planning and to exhibit the New Deal’s relationship to labor and the natural environment. Because Reblando is more concerned with the utopian qualities of the Greenbelts, and does not respond to Tagg or other FSA scholars directly, I expand here upon Reblando’s work. Reblando additionally glosses over documents like RA pamphlets, and therefore neglects the interplay between image and text that defined the era’s photography and definitions of documentary, a necessary consideration for the aesthetics of an era defined by photo-textual documentaries. I go beyond his readings to focus less on the utopian qualities of the Greenbelts and more on the aesthetics of waste and sanitation that informed the New Deal aesthetic using the theoretical scaffolding provided by Tagg.

Above, we see the construction of a waste disposal plant in Greenbelt, Maryland (fig. 6). The focus of the image is the infrastructural underpinnings of the town’s urban planning that contribute to sanitary lifestyles conducive to healthy civic cooperation. A man stands in the bottom left as a demonstration of scale, emphasizing the enormity and significance of urban planning that prioritizes waste management. Therefore, rather than simply present a sanitized environment, this photograph serves as critical documentation of skeletal infrastructures as models for future city plans. Jason Reblando rightfully posits that the same degree of poverty is not present in these photographs, and this lack of address of the subaltern is precisely what differentiates the Greenbelt photograph. The below photograph of a personal garden shows that the Greenbelts present an opportunity for a subsistence lifestyle at the individual and communal levels (fig. 7). The land is treated with a different aesthetic consideration that relates directly to the utopic conception of the Greenbelts, where farmland can be produced despite human-imposed devastation of agricultural ecologies. This infrastructure shows how the Greenbelt residents provided for themselves and each other through reviving an environment against the destruction of industrial capitalism, and an accumulation of surplus goods.

This photograph should be situated in a consideration of the back-to-the-land movement that encouraged Americans to return to subsistence living and agriculturally centered lifestyles. The back-to-the-land movement explicitly sought a divide between urban and rural life, seeing the “propertyless proletariat” as evidence of the failure of urban planning and city life.55 Returning to the land was a means of resisting American industrialization and its resulting economic and ecological crises, but in many ways, the movement fell into utopian pitfalls. Ebenezer Howard—the inventor of the Green City movement and inspiration for the Greenbelts—distanced himself from the idea that his cities were utopias, despite More’s influence, as he rather “saw [them] as the foundation of a new civilization which could be realized only as his ideas bore practical results.”56 In line with dissolving the rural-urban distinctions rather than exacerbating their differences, the RA and FDR sought to unite town and country using the Greenbelts. The result was a blend of mostly urban-suburban life with rural subsistence practices carried out at a community level. In other words, these plans sought “practical” methods of achieving a rurally-inspired urbanity, from small acts like community gardens to large-scale reimaginings of local socio-political life in response to the failure of a capitalist economy to supply healthy human relationships, both amongst one another and the environment.57

In one regard, the implication of photography’s relation to infrastructure in these two contexts is the reification of a U.S. political system that in reality was not working for those migrant workers in the photographs. Keynesian liberal economics subsequently swelled into neoliberalism, meaning the New Deal’s liberalism was transient and inadequate. On the other hand, infrastructure is evoked in this type of imagery in the New Deal administration’s biopolitical power to control the lives and deaths of the “surplus proletariat” present in the portraits of the FSA file. Foucault’s writing on biopolitics is useful for contextualizing the New Deal’s exercise of political sovereignty in its politics of waste and excess. The RA’s work in creating Greenbelts as a haven for a certain group of American citizens is an instance of the idea that governments at the turn of the century have the “power to make live and let die,”alongside other programs such as the Social Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Rural Electrification Administration.58 Although Tugwell’s vision for the Greenbelts was socialist in nature, the Greenbelts, along with these infrastructural photographs, exposed the kind of people and places the government “let die” at the time. Rereading the pamphlet through Foucault demonstrates the exercising of biopolitics through photography-as-sanitary-mechanism to counteract the city-planning failures of private and governmental developers. Tagg’s work reiterates the role photography played in carrying out a sanitary function in line with a Foucauldian “microphysics of power,” as the rise of modern biopolitics fed and was fed by photographic documentation and surveillance in archives.59 Tagg and Foucault, read together, propose that the use of photography as an apparatus of biopower is not incidental, but contingent on modernity’s appropriation of photography.

Nonetheless, Tagg’s argument seen through a Foucaldian lens tends to essentialize the various functions that may be gleaned from closer readings of sets of images, rather than claims about the FSA archive as a whole. While Tagg’s colleagues—Rosler, Sontag, Azoulay, and others—may argue that the FSA photographers displayed poverty and destitution for the sake of a pure affective response that served the state’s intentions around policy, the Greenbelt photographs depart from this purely affective function. Reading these photographs as evidence of a newly theorized way of American life that accounts for healing urban issues, while simultaneously reviving the rural communities hit hardest by the Depression, shifts the image’s function from a purely biopolitical object to a method of community building, albeit optimistic. Here, the infrastructural image is less about the New Deal administration at large, and rather concerns the myriad ways in which local communities can exercise agency against the biopolitical wasteland on the periphery of their daily lives. Various images emphasize subsistence farming, town council meetings, and green spaces as communally owned methods of maintaining order and rights to sanitary life for Greenbelt occupants, which Tugwell hoped to expand across the country before his forced resignation. The RA’s financial limitations in conceiving these cities shroud the potential for a more democratic reorganization of the social contract that made the Greenbelts, and therefore the photography around them, overly optimistic and exclusionary. If the original plans to build 3000 Greenbelt cities were carried out, perhaps photographs such as these could provide messages to the next generation of Greenbelt dwellers.

These close readings demonstrate how the language around waste was not selectively used in the textual documents housing authority of the RA, but was also widely adopted by photographers in order to assist the efforts of the RA’s urban planners in their infrastructural pursuits. Essentially, my reading here might act as a type of blueprint for those encountering other images of excess in the FSA archive, where the state’s motive is identified in relation to the specific project that the photographs aided. The connection between waste and photography, and photography and infrastructure, is critical because it augments Tagg’s arguments, and as such, redefines his notion of photographic excess towards a material end. In other words, the excess here is manifest both in the image content (of unsanitary infrastructures), but also the ontological category of the photographs in their housing in the archives. Tagg’s reading of Roy Stryker’s scripts for FSA photographers, and the efficiency of the bureaucratic machine that was the FSA photography unit, supports a waste studies perspective on the support of an analysis of these infrastructural photographs. He writes that the FSA sought to convey easily discernible meanings from the photographers’ field work as a means of driving “a utilitarian ethic that dreams of greater ‘efficiency’ and productivity in the use of the camera,” and goes on to cite The Camera as Historian as demonstrative of the rhetoric around photographic waste:

To the engineer it is abhorrent that any energy be allowed to run to waste. But in the domain of photography the amount of ‘horse-power running-to-waste’ is appalling—and all for lack of a little system and coordination [...] Shall the product of countless cameras be in the future [...] of no public usefulness whatever? This is a question of urgency. Every year of inaction means an increase of this wastage.60

The thread of waste and dirt unites the image of photographic excess—delegated to the government-issued pamphlet or the file cabinet—towards the social documentary image. We can see this in Lange’s landscapes through the evocation of an impurity that spurs participation in the political system. The fear, regret, and nostalgia for a land without the stain of industry and vast poverty—stolen away by these photographs—is what ultimately helped the New Deal administration’s ability to pass legislation. This reading, then, demonstrates a resistance towards the idea that the excess of photographs, made by “countless cameras,” can be read across time as illuminating, rather than inundating.

4. The Domestic Consumer Image

The previous section expresses the idea that the infrastructural photograph relates to how the public may come to understand their urban planning projects through a photographic perspective that relies on infrastructural imagery. Where much of the photography of the 1930s was concerned with the public scope of the photographic regime of the FSA, the Greenbelt archive offers a “private” view into the domestic spaces of the cooperative communities. Of course, these intimate photographs were intended as public documentation, and would live in the LOC archive to be seen by the American public for the next century. This category of “domestic” photographs is primarily focused on the U.S. citizen, often female-identifying, as a consumer of publicly subsidized urban housing projects and is often gendered. The subjects in these photographs consume products offered by Greenbelt retail spaces, or they exhibit the role of domestic labor as a critical component of Greenbelt utopianism.

On the left (fig. 8), a family selects produce at a cooperative grocery store in Greenbelt, Maryland that functioned by way of residents’ purchasing stock in the local Greenbelt Co-op. The store proved so successful that food prices were nine percent lower than in Washington, D.C., and could have been lower if legal restrictions allowed for further reductions in costs.61 The photograph shows the facets of family life made easier through cooperative living in the suburbs, directly related to economic relief and statistical evidence. Even though this photograph centers on this type of familial consumption, the consumer’s shopping is limited to retail entities established through cooperative citizenship in the towns. Thus, the visual apparatus extends a propagandistic mission of holding up subsidized food as the affordable and efficient option, against a landscape of famine presented by the social documentary photobooks. Alongside the sanitary function of the RA pamphlet discussed earlier, this retail photograph propagates a certain attainable lifestyle, against the exposure to metaphorical and literal dirt that many Americans faced at the time. Here, housewives can participate in the polis through subsistence consumership, thereby serving their families while making claims as citizens of a newfound utopian domestic space.

The photograph adjacent to the grocery co-op pictures a mother setting a table in her Greenbelt home (fig. 9). Access to this idealized, sanitary lifestyle was unimaginable for such Greenbelt participants before the RA conceptualized the towns as a means of achieving a universal standard of cleanliness. The planning of the home design in each Greenbelt city was difficult, as the government administration balanced low-cost housing with the “space” that made living in suburban areas more attractive. Eventually, the RA settled on constructing row houses with various kinds of layouts meant to reduce rents and encourage minimalist lifestyles. For example, homeowners were encouraged to combine their living and dining rooms, and some converted their living rooms to bedrooms at night.62 While the government retained ownership of the row houses in the Greenbelts, photographs like the one above demonstrate the capacity for domestic work and homebuilding to continue despite the lack of individual property ownership. This is critical for it represents a moment in American history where More’s ideas were enacted in real time, and where a communal claim to publicly-owned property was centered as an emerging civic value, against capitalist ideals of enclosure. Further, this image emphasizes the role of the matriarch in maintaining this newfound “clean” living in the home, as well as the town center. The house was not a place of individual ownership in the Greenbelts, and oftentimes acted as a facilitator of social relationships between families. Alongside the grocery co-op, mothers in the Greenbelts organized cooperative childcare, made easier due to the architectural facets of the row houses. Therefore, where one might read this photograph as an outdated demonstration of traditional patriarchal family structures—and it certainly plays on gendered expectations and the appeal of the white, blonde, American housewife—it essentially advocates for the benefits of forfeiting property ownership to extend the home’s boundaries.

Compositionally, these photographs represent the sanitizing function of Greenbelt photography most explicitly. They remove all detritus from view to emphasize the ease of life in the Greenbelts—the photographs feature cleanliness and access to amenities that make life more bearable than in the “badly planned residential districts of the city.”63 The presentation of families and bodies is pristine, and this careful articulation of visual space further extends to non-human matter, demonstrated in this photograph through the focus on food displays. The presentation of a sanitary life directly contrasts the function of social documentary, which was to show what life was like during the Depression. Rather than emphasize this dirt-filled present, these photographs target families to visualize a utopian, American family lifestyle that could emerge if “idealistic” New Deal projects were fully implemented. As mentioned earlier, this family life was exclusively visualized as an endeavor for struggling white families, excluding African Americans and non-American migrant workers who formed much of the labor force at the time and faced the brunt of the Depression, which would require further scholarship.64 Thus, the function of cleanliness is dual—the camera cleans through the lens’ perspectival shifting of domestic space, while also purporting that the ideal American family was both white and patriarchally oriented.

Thus far, I have concentrated on the role of the infrastructural and consumer photographs in the LOC archive. It is certainly possible that these categories extend and blur past the boundaries I have set in my writing, but these delineations serve to elucidate alternate methods of sanitization, or the lack thereof, in FSA photography. The RA identified the use of nature, through the Greenbelt feature and subsistence farming, as an antidote to mistakes in urban planning. The human realm is thus intimately wrapped up in the natural world in these images through their display of construction, sanitary living, and community-building. After all, the Depression was both a social and environmental crisis that required policy that treated each domain in fresh ways. Each demonstrates how Latour’s notion of hybrids, as well as Douglas’s idea that dirt seeps into the order of civic life, apply to the New Deal. The Greenbelts themselves acted as hybrids of “town and country,” producing the model town that aimed to reduce the urban-rural divide rather than seek a solution to the socio-environmental crisis in an outdated utopian vision of “returning to the land” that was never theirs to begin with. Ultimately, the sanitized view of life provided in these photographs insists on the promise of practical solutions to the American public’s struggle with poverty in the 1930s, despite the limitations of the RA’s funding and congressional backlash against socialist policy.

5.The Aerial Photograph and Envisioning Utopian Futures

If we return now to the “Greenbelt Towns” pamphlet, one may see how evidence is deployed to an alternate end when it pertains to aerial photographs in particular. In opposition to the purely documentary function of the infrastructural images of dwelling spaces deteriorated by the lack, or historical photographs of Howard’s projects, the aerial photograph projects alternative futures on the American landscape from a gods-eye-view. An early example of the use of aerial photography is in the introduction, when the pamphlet explains Howard’s conception of his garden cities, and how the RA explicitly referenced these projects in its policies (fig. 10). Here, an aerial photograph of Welwyn is paired with a caption stating: “Welwyn Garden City, England, a model of scientific planning. The parks, farms, and woodlands which surround the town are publicly owned, forming a protective belt of permanent open space.”65 By using the phrase “scientific planning” and the word “protection” to convey primary tenets of Greenbelt planning, the pamphlet makes explicit its use of photography as another indicator of scientific proof. Here, the photograph departs from primarily serving a sanitizing function, and rather focuses on the indexical qualities of the image as a signifier of the real—or the possible—as proven by history.

Aerial photographs are the primary method of pictorial representation in the first part of the pamphlet, but this later shifts to illustrations of plans from an aerial perspective, buildings, and citizens engaging in various activities (fig. 11). The pamphlet’s illustrations emphasize the fact that these communities were imagined as models and blueprints of each other, almost like a stamp on the American landscape that was lifted from an international context. The reason for this shift is explained by the pamphlet being issued before major construction was completed in Maryland to residents living around the potential neighborhood as a means of convincing them of their validity. The illustrations here are limited by the fact that this was an advertisement for an ambitious government policy—that would go on to fail—and not a visualization for what has already been accomplished in the United States during the New Deal. In other words, the aerial illustrations are a reshaping of the pictorial functions of the photographs, which are ordinarily seen as objects of proof and are only prophecies of the future if supplied with “scientific” reasoning. That is, the illustrations reverse the qualities of photography’s favoring of the past as evidentiary, and instead disrupt the temporality of the image as a way of projecting a topography of the future. In this sense, the pamphlet shifts its use of visual media to convey a utopian promise of what-may-come, as proven by the photographic “that-has-been.”66

The aerial snapshots are striking for their stark contrast to the horizontal perspective of suburban life present in the majority of the LOC archive’s items, or the language of on-the-ground waste in “Greenbelt Towns.”67 The pamphlet’s aerial photographs are a promissory final note, as shown in the pamphlet’s final photograph (fig. 12). Like the earlier green city photographs, these views appropriate the assumed authenticity of the photograph to confirm the success of the RA’s utopian project. The above photograph concludes the text by showing early construction of Greenbelt, Maryland, and unlike its paired illustration, the adjacent farmland takes up more space than developed land. This overgrowth of the black mass of woodland lends Greenbelt the pastoral quality requisite for maintaining the utopian ideals central to theorists and planners across centuries. Viewing the beginnings of construction, and therefore the ongoing functions of the RA as a government body, opposes other popular Depression-era media centered on portraiture and the explicit impact the ecological and economic shifts had on the human.

This aerial photograph and its counterparts reimagine the function of the FSA photograph in three primary ways. First, the photographs are a means of resisting conservative pushback in Congress in realizing an urban planning project that was projected to fail for its socialist ideals, and budgetary constraint. Second, they also formulate a sense of utopian time in the midst of great economic and environmental strife, and as such, evidence a world of enclosure that resists the catastrophe of 1929. These early-stage aerial photographs gather the functions of evidence and the potential for temporal disruption in crafting visions of the future, proposing the early stages of development as a critical marker of photographic time in relation to the state. In other words, these photographs become periodic markers—and future archival documentation—of the status of an idealistic plan that sought to reshape American life on an atmospheric scale. Third, and in line with the mission of the “infrastructural photograph,” the aerial views sanitize the American landscape from above. In doing so, the aerial view allows one to revisit Lange’s lone shed on the horizon, offering instead a panoramic view of the potential for cooperative spaces at large. Paula Amad further complicates this notion of projections of sublime utopia on part of the aerial photograph, explaining that the aerial photograph—while being associated with structures of power and the “God’s-eye view” in 20^th century warfare—can represent the unrepresentable and provide an alternative visual understanding of the Earth’s surface.68 It is this balancing of a utopian and dystopian quality that the Greenbelt photographs have in this context, adapted through time from Howard’s early city models. Retroactively, these images contain both the utopia and dystopia of the 1930s—both the promise of new models of life and the reality of American liberalism and the failures of the New Deal administration as the limiting factors in achieving such goals. Thus, the RA employed aerial photography as a critical method of conveying the merit of urban planning in Greenbelts, the predominant role of nature, and the feats of modern imaging technology in the 1930s.

To conclude this section, I turn to the historical precedent of landscape survey photography in the late 19th century, particularly by Timothy O’Sullivan on Clarence King’s 1870 survey of the American Southwest. Alan Trachtenberg circumscribes the production of O’Sullivan’s landscape views, in Reading American Photographs, as related to a bureaucratic pairing of image and text to “[give] place names a visual aspect.”69 Trachtenberg further explains the 19th geological survey photograph as producing the “geological imagination” that “results in a doubled vision: not just past and present, visible and invisible, but a vanished order of cataclysm [...] and a visible order of tranquility.”70 The aerial photographs above provide a new kind of geological imagination not yet imagined possible in 1870, and that renders the top layer of America’s geological landscape as utopian prophecy, much like the mining surveys in the West. They collapse time, both in their referential status to Howard’s English utopias, as well as their optimism to replicate the view across the American suburbs, which was ultimately not possible. Moreover, they contribute to readings of photography’s ontological treatment of the view, more generally.71 By situating the Greenbelt aerial photographs in this legacy of capturing landscape views, and not only within the wasteland of the 1930s, a new potential for reading these images of excess as images integral to an American historiography of the landscape photography, I make it clear that they should not be discounted, or favored over the more famous FSA photographers’ landscape photographs, taken on the ground.

6. Conclusion

The Greenbelt towns inevitably failed, but the historical urgency of their conception can be felt viscerally in the materials I have outlined in this article. In doing so, I have only provided a cursory glance of the various functions of photography throughout the 1930s, as it functioned as an arm of state bureaucracy. This era was shaped by the making of a citizenry that relied on photography to glean information about American life, from positions both within and outside the wasteland. These images landed themselves in archives and institutions in the form of forgotten negatives and proliferating portraits of struggling workforces amid ecological and environmental crises. These photographs of excess—tens of thousands of which remain untouched or unseen—are worth returning to with the perspective of fields outside of photography studies. Reducing the binary between the human and non-human, these archival photographs suggest an explicit relationship between human well-being and systems of eradicating dirt through infrastructural planning. By focusing on this pamphlet and individual photographs in the Library of Congress (LOC), I have argued that a Foucauldian archaeology of FSA photography that, a century later, permits fresh readings of the era’s photography, while also reshaping the discourse around how waste infrastructures have inspired policy and access to clean living, historically. Using Tagg’s work to justify this undertaking, I conduct close readings of seemingly useless photographs—lost to history—that possessed an explicit connection to government programs, and not the emerging aesthetic of the New York art photography scene.

From my analysis of how the U.S. government deployed photographic apparatuses to different ends, the question that remains is perhaps whether or not this legacy endured. The FSA dissolved in 1946 after replacing the RA, and the government has ceased funding social documentaries in any substantial way ever since. Each Greenbelt town eventually failed because the U.S. government sold the towns to private developers in the 1950s, resulting in the loss of the publicly owned greenbelt. Ignoring the inconsistencies with utopian socialism and the complete rejection of private property, the Greenbelts were promising early attempts at public housing and cooperative living in the U.S. context. Certainly, the FSA’s legacy as a source of the United States’ most lasting social documentary is stronger than the Greenbelts in terms of academic attention. Still, the project was a massive undertaking that remains understudied in all its intricacies, especially the work of lesser-known photographers and those working outside of the FSA. I have demonstrated the importance of considering the entire system of discourses surrounding the operation of the Resettlement Administration, as illuminated by waste studies. The result was the creation of both a tradition of social documentary, and a hybrid function of the archival photograph that established a form of modernity rooted in a rhetoric around sanitization. Each program was a brazen attempt to remedy the wasteland of the American plains, South, and Southwest in a time of cataclysm, but which inevitably failed because the radical capacity of each program was limited by the New Deal’s liberalism.

As I expand on John Tagg’s photography scholarship and Foucault’s conception of biopower, I concede that the RA fell short of creating a cooperative city model that applied to all Americans, and that could be easily replicated across the country. Nor was the FSA photography unit as explicitly pro-labor and anti-establishment as its peer projects, the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Music Project. Yet, the focus of my argument is not the debate about the function of scientific Marxism in government policy and how much the Greenbelts were in line with universally applicable urban planning across the U.S. Nonetheless, I suggest a point of departure for a possible answer to the failures of each. Foucault critiques socialism for partaking in the biopolitical project: “...It seems to me that socialism takes this over wholesale. And the result is that we immediately find ourselves in a socialist State which must exercise the right to kill or the right to eliminate, or the right to disqualify.”72 The Greenbelts reinforced biopolitical socialism in the sense that they always maintained an enclosure against the wasted lives depicted, and even reified, in Lange’s and others’ social documentaries.73 Second, the Greenbelts upheld patriarchal marriage and family structures, and therefore relinquished claims to dogmatic Marxist rhetoric. Finally, the fear of waste that was sanitized through the Greenbelt photography blocked an incorporation of the entire American polis. The result was a chaotic mixing of conservative American values, attempts at Utopian socialism, redefining the U.S.’ relationship to nature post-industrialization, and a confused definition of public property that could not be reconciled in the end. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels remarks that there is an economic crisis once every ten years. He states, “The mass of the workers is in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence.” In other words, they are “crise plethorique.”74 The crisis of plethora is still upon us, and much of the leftism of the 1930s and 1940s has since been depleted due to the rise of a neoliberal state politics, and an ever-increasing neo-fascist presence in the United States and Europe.

As a concluding note, I suggest that the function of photography, as critical to conceptions of utopian projects in the 1930s, can act as a tool moving forward in American policy, perhaps in relation to the Green New Deal. It is helpful to remember that the FSA photography did help spur an uptick in ballot attendance for FDR’s re-election, proving its usefulness as a tool of inspiring civic engagement and broader awareness of social issues. As climate catastrophe and genocide arrives on our doorsteps, the dialectic of history continues to assert itself, but photography provides evidence, human documents, models, and blueprints for moving forward that cannot be discounted, despite its many fraught relationships with the State. Photography, paired with text to different ends, can be a productive, multi-functional tool that inspires participation in democratic citizenship, while simultaneously acting as evidence of the success, albeit transitory, of certain projects like the Greenbelts. As such, the camera itself becomes a means of production that can be seized by the public as they resist crises spurred by capitalism in hopes of crafting a new future.75 At this moment, the proletariat and the State will have to renegotiate its relationship to the excesses of the camera yet again.

***

Emily Broad is a PhD student at the University of Rochester specializing in the history of photography, with a focus on how photography can be used as a tool to negotiate rights and state formation. In particular, she has researched the FSA, photography in the Arabian Gulf, and vernacular photographic archives.