Jack Delano (1914-1997) - a photographer for the Farm Security Administration - was born near Kiev, Ukraine and immigrated to America, with his family, in 1923. While a student at Philadelphia's Academy of Fine Arts, he became interested in photography when he had a chance to travel in Europe on a fellowship.
Learning the Farm Security Administration was hiring photographers, to document people and places throughout America, Delano was immediately interested. In his oral history, he tells us how he landed the job:
I, in the meantime, had moved from Philadelphia to New York where I was free-lancing as a photographer, not earning very much money, needing a job very badly, when one day I received a telegram from Roy Stryker saying that there was a job opening at $2,300 a year as photographer in FSA, would I be interested? Well, I was never more interested din anything in my life.
Delano had a problem, however. The FSA's photographers had to drive their own cars as they traveled hither and yon throughout America. Not only did Delano not have a car, he didn't even know how to drive:
One of the conditions was that you had to have a car and you had to be able to drive and you had to provide your own transportation. I had neither a car nor did I know how to drive. I got a friend to teach me how to drive in New York, and we were always in traffic jams with me not knowing how to get the car out of high and all those kinds of things. But I finally learned how to drive, got a license and bought an old wreck of a car which I proceeded to drive on down to Washington. I had all kinds of traffic problems all the way and getting through the Holland Tunnel was quite a problem with this car which had almost no steering wheel, but I made it. I got to Washington.
Delano liked meeting the people he photographed and learning about their customs. He especially liked local fairs and was intrigued by the clothes people wore and the dialects they spoke:
Well, as with any job that you really enjoy and like doing, it never seems like a job, and this was certainly true with us. [He frequently traveled with his new wife, Irene.] I felt that I was learning and I was studying for myself what I wanted to find out, and it so happened that what I wanted to find out and what I was studying was just what my job expected of me, and I can't think of a better arrangement. When I would go to cover a county fair, for example, a county fair; well, I didn't know much about county fairs. I had always been a city boy and it was all great and new and wonderful to me. And Irene and I would sit down and work out shooting scripts after going the first day, and they would be the most detailed and, for us, exciting things that we could imagine. Not only what was displayed at the fair and all the products, and so on, but the people and what they wore, and how they looked, and what kind of tobacco they used, and the kids, and the language. And frequently we would get into things which were non-photographic but which were fascinating to us, such as the accent and the inclination and the songs and everything having to do with it, which to me was a revelation and was fascinating. And I was studying, I was learning from this and documenting everything I possibly could because I felt that this was what Roy would want also - that it would be valuable for the file.
I think that, aside from that, speaking for myself, I felt that I was part of an organization which was basically interested in the cultural values of America, which had nothing to do with politics but had to do with the American tradition, with the bad things, the good things, the difficulties, the problems, the joys and inspirations and everything that went with it. And it could be a tight little Jewish community someplace in Colchester, which we covered, including the synagogues and everything that went with it, or it could be a horse show at a county fair in New Hampshire somewhere. It was all part of what was making the United States and what the United states had come from, and this was the exciting thing for us. Through these travels and the photographs I got to love the United States more than I could have in any other way. (Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)
In this photo, by Jack Delano, a family attends a fair in Rutland, Vermont. At the time, mothers often used feed sacks to make clothes for their children.
Click on the image for a better view. Part of the "Bound for Glory" exhibition from the Library of Congress.
Credits
Image 4 (of 70) included in the Exhibition, "Bound for Glory,"
online courtesy Library of Congress. The LOC describes this
reproduction, from a color slide, as follows:
Jack Delano. At the Vermont state fair. Rutland, Vermont, September 1941. Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-54. LC-DIG-fsac-1a33924. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Quoted passages from Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
