Black (and White) Dynamite Critical Photobooks of the Depression Era

Abstract Inspired by the documentary black and white photographs of the New Deal’s Resettlement/ Farm Security Administration ( ra / fsa ), the critical photobooks of the Depression era provided a radical view of contemporary and historical United States of America. Anchored by words, the images in these books were highly critical of the agricultural economy and American capitalism in general. In addition, they criticized Black people’s exclusion and discrimination. The present article discusses this genre by comparing Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1937) and Dorothea Lange and Paul Tailor’s American Exodus (1939) with Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941). While the first two radicalized the ra / fsa ’s reformist criticism, Wright and Rosskam’s book went further by subverting the very roots of the American dream, exposing it as an ongoing historical depression for Black people.