FSA Archive: Shifting the Focus
The book "Omen" reexamines the Farm Security Administration's photographic archive, revealing a lesser-known narrative that challenges traditional views of American history.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency funded in 1937 to combat poverty in the American South. Its documentation was entrusted to photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, who turned it into a fundamental part of the country’s recent visual history. While exposing the catastrophe that the American society was facing, the function of the documentation was creating a narrative about triumph against adversity.
The book’s visual sequence crops images of the archive by shifting the focus of the image to details and secondary characters, to “what should not be there and what appears by chance”. In so doing, it unveils a more complex and unsettling narrative, which can be interpreted as a premonition of the systemic violences to come in American society.
The book “OMEN” is published by Editorial RM and available at the price of 40 Euro.
