CAITLIN BLOMO

The Great Guy and The Grand Canyon State: Explicit and Implicit Meanings in Russell Lee’s 1940 Arizona Photographs

This paper explores the photos of Russell Lee taken throughout the state of Arizona in 1940. Lee was one of eleven photographers who worked under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration from 1936-1943. As a photographer with the FSA, Lee’s mission was to “introduce America to Americans” by documenting the effects of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression on people across the country. Beyond that, photographers at the FSA had the additional goal to showcase the positive effects the FSA and federal government’s assistance had on their lives. While his photos were primarily taken and used to promote the work of the FSA, the federal government, and the state of Arizona, Lee’s photos—both what is included in them and excluded from them—reveal much more. His focus on images of government farms and their landscapes documents the government’s new land use policies that emerged in the wake of the Dust Bowl as well as beliefs in strict environmental control and overcoming nature. Likewise, Lee’s photographs of Arizona residents reveal the changing racial demographics in the state as well as the government’s policies on immigration and migration. His images relating to Native Americans further reveal the government’s stance on both racial and environmental issues as well as contemporary cultural understandings of native people.

While Lee was the longest serving and most prolific of the FSA photographers his work—perhaps because of the sheer breadth of it—has gone largely unexplored often in favor of contemporaries like Dorothea Lange or Gordon Parks. His images taken in Arizona in 1940 are especially under-researched in favor of his much more famous series taken in Pie Town, New Mexico in the same year. This paper works to shine a light in this unexplored area as well as to examine it through the also often-ignored lenses of race and the environment.