Contributing to a view of Pennsylvania’s history of its people during the first 40 years of the 20th century, the concerns of this exhibition will be to examine two collections of photographs of rural Pennsylvania each of which exemplifies a position that both documents and manipulates the view of the history they present.  Photographs by Pennsylvania photojournalist, H. Winslow Fegley, offer the simple intention to preserve the history of the rural Pennsylvania German community.  Similarly focused on the rural community, images by photographers working for Federal assistance programs of the 1930s begin with an intention to serve an agenda predetermined by the project organizers.  Both groups of photographers contribute to a definition of Pennsylvania’s history, but with distinctly different results.  Seen together, it is possible to recognize the extraordinary value of visual documents as historical evidence of an era, particularly when the context and intention of the photographer offer their own interpretation. In the early decade of the 1900s, H. Winslow Fegley produced a focused view of Pennsylvania Germans through a large body of photographs.  Fegley’s images appear to have been created in the community of his birth around 1903-5 as a project for preserving a historical past that was immanently declining.  His documentation of the practices, people, and customs of the German-American farming community in Pennsylvania exhaustively preserves the visual history of a cultural that compromises a significant part of the state’s population.  Focusing on the farms and people of Hereford, a village in Berks County 50 miles north of Philadelphia, the photographer builds a comprehensive study of people in costume indigenous to their heritage who are posed in settings that define their homes and workplaces.  Individuals are shown in the act of preparing food for the community defining every process of a working farm from planting to harvest to table preparation or, in the case of livestock, from rearing to butchering to the cleaning of meat for food.  The entire body of these photographs address the issue of documentation of a bygone era. Fegley’s journalistic approach to his history of the Pennsylvania German community must have been for a project quite grand. Several hundred photographic images—some glass plate negatives and around 150 silver prints—are in the collection given to the Schwenfelder Library and Museum in Pennsburg, PA. The photographs, many of which bear captions describing Hereford subjects, propose an ambitious documentary project suitable for an article for the Pennsylvania German Society (Fegley became a member in 1902), or, even further, for use in a book. Fegley’s agenda seems straightforward: to document the culture he knew, nostalgically acknowledging the forthcoming decline of an era. Extrapolating  from their images an understanding of particular ethnic or societal groups, the viewer is given the subtly imposed perspective of the photographer who may have altered the meaning to suit a particular agenda. In a selection from a second group of photographs in the exhibition, those of the Far Security Administration (FSA) now in the collection of the Library of Congress, social conditions during the climactic years of the Great Depression of the 1930’s are preserved in a pictorial essay of the times. Among this latter group of more than 70,000 photographs only around 700 images of Pennsylvania subjects appear that bear upon an understanding of the economic impact of the Depression felt by people of the Commonwealth. While, like Fegley’s work, the FSA subjects show people in farming communities, they place greater emphasis on narrative, metaphor, and a definite political agenda. Roy E. Stryker was hired in April 1935 to head up the historical section of the Resettlement Administration (in 1936 it became the FSA-Farm Security Administration) to describe and elucidate the social responses of rural America to Roosevelt’s New Deal Federal assistance programs. Receiving his authority and direction from his former Columbia economics professor, Rexford G. Tugwell who had set up the Resettlement Administration, Stryker hired a team of photographers who could work in the field under his precise direction. The photographs were given written assignments identifying areas of the country to photograph, along with a rationale describing a point of view to take with their subjects—a “shooting script.” Accompanying the instructions were books and pamphlets discussing background material on the locales, which included data on economics, history of the community, and every imaginable kind of information that might familiarize the photographer with his or her assignments. The director maintained rigid control over the objectives of the photography project. What he was unable to control was the photographers’ creative vision. Though the disparate subjects of the early photographic studies of Pennsylvania German farmers by H. Winslow Fegley and those of the FSA photographer of the 1930’s seem unrelated, their objectives appear less divergent when considering the artists’ intentions. Fegley, whose career was dedicated to words as well as images, ennobles his subjects much like those of the FSA photographers, engendering a sense of dignity in their humble tasks. Even Ben Shahn’s “Children Picking over Refuse in a Dumpsite,” shares with Fegley’s women an iconic quality given to their occupations that brings respect for their industriousness in the consideration of their economic struggles. A metaphor for these people is created by Walker Evans in his Household Supply Store, 1935, which pairs utilitarian objects in a display window—pots and pans nestle together like family members, a suggestion of their future place in the American home. The FSA photographers—academically trained, professional, and urbane—initiated their photographic project as a journalistic assignment not unlike that of Fegley. Finding the personalities of their subjects compelling, they each sought to emulate artistic elements in their compositions, evoking in the picture not only the poignant situation of the sitter, but the aesthetic sensibility of the photographer. The exhibition developed from a collaboration between Susan Johnson and Valerie Livingston for papers given at the Pennsylvania Historical Association in November, 1997. Through a University Grant, thirty archivally printed  photographs were added to the collection of the Lore Degenstein Gallery.   Valerie Livingston     Household Supply Store (detail). Walker Evans. Archival silver print. 11 x 14"