In 1943 Roy Stryker left the Farm Security Administration to work for Standard Oil, where his job was "similar to what it had been at the FSA: to hire photographers to document the activities of Standard Oil in a way that would help create an influential and benign image of the company." Out of the Forties is drawn from the resultant 85,000-print Standard Oil Archives.
Author Nicholas Lemann describes the collection as "perhaps the best portrayal of the 1940's in any medium." It was certainly one of the most influential, since its prints were widely published in texts, picture books and magazines. With such a vast resource and the well-honed documentary abilities of Edwin Rosskam, John Vachon, Russell Lee and Esther Bubley, among others, we might expect a Forties version of We Have Seen Their Faces. Instead, in a very spare 131 images -- many of them very small -- Lemann has attempted "nothing less than an explication of our national character"; a chart of the modern marriage of industry and government; and a history of the lives of New Jersey refinery workers and Mexican farm workers, of civil rights, and of the transition of the Texas economic base from cattle to oil.
With the first chapter, "The Project: A Picture of America," the basic flaws in the book become evident. Lemann's text defends Stryker's involvement in the project and characterizes the content of the archive as "Americans working in colonial splendor in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela; the emotional background of OPEC's economic policies; the global activities of the world's largest company." The photographs included show no such things. There are familiar scenes of young GIs on leave in their home towns, barefoot boys in overalls, lonely tugboats and trains, jars of homemade jelly at the church fair, waitresses and fishmongers. Among them are some quite handsome images, but they are bereft of intelligible textual support or sequencing, and effect little more than a vaguely nostalgic atmosphere.
In Linden, New Jersey, Lemann describes with clinical detail the functions of Standard's Bayway Refinery and the achievements of Abby Rockefeller's Bayway Community Center. The accompanying photographs are public-relations shots of refinery, community center, officials and workers -- interspersed with unrelated images of heroic workers and huge machines in Ohio, New York, and Texas. Many of the images are so small as to be unreadable. Only two frames, one of a teenage couple dancing slowly and one of a handful of lanky youths bored in front of a TV, provide a credible echo of the postwar years. The tone of the chapter as a whole is uncomfortably like an annual report.
Testifying to the "Americanization of Mexican farm workers" in Elsa, Texas, Lemann relies on a rambling narrative of the fortunes of agri-entrepreneur Fred Vahlsing. Murky photographs of workers in the field and the packinghouse, and at the obligatory fiesta, illuminate this success story. Although the images seem to show stultifyingly hard work, exhausted workers (some of them in New England!) and a degree of alienation, the text insists that the successful acculturation of Vahlsing's foreman is the real content. Lemann writes, "A more on-the-money story of immigrant's progress would be difficult to imagine, as Zeke himself, despite his air of fierce un-complicatedness, was well aware."
Lemann's approach to racial-equality progress is equally awkward. In St. Martinville, Louisiana, he examines the disputed murder conviction of a young black man, Willie Francis, in 1947. (Lemann concludes that Francis's supporters were too racially biased and that the youth was guilty.) Only one photograph relates to the tale, and the pertinence of the case to racial progress is uncertain. The criterion for other photographs in the chapter seems to be the presence of a black subject: poor children selling berries alongside a Texas highway, North Carolina farm boys, passengers in a New York City bus terminal. The occasional portrait of a refinery worker at a menial job does little to advance notions of racial equality or of a benign Standard Oil.
Chapters on cowboys displaced by oil fields and on a model refinery town are underscored by texts which assert, predictably, that "the oil field's been great to us . . . We used to work seven days a week here, with one week's vacation. Seventy-five cents an hour, five dollars a day and no overtime. Exxon was good to us. They was like a father to us. Lord, they made a millionaire out of me."
A documentary effort by Standard Oil, begun in the wake of Justice Department hearings on Standard's war collaboration with I. G. Farben, is obviously not likely to focus on labor unrest, industrial accidents, environmental pollution, or international political machinations. The archive does, however, contain a wealth of richly revealing images which might have been used in this book. (A preview of the book in a recent issue of Atlantic included a fair number of them that did not appear in the book itself.) Part of the problem here is that Lemann has made a remarkably pedestrian selection and seems to have little notion of context or sequencing. He doesn't much trust the audience to see the photographs, either; extraneous texts detail what we can clearly see for ourselves: "sober-looking man dressed in a heavy neat suit in the picture on this page."
Ultimately, the difficulty lies with Lemann's attitude toward the people in the images. Even Standard Oil is not clumsy enough to speak about "colonial splendor" in 1983, yet the text reeks of colonialist attitudes and public-relations puffery. Out of the Forties is neither good documentary nor good propaganda. It has neither the air of candor of the former nor the subtlety of the latter. It is a valuable lesson in the vulnerability of the still photograph to misappropriation by text and context.
