McDannell, Colleen.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. 319+ pp, $ 45.00 (USD). ISBN 0-300-10430-8.

[1]  Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother has become the image associated with the Great Depression.  The woman stares out blankly while two children huddle near her.  This image and many others produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA, previously the Resettlement Administration) portrayed a secular America in the grips of the Great Depression.  In Picturing the Faith, Colleen McDannell presents other photographs that were not as iconic as Migrant Mother and display a different story about the 1930s and 1940s in American history.  McDannell finds ordinary religion in the photographs of the FSA, and she uses documentary photography to counter the prevailing historiographical trend to label the 1930s and 1940s as a secular period in American life. 

[2] Picturing the Faith revolves around the interaction of the “unchurched”—the FSA photographers and Roy Stryker, their leader—and the “churched” subjects, the itinerant ministers, the Okies, the rural folks, African American churches in the cities, Jewish farming communities, and others.  McDannell writes, “Picturing the Faith tells the story of how a set of photographers—who were not themselves religious—saw religion in the United States” (5).  She points out that religious institutions might have been losing members, but religiosity did not disappear; rather, it was lay-driven.  The Great Depression did not wipe out religion.  It was a part of the culture of the poor, and it sustained them and followed them from soup kitchens to orchards to temporary housing to graveyards.  Itinerants followed the migration of people with their cars decorated with biblical verses and warnings.  Churches might have stood empty, but ordinary piety remained. 

[3] The FSA photographers found that faith abounded, but they also found beauty in the abandoned churches and the people they documented.  The photographs were also works of art.  Walker Evans, in particular, was fascinated with southern churches.  These churches provided a “distinct American vernacular architecture,” and their simplicity allowed the artists to interpret the buildings (56).  However, the churches that were photographed always lacked people.  McDannell proposes that Evans, and also Lange, preferred empty space because the “power of religion” for them resided in space and form (63).  The FSA photographs thus documented the ordinary piety of their subjects and the photographers’ own conceptions of religion.  Photographing religion also provided a way to preserve the dignity of the poor (83). 

[4] The reformist agenda of the FSA photographers, however, was not always favourable to religion.  For instance, the photographs of John Vachon represented Christian charities as distant (and inadequate) from the reforms of the New Deal.  McDannel writes, “He used his camera to harshly judge the practices of religious people” (114).  Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the Salvation Army presented them as only religious, which ignored their charitable work.  The photographers manipulated their subjects to fit their own interpretations, and McDannell gives instances of both positive and negative interpretations of religion by the FSA photographers.  More importantly, these photographs portrayed religious activity in a time when religious participation was on the decline.  McDannell’s work uses photography as medium to contest a prominent historiographical trope of secularization of America in the 1930s and 1940s. 

[5] Not surprisingly, McDannell has provided another monograph that challenges American religious historians to find new sources for their work.  Her Material Christianity (Yale University Press, 1995) urged scholars to look at the “stuff” of religion, and this work urges us to examine photographs and what they can add to the historical record.  She successfully uses this medium to show how religion was still an important facet in the lives of ordinary people during the Great Depression.  She writes, “Rather than being a time of retreat from the supernatural, the Depression years were a time when Americans intensely engaged the world beyond and integrated it into their everyday lives” (277).  However, McDannell, like any good historian, realizes the limitations of her sources.  Photographs are often depictions of religion with the sound turned off.  The FSA found beauty in their subjects that can overwhelm viewers yet we have to realize that there are other elements to religious experience that we miss.  Cultural expressions never fully capture the soul of the faith. 

[6] Overall, this work could be beneficial to scholars of religious studies, history, or art history.  McDannell interweaves facets of the aforementioned disciplines masterfully.  Picturing the Faith is a great addition to American religious historiography and a great read, which is not to be underestimated.  I would recommend it for one’s bookshelf or even one’s coffee table because the photographs are poignant (and beautiful) images of American’s religious culture.

Kelly J. Baker
Florida State University
kjb6056@fsu.edu