Picturing Poverty Print Culture and FSA Photographs

Working for the government's Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, photographers set out across the country to capture the human face of the Depression. Picturing Poverty examines how popular magazines used these images to construct complex and often contradictory messages about poverty. By striving to understand the original context of the photographs, Finnegan shines new light on the meanings of poverty, the Depression, and the various roles of the media.

Cara A. Finnegan is assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.