Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida

 Like the rest of the South, rural Florida was desperately poor during the depression.  Per capita income in the state dropped from $510 in 1929 to $298 in 1933, and 157 banks permanently closed their doors between 1928 and 1940.  Many of the FSA photographs illustrate how poor men, women, and children lived, worked, and survived during hard times.  Balancing images of the impoverished are those of ordinary tourists, of the middle-class residents of small towns and villages, and of the well-to-do in cities along the southeastern coast.  Together with photographs depicting soil erosion, the misuse of farmlands in northern counties, and the decline of the fishing, wood pulp, and timber industries, the Florida FSA collection offers a brilliant composite portrait of the sunshine state in the grip of the Great Depression.   

Arts & Photography

Provenzo Jr., Eugene F.

Carlebach, Michael L.

Photography & Video

University Press of Florida

The tintype, patented in 1856, was a cheap, fast, easy-to-make, practically indestructible type of photograph that became enormously popular among the working class in the late nineteenth century. For common laborers and their families, the opportunity to join the ranks of those who owned pictures of family and friends--the upper classes--was momentous. This collection exhibits more than eighty examples of a specific kind of tintype: occupational portraits, photographs of working people with the tools of their trade. Michael L. Carlebach examines the historical significance of these tintypes and finds that they reveal a great deal about late nineteenth-century values. The subjects of these images are plumbers proudly holding their wrenches and pipe cutters, carpenters with their saws and lathing hatchets, textile workers with their spindles and yarn, icemen with their tongs. These people lived and worked at a time when a depersonalized factory system run by production and efficiency experts was beginning to dominate American industry and culture. Many of the men and women in these tintypes were part of a disappearing class of self-employed artisans and journeymen; their portraits proudly stress their individuality and the essential nobility of their work. The most common reaction of historians to tintypes has been undisguised contempt or, at best, indifference. The photographs were generally seen as hopelessly unartistic and common. Yet Carlebach celebrates these anonymous portraits and finds that they say as much about today's working Americans--who are much more likely to document their toys and leisure activities than their professions--as they do about the working men and women who proudly sat for them in a much different age.

Working Stiffs: Occupational Portraits in the Age of Tintypes

Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press

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Books by Carlebach, Michael L.