Roy Stryker

Roy Stryker was not a photographer and he directed the most consequential documentary project in American history. He was a Kansas homesteader's son, served in the infantry in the First World War, and was teaching economics at Columbia when his mentor Rexford Tugwell brought him to Washington in 1935 to run the historical section of the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. The job was to justify New Deal rural policy with pictures. What he built instead was an archive of about a quarter of a million photographs of the United States between 1935 and 1943, made by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and others. His method was to send photographers out with reading lists and shooting scripts - detailed briefs about what a place meant, not just what to photograph - and to fight Congress for the budget. He also punched holes through the negatives he rejected, tens of thousands of them, which is either ordinary editing or an act of vandalism depending on who is describing it. Evans fought him constantly over control and was dismissed in 1937; Lange was dismissed twice. He insisted the whole file stay public, and it is at the Library of Congress and free to use, which is why those pictures are everywhere. After the FSA he ran a comparable documentary project for Standard Oil of New Jersey and later for Jones and Laughlin Steel. The hole-punched negatives are themselves now an object of study. He hired Gordon Parks, the first black photographer on the project, in 1942.

• Lived: 1893 CE – 1975 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other