Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the Margins of Visibility in the American South

The FSA as an Archive and Model of Photojournalism

Schwarzenbach arrived in the U.S. in September 1936 to work alongside the American writer and photographer Barbara Wright. She met Wright in Tehran in the summer of 1935 shortly after marrying the French diplomat Claude Clarac, who befriended the American during his foreign service post in Washington, D.C. The two women traveled together in Persia and became close, with Schwarzenbach admiring Wright’s “Ehrgeiz und Wissensdrang”² (Schwarzenbach, “Tagebuch” 2). She jumped at the opportunity when Wright invited her to undertake a journey in her home country. In preparation for their trip, which first took them to Maine and the industrial regions of Pennsylvania, Wright recommended readings on little-known American regions and social issues. Schwarzenbach was confident that her reportage would benefit from meeting important people through Wright, a member of a highly connected Washington family (Schwarzenbach, “Brief an Klaus Mann” 146).

As it turned out, she made a crucial contact shortly after arriving in Washington. At a cocktail party held at Wright’s mother’s home in Northwest D.C., Schwarzenbach met Roy Stryker, head of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration. This New Deal agency was created in 1935 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression. That year, Stryker launched an ambitious and highly influential documentary photography program that produced an extensive pictorial record of American life until 1944, operating under the Farm Security Administration from 1937 and the Office of War Information from 1942. He hired some of the most important photographers of the day, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, as well as lesser-known figures like Wright. Over nearly a decade, his unit produced some 175,000 black-and-white negatives in addition to approximately 1,600 color transparencies. In their day, these ‘straight photographs’ circulated widely as objective evidence of New Deal needs and efforts; they have become some of the 20th century’s most powerful expressions of social documentary photography, cementing the popular image of the Great Depression.

Even with the huge range seen in such a staggering number of photographs made by more than a hundred photographers, certain tendencies in approach, subject matter, and aesthetics emerge. Often working from shooting scripts outlining suggested topics, FSA photographers covered the country to record the human toll of economic crisis and the agricultural disaster of the Dust Bowl. Broadly speaking and with many exceptions, the photographers pictured people with candor and emphasized the larger circumstances and effects of their environments. Convinced of photography’s effectiveness in communicating societal ills, the unit sought to garner support for government programs by demonstrating the plight of a struggling populace. Text was central to this endeavor, as photographers supplied captions with information about the locations and situations pictured; prints made in the headquarters in Washington, D.C. were usually mounted with these captions, and images circulated in the press often drew on them as well. In compiling what Stryker later called an “encyclopedia” of American life, the project naturalized photography’s role in collecting and cataloguing information and making its subjects available and transparent to a wider public (Stryker, “Oral History”).

In the fall of 1936, Stryker gave Schwarzenbach access to his team’s photographic files. In a 1940 diary entry, she refers to Stryker as “meinen alten Freund”³ and describes going through drawers of FSA pictures in D.C. (Schwarzenbach, “Tagebuch” 2).⁴ She visited the archive several times and illustrated most of her articles for the Swiss press with FSA photographs, usually choosing the government images over her own and receiving advice from FSA officials about what was worth publishing. While in D.C. in 1936 she wrote to Zürcher Illustrierte (ZI) editor Arnold Kübler that it was an “erfreuliche[s] Faktum” that the photographs published in the Swiss magazine were met with “enorme[m] Anklang” and that she would continue to use agency pictures (Schwarzenbach to Kübler).⁵ When so much scholarship has centered on the circulation of FSA images within the U.S., Schwarzenbach’s reports present a fascinating case study for their movement and meaning abroad (see Finnegan and Natanson). Working for largely German-speaking audiences (sometimes with French translations), she used FSA imagery to visualize rural poverty, the ravaged American landscape and dilapidated dwellings, and the psychological distress found in human faces. She also used FSA photographs to bring marginalized Americans—the poor and especially people of color—into more prominent view, while these same images of nonwhite Americans were circulated less often in U.S. publications of the time.

Her early reports from the U.S. reflect how Schwarzenbach used the FSA archive to picture American diversity, mainly in the South, even before visiting there in the fall of 1937. Her article “Roosevelt-Wähler,” for example, profiled the incumbent president’s constituents in the election of November 1936 in a layout emphasizing the voting power of people of color and the working classes. Sizable images of African American and Native American men and Creole women surround two relatively small photographs of Caucasian men in the center. Attributing authorship of layouts is complicated, as ZI‘s editor Arnold Kübler was very involved in crafting a high-contrast, dynamic look for photographs on the magazine’s pages (Wichor 172–203) (fig. 2). If Schwarzenbach did not in fact help design the layout including placement and relative sizes of images, she at the very least signed off on their presentation. The text certainly communicated her voice, and her caption for the Rothstein image of two Apaches in New Mexico on the right reminds the reader of the unpopular truth that Native Americans were the original sovereigns of this land.⁶

Fig. 2:

Dr. Annemarie Clark: “Roosevelt-Wähler: Wie sieht der Amerikaner aus?” Spread from Zürcher Illustrierte 12/45 (November 6 1936): 1412–1413. ETH Zürich, www.e-periodica.ch.

The diversity of representation in Schwarzenbach’s report encompasses not only race but also the intersection of gender, age, and class. Suggesting that whiteness is no guarantee of material success, her caption points out how the older white farmer’s Anglo-Saxon features did not make him a millionaire in the U.S. At the same time, the constellation of images invites the reader to notice a differing visual construction for whiteness, as the farmer is the only full-bodied figure standing proudly before land that he owns, while the white miner in the photograph to the left is pictured smiling. The layout revolves around men represented as laborers, including the white men and the Black man in the straw hat who, as the caption tells us, works on a cotton plantation, in contrast to the surrounding images of idleness and recreation. The subjects may all be poor or of the working class, but the photographs train the viewer to recognize the layers in their intersecting social identities.

What unifies most of these portraits of different cross-sections of Americans is their frontality, illumination, and focus on the human face. In contrast to the photograph by Schwarzenbach discussed in the beginning, whose shadows pose questions of engagement and agency, the photographs in the article appear to capture their subjects openly at close range. Gestures of casual-ness—the Apaches’ hands in their pockets, the crossing of the older white man’s legs, the miner’s enthusiastic smile—give the impression that the subjects are at ease with the camera.

In this respect, it is noteworthy that Schwarzenbach gravitated in her choice of FSA illustrations toward the work of Ben Shahn, a fellow Europeanborn liberal who was unusually sensitive to racial dynamics. Shahn is well known for using a compact Leica camera with a right-angle viewfinder, an accessory that enabled him to photograph scenes perpendicular to him while pointing his camera forward so that his subjects would remain unaware. His two portraits from Louisiana reproduced with this report, of a half-awake trapper and Creole women playing a guitar, caught intimate, unposed moments that may not have been possible if Shahn had directly pointed his camera at these people. Whether Schwarzenbach knew of Shahn’s technique or not, it is revealing that even in selecting FSA photographs where subjects appear to pose willingly for the camera, she included some with additional intricacy in terms of the subjects’ knowledge of being photographed. In Shahn, she was drawn to one of the photographers whose process complicated and even undermined the FSA’s rhetoric of truthfulness, where claims of shooting ‘straight’ perpetuated a discourse of documentary objectivity for photography.

Beyond looking to the federal project for visual evidence for her sociopolitical reports, Schwarzenbach also found in the FSA a kind of exemplar for the type of photojournalism she wanted to pursue in the U.S. On paper, Schwarzenbach aligned closely with the FSA’s vision of its ideal photographer. For example, an undated memo by an unknown author in the FSA-OWI Collection titled “The F.S.A. Photographer” stated that he or she “must be capable with pencil and note-book to almost the same degree as with lens and shutter. [...] To do this job the photographer has to be more than an artist,—more than an adequate mechanic. He must be something of a sociologist, something of an economist [ . . . ] he must have a healthy nose for news coupled with a thorough scepticism of biased information” (“FSA Photographer”). Schwarzenbach fits this description as an avid reader, writer, and academically trained historian. She possessed the research skills and inquisitive nature that deepened her understanding of the complex subjects she photographed, even and perhaps especially as an outsider to American culture. Like Wright and some of the other FSA photographers whose work she studied in Washington, Schwarzenbach’s images take their cues from researching her subjects.

However, she grappled with the ethics of documentary photography and questions surrounding agency given the power relations and invasion of privacy involved in making a photograph of another person, especially someone in compromised circumstances. Awakened to regional inequities through reading, conducting interviews, and poring over FSA photographs in Washington, she set off on her road trip with Wright through six Southern states in the fall of 1937. As she would soon discover, “die Vision eines besseren Lebens, der langgehegte amerikanische Traum, wird schattenhaft, je weiter die Strassen nach Süden führen” (Schwarzenbach, Jenseits 81).⁷ In unpublished notes from November 1937, she wrote of picturing Southerners: “Wir machten Photos, es war peinlich, diesen Haufen Elend als ‘Sujet’ zu benützen [...] ‘Dokumentar-Photographie’ nennt man das, Realität, Beweis – aber wie, wenn die Leute selbst ihre Lage nicht realisieren?” (Schwarzenbach, Jenseits 118).⁸ Racked by self-criticism and doubt about the importance of the photographs, she questioned the logic underpinning the FSA, which held that raising awareness about social issues through photographs—”introducing America to Americans”—benefited those suffering (Stryker and Wood 8).

Some American photographers and writers also struggled with the inherent hierarchy of exploiting their vulnerable subjects for their own journalistic ends. In his collaboration with Evans on Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), James Agee wrote that it was obscene and thoroughly terrifying [...] to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings [...] for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism.’ (Agee and Evans 5) Looking at the double-bind Schwarzenbach found herself in from today’s point of view, it appears that outsourcing the imagery in her published reports to American photographers helped Schwarzenbach mitigate this conflict, as most of her American photographs remained private during her lifetime. Keeping her photographs in the archive did not constitute as much of a ‘prying’ or transgression as ‘parading’ them in the press. At the same time, choosing the government photographs acknowledged them as the ‘official’ imagery of the time and place, positioning her own views as more authorial, open-ended, and subjective.

In her reports for the Swiss press, Schwarzenbach selected and arranged FSA photographs and marshalled facts and figures to insist that Americans of color were an integral, if marginalized part of national life. As suggested by this essay’s opening image, her own photographic practice would explore these margins of visibility by evading a clear gaze and producing a subtlety and mystery that demand the viewer’s close study.

Picturing Life on the Margins in the South

Armed with two Rolleiflex cameras, Schwarzenbach and Wright spent three weeks driving a Ford 8 through Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. Schwarzenbach wanted to see the South for herself after hearing and reading so much about the region and viewing it through government photographs during her time in the Northeast the previous fall and spring. In particular, she sought to investigate its labor struggles and racial injustice. As she later shared of her desire to explain the shortcomings of American democracy, she decided to focus on economic and social problems “statt dem Kontinent der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten romantischere Seiten abzugewinnen. Es gibt überall Licht und Schatten zu entdecken, aber man schreibt über das, was einem auf den Nägeln brennt” (Schwarzenbach, Schattenseite 12).⁹

Schwarzenbach used photographs to make palpable what she called America’s Schattenseite or “shadow side” for Europeans. As Sofie Decock has argued, this focus on societal ills and underrepresented Americans held veiled meanings for European readers surrounded by the escalating conflict of World War Two (Decock 207). If Schwarzenbach’s photo-reports from the American South partly reflected her fears surrounding divisions in Europe, as Decock contends, they also represented her hopes for the progressive cause by refusing to essentialize their subjects. While representing the disenfranchised by reproducing FSA photographs, in her own photographs she questioned her ability to understand and represent the people before her lens.

The first article to include her images, “Das Drama im amerikanischen Plantagen-Gürtel. Glanz, Sturz und neues Leben in den Südstaaten von U.S.A.,” was the lead story in the June 10, 1938 issue of ZI, the main purchaser of her photographs (fig. 3). It seems that several of the feature article’s eleven photographs were made by Schwarzenbach, with at least four by Wright and one by Rothstein. It is difficult to attribute all of the photographs with absolute certainty, since Schwarzenbach did not consistently credit photographers, many of the photographs in her archive are not signed or stamped, and she and Wright were making pictures of the same subjects in several cases (see the essay by Elisaveta Dvorakk in this issue). Though we cannot be certain whether she chose or made the photographs in this report characterizing sharecropping as modern slavery, or how much input Kübler or even FSA officials had in selecting them, roughly one third treat African Americans or their dwellings.

Fig. 3:

Annemarie Clark-Schwarzenbach: “Das Drama im amerikanischen Plantagen-Gürtel.” Spread from Zürcher Illustrierte 14/24 (June 10 1938): 704–705. ETH Zürich, www.e-periodica.ch.

Notably, this number is higher than the proportion of FSA photographs covering Black life, which photography historian Nicholas Natanson found to be approximately 10% (Natanson 66). In Schwarzenbach’s archive, it is approximately 16%, though this number grows if one counts only pictures with a human focus. Natanson argued that the FSA representation was significant, first because it was in line with the percentage of the population at the time, and second because photographs of African Americans were not circulated as widely in publications and exhibitions. Indeed, though the archive contained a sizable portion of images of Black life, the FSA file was often used to construct an image of the deserving poor as mostly white. Schwarzenbach went further than the government project. Like her earlier article on Roosevelt’s voters featuring numerous photographs of people of color, her reports on the South consistently supported African Americans and exposed the unique issues they faced.

In the spread from her ZI article mentioned above, Schwarzenbach photographed Black longshoremen sitting on the docks of Savannah, Georgia. Overlapping it on the page, a group of Black inmates at a prison in Harris County, Georgia, is paired with text explaining the system’s segregation and harsh penalization of minor crimes by African Americans. Linking these photographs, some of the men gaze directly at the camera, while others look aside. Below, a white ‘tramp’ sits in a cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina in a photograph by Wright. In the text accompanying the bottom right photograph, Schwarzenbach points out that a stately Alabama home ravaged by the Civil War now houses six Black families working in nearby plantations, while the top right photograph by Wright focuses on the doorway of an American Legion building. These photographs appear to radiate out from the central largest image of a man and mule walking a road between cornfields, linking current conditions in the South with plantation agriculture. Beyond giving ample space to African American content within this layout, Schwarzenbach resists stereotypical images and stories on upbeat themes of progress (see the essay by Verena Kick in this issue).

The article also points to her understanding of intersectionality, which will be further explored in the next section. The layout connects three groups of men overlapping and forming a diagonal—from the longshoremen and prison inmates to the white ‘tramp’ in Charleston. The longshoremen and ‘tramp,’ who, as Schwarzenbach explains, is likely an out-of-work farmer, face in towards each other across the page. They border the image of the prison inmates that overlays them, reinforcing her words about how imprisonment disproportionately affects Black Southerners. Meanwhile, her caption for Wright’s picture of an American Legion office likens this organization to the Ku Klux Klan in their “Rassenkampf gegen die Schwarzen” (Schwarzenbach, “Drama” 705).¹⁰ Schwarzenbach’s article creates the overall impression that even though conditions are adverse for all Southern workers, Black workers suffer from intersecting class and racial discrimination.

Indeed, the photographs suggest Schwarzenbach’s interest in exploring interracial tensions and her complicated relationship with her subjects. While on the one hand she included relatively straightforward attempts to make marginalized people visible in her photographs, on the other hand she kept her subjects perched on the edge of opacity or unknowability by creatively using shadows and selecting moments that kept the people before her lens impenetrable. The image of Black longshoremen is an unusual choice for reproduction, as it boldly interrupts the illusion of objectivity. Although the older men pictured seem unaware of or unbothered by Schwarzenbach, the youngest greets her camera with wariness, an understandable reaction to a white European woman taking his picture given the racial injustice described in her words. Her caption refers to Savannah as a former “Hafen für Zucker, Baumwolle und – Sklaven;”¹¹ and she furthermore describes these men waiting for steamers as partaking in “problématique” employment (Schwarzenbach, “Drama” 704). With its close range detailing the younger man’s direct eye contact and expression of distrust, this is one of her most confrontational photographs, seeming to instantiate a problematic relationship like that told by the caption. Including a photograph where she intrudes on the young man’s space and her presence does not seem welcome, Schwarzenbach visually conjures her reflections cited earlier on the importance of social documentary photography and her right to photograph her subjects.

For Schwarzenbach, representing African Americans in more active roles meant not only representing them in the literal sense of promoting their images but also preserving their powers of self-representation and protest within the picture. In this picture, she shares agency with the young man, who asserts his power, active role, and resistance to her camera in a defiant gaze. Glissant’s theory of opacity is helpful in crystallizing the unique and enigmatic way in which Schwarzenbach approached her subjects. Discussing literary texts and translations as well as intercultural communication more broadly, Glissant defined opacity as “the right to difference” (Glissant 189) and the opaque as “that which cannot be reduced” (Glissant 191). In contrast to transparency that diminishes the other by assimilating him or her as a knowable object, opacity or “opportune obscurity” defies attempts to generalize and essentialize (Glissant, 189). For Glissant, opacity may range from the obscurity seen in the opening photograph to other forms of impenetrability, such as this young longshoreman’s assertive gaze. Resisting sensationalism or didacticism, Schwarzenbach invested her photographs with ambiguity and pictured her subjects with minds of their own.

The Shadow Side of Knoxville

In her quest to expose the shadow side of American life, Schwarzenbach found a rich case study in Tennessee, the setting of the opening photograph. She and Wright visited much of Tennessee’s Eastern half, driving from the Cumberland Mountains to Chattanooga, Knoxville and Monteagle. As Ute Bettray has convincingly argued, meeting with Myles Horton, whom she photographed extensively in Monteagle, was revelatory (Bettray 185). Horton was a socialist and member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) who in 1932 co-founded the Highlander Folk School, a center for community empowerment that later trained Civil Rights leaders including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Violating segregation laws, the school encouraged white and Black members of the working class to come together to discuss social change and the improvement of labor conditions. Schwarzenbach clearly admired Highlander, writing that the school “scheint so etwas wie ein Zuhause und sicherer Hafen zu sein – für alle Verfolgten, alle Wissensdurstigen, alle zuverlässigen Freunde der Arbeiterbewegung” (Schwarzenbach, Jenseits 96).¹²

Visiting the school in mid-November, she grew inspired by Horton, a white Southerner who risked imprisonment to promote industrial organization in the region. He helped open Schwarzenbach’s eyes to the injustices of segregation and the intersectionality of class and racial prejudice. As she wrote in an article published in Die Weltwoche in early 1938 about her trip to the South: “Ich sah die Armut in den Gruben und Holzfäller-Lagern von Tennessee, das Elend der schwarzen ‘Sharecropper’ (Baumwollpächter)und ihrer weissen Feinde und Schicksalsgenossen auf den zerfallenden Plantagen” (Schwarzenbach,”Ehre” 9).¹³ Schwarzenbach learned to recognize the similarities and differences between how Black and white people experienced poverty at the time—how they could share adversity while tensions between them persisted.

The opening image of my essay can be understood to reflect Schwarzenbach’s growing awareness of these issues during her time in Tennessee in juxtaposing a dark-skinned man standing in the shadows with Hollywood posters. With its grayscale and long tonal range, photography was the ideal medium for articulating such shadows. This adds further nuance to the argument that Schwarzenbach used photography to visualize contrasts between black and white, since she simultaneously used it to emphasize a span of shades beyond these binaries (Bergmann 279). The male actors’ gleaming faces are positioned away from the standing figure, looking to turn their backs on his existence and suggesting a position of white hegemony, a theme explored by Franziska Bergmann. However, the lines of the female actors are directed towards him and converge on his body, emphasizing his inclusion in the frame. Schwarzenbach presents us with the paradox that the man is both embedded in this scene and apart from it—he is ‘there’ but almost in the background, resisting the right poster’s “NOW SHOWING” sign and its proclamation of clarity. His blur suggests movement, only momentarily arrested by the camera.

The intense shadow and blur make the man’s racial identity hard to determine with certainty, yet the ambiguity lends even more friction to his positionality. Does he belong to the white world pictured by the posters, yet exists on its margins due to his class? Is he an African American man sidelined by mainstream culture, especially in the South? During her time in Knoxville, Schwarzenbach photographed a handful of the city’s mostly segregated movie theaters, which typically offered people of color inferior seating during limited hours. If the man were African American, his wraithlike presence next to the posters might emblematize his restricted access to the movies they advertise.

Glissant’s concept of opacity helps unravel Schwarzenbach’s multilayered image. While drawing attention to the man by photographing him, his existence in shadows seems to point to his precarious position in society. Many of Schwarzenbach’s photographs of African Americans evoke a similar push-pull between visibility and invisibility; they make her subjects visible by registering their existence, yet also attempt to protect their agency or identity by not fully revealing them. Turning the work of seeing to the viewer, she enacts opacity’s powers to provide an alternative to a resolved image with a predetermined meaning. Hers is not a vision of the South available for knowing, but rather one that interrupts the gaze and what Glissant calls “the ideal of transparent universality, imposed by the West” (Glissant 2). This approach extends to her photographs of African American women with ambiguous poses and expressions, such as her image of a young Black woman with crossed arms and an anxious stare behind a home in Cincinnati (A-5-10/097). Her neatly dressed figure leans away from her dilapidated surroundings, as Lorely French has noted, and while standing close to the camera she eludes its gaze, defying an easy interpretation of the scene (French 195). Though FSA imagery varied widely between its many photographers and their individual styles, its overarching goal of legibility did not always leave as much room as Schwarzenbach’s images for addressing the complexities of cultural difference.

Utilizing dynamic oppositions as seen in the image of the Cincinnati woman, Schwarzenbach’s Southern photographs often used advertising imagery like the film posters to accentuate the distance between reality and promise or fantasy. For example, at Birmingham, Alabama’s Smithfield, a low-income housing development recently constructed with New Deal funding, she captured an African American man passing before a billboard for lamps, his body pointedly left in the shadow. Adding to the irony of his lack of visibility beyond a silhouette, the man’s body shares the verticality of the advertised lamp above him, yet the lamp’s depicted light fails to illuminate him (fig. 4). In a note she added to the envelope in which she archived the image, Schwarzenbach cynically located the photograph in “Birmingham, Alabama City of perpetual promise” (SLA-Schwarzenbach-A-5-11/015).

Fig. 4:

Annemarie Schwarzenbach: USA, Birmingham/AL: Häuser (1936–1938). Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv, Nachlass Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek Bern, SLA-Schwarzenbach-A-5-11/015.

Like in the opening photograph from Knoxville, the ad jumps out to the viewer while the rest of the shadowy scene requires close inspection. Both photographs center on a single man and emphasize the ambiguous effect of concealing and revealing at the same time. Here the ad’s message of “Seeing is Believing” seems an implicit instruction to look closely at the image to decipher its complexities. Yet if one must see to believe, how can the viewer hope to understand this barely visible man? This idea gains further political meaning in the ad, which uses the language of voting to claim the viewer’s eyes will “vote for” I.E.S. Lamps. Aligning vision and seeing with enfranchisement and buying power, the photograph poses the question of where this system leaves those who are in the shadows, politically and economically. These and other such images mark advertising’s detachment from lived experience and failure to deliver on its claims, which was a running motif in FSA photography.

Government photographers such as Marion Post Wolcott highlighted the exclusion of African Americans from mainstream culture as materialized in films and ads. In an iconic 1939 photograph made in Mississippi, a silhouetted Black man walks a long flight of stairs to the theater’s segregated entrance (fig. 5). A painted Dr. Pepper sign declaring the drink is “Good for Life!” and the actor Bob Steele’s smiling face in the poster for the Western Feud of the Range (1939) seem shockingly removed from the demeaning racial hierarchy spatialized in the theater’s two levels. In Natanson’s words, “his being black suggests the profound irony of mass-culture romanticism, and of a particularly low-grade sort at that, being ‘consumed’ by members of a race whom most mass-culture creators had done their best to denigrate or exclude” (Natanson 2). Like Schwarzenbach’s photograph, there is a disparity between Steele’s face in the poster and the figure’s obscured features. Taken from a greater distance in which the human figure is graphically silhouetted against the brilliant white wall, Post Wolcott uses shadow to emphasize how the stooped man trudges onward and upward even as the larger environment belittles him. For Schwarzenbach, shadows bury the figure, balancing him on the edge of absence and underlining his unresolved relation to mass culture.

Fig. 5:

Marion Post Wolcott: Negro Going in Colored Entrance of Movie House on Saturday Afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi (1939). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-9058-C.

While Post Wolcott’s photograph concerns segregation explicitly, Schwarzenbach’s works by power of suggestion. Her image is invested in exposing the man’s lack of visibility, where light distinguishes the readable posters and signage from his body. As suggested by her “Seeing is Believing” photograph, lighting as a commodity symbolized the comfortable classes in society, those who could afford electricity and lamps, and were admitted to the projected light of movies without restriction. As a source of illumination, light defined what was representable. It might be said that light and lighting thematize Schwarzenbach’s broader interest in illuminating societal problems and rendering visible communities that were often left in the dark. Yet, as I have discussed, a crucial aspect of her photographic vision was that it was not always open and clear but often partial and fraught with obscurities that the viewer must slowly discern. As a medium uniquely sensitive to modulations of light, photography provided the ideal language to address Schwarzenbach’s concerns with representing those who were underrepresented in the visual culture of the time.

The gulf between light and dark seen in Schwarzenbach’s two Southern photographs also pervades her essay, “Auf der Schattenseite von Knoxville,” published in Basel’s National-Zeitung in December 1937. As she describes readjusting her vision to varying levels of brightness, Schwarzenbach shuttles between the city’s “grell erleuchteten Mainstreet und dunklen Quartieren, wo die Arbeiter der Trikotagefarbriken in dürftigster Weise leben müssen” (Schwarzenbach, Jenseits 81).¹⁴ She was particularly struck by the paradox of the Norris Dam’s proximity to Knoxville. For her, the newly constructed dam was a Symbol des Fortschritts über dem schlafenden Tal [...]. Aber während hier Tag und Nacht zwei riesige Generatoren Elektrizität erzeugen und gleichsam das ganze Leben dieses Landstrichs erneuern, während die Schaufenster der TVA jedem Beschauer verständlich machen, was planvoller und intelligenter Wille im Kampf gegen Armut und Rückständigkeit zu erreichen vermögen – während so eine neue Vision des besseren Lebens geboren wird, braucht man in Knoxville nicht weit zu gehen, um die Schattenseite zu finden. Es wirkt wie bittere Ironie, dass hier, dreissig Meilen vom Norris-Damm entfernt, ganze Quartiere weder mit elektrischem Licht noch mit laufendem Wasser versorgt sind. Ein Kranz von solchen dunklen Quartieren schliesst sich um Knoxville wie um jede andere Industriestadt im Süden. (Jenseits 83)¹⁵

The association of light with progress and dark with exclusion and backwardness shapes many of Schwarzenbach’s photographs from the South. Her interest in wresting figures from the shadows, in singling them out as worthy of attention, visually highlights the thrust of her verbal arguments—that they are caught in a system that does not make room for them to exist, let alone thrive. At the same time, the shadows serve a protective function in maintaining the figures’ unknowability and right to privacy. Needless to say, equating light with advancement and darkness with a lack of civilization perpetuates major tropes of colonialist thinking. Yet, complicating the standard dynamics of a Eurocentric gaze, Schwarzenbach’s photographs simultaneously posit darkness and the perceptual instability created by shadows as spaces inviting close looking while denying easy assimilation within a universalizing worldview.

Schwarzenbach’s attention to the margins of visibility—the perimeters and peripheries of the perceptible and representable— permeates her American photographs. Relative to many FSA photographers, Schwarzenbach veered even more towards mystery and ambiguity in exploring shades of gray. In some ways, her poetic insight prefigures her compatriot, the Swiss American photographer Robert Frank, whose watershed photo-book The Americans (1959) presented an unsparing look at racial and psychological alienation in the U.S. some twenty years later.

In exposing racial dynamics in the South, Schwarzenbach shared in the FSA file’s foundational belief: that representation forms an integral part of a thriving democracy. Looking to photographers like Shahn, who foregrounded the Black experience, she used FSA images to emphasize the systemic challenges facing New Dealers. In her own photographs and writing, she pushed the boundaries of what was representable by exploring the shadows and highlighting mass culture’s margins. For her, true representation involved picturing its limits and acknowledging the inextricable difficulty of understanding and portraying another.