‘Malign Living Structures’: Functions of the Survey Image in “Soil Erosion – A National Menace” (1934)
This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies The land survey photograph, as represented by the first two pictures here, is a category of image that circulated widely in scientific journals and official publications during the 1930s. Severe droughts and dust storms between 1934 and 1936 culminated in what has been described as the worst drought in American history and the designation of 1,194 counties as emergency drought areas by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. [i] Pictures were included, for example, in the article, ‘Soil Erosion – A National Menace’ (1934), prepared by Hugh Hammond Bennett as chief of the Soil Erosion Service in the United States Department of the Interior and published in The Scientific Monthly. [ii] These were campaigning photographs, included for their ability to function as warnings—to shock audiences into recognising the scale of land degradation in a rural […]