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British Association for American Studies

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Samuel Hawksford-White

Samuel Hawksford White is a postgraduate researcher at the Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull. Previously, he studied planning at Oxford Brookes University and architectural history at the University of Cambridge, and recently participated in an international conference on earthquake reconstruction in the Marche, Italy (Living with Earthquakes, UNIVPM). His interdisciplinary research has been focused on the built environment, landscape, and the history of photography, particularly in the twentieth-century United States. His current project on flooding and drought in New Deal photography and nonfiction film is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

‘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 […]