Seeing America

""I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer,"" retorted Berenice Abbott to a New Deal bureaucrat who, upon seeing her Bowery pictures, warned that nice girls avoid certain New York neighborhoods. The five American women photographers profiled in McEuen's biographical-critical sketches brought the independence, brashness, curiosity and feminist spirit exemplified by Abbott's remark to documentary photography, and in doing so, helped transform the genre--and, indirectly, the nation. In this vibrant and penetrating study, McEuen, a history professor at Kentucky's Transylvania University, shows how Doris Ulmann's romanticized composite portrait of a disappearing rural America challenged the pace of change in the rapidly industrializing 1920s. Dorothea Lange's 1930s' portraits of determined strikers and Dust Bowl refugees (made in the employ of New Deal agencies), were aimed toward getting them relief. Marion Post, another New Deal photographer, crisscrossed the country, from Vermont town meetings to Memphis juke joints, idealizing a panorama of Americans at work and play to promote collective action. Flamboyant advertising-photographer-turned-modernist Margaret Bourke-White's famous paeans to the machine age gave way to a sensational, unflattering book whose images of Southern poverty, racism and despair attempted to bolster the veracity of Tobacco Road (by husband Erskine Caldwell). Abbott's wondrous WPA survey of New York (now a touring exhibition) portrays a city in flux as the 19th century's buildings fell to the skyscrapers. Studded with 54 b&w photos, this clear, unstuffy inquiry opens a window on American culture between the world wars. (Dec.)