About the Book:During the 1930s, the world of photography was unsettled, exciting, and boisterous. John Raeburn’s A Staggering Revolution recreates the energy of the era by surveying photography’s rich variety of innovation, exploring the aesthetic and cultural achievements of its leading figures, and mapping the paths their pictures blazed public’s imagination. While other studies of thirties photography have concentrated on the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), no previous book has considered it alongside so many of the decade’s other important photographic projects. A Staggering Revolution includes individual chapters on Edward Steichen’s celebrity portraiture; Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York project; the Photo League’s ethnography of Harlem; and Edward Weston’s western landscapes, made under the auspices of the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer. It also examines Margaret Bourke-White’s industrial and documentary pictures, the collective undertakings by California’s Group f.64, and the fashion magazine specialists, as well as the activities of the FSA and the Photo League.Table of Contents: Preface ix Acknowledgments xv A Calendar of Thirties Photography xvii 1. The Rebirth of Photography in the Thirties 1 2. Disestablishing Stieglitz 19 3. Group f.64 and the Problem of California Photography 30 4. An Eastern Beachhead 48 5. Edward Steichen and Celebrity Photography 61 6. MoMA’s “Big Top” Show 80 7. Camera Periodicals and the Popular Audience 93 8. Culture Morphology in Berenice Abbott’s New York 114 9. Farm Security Administration Photography and the Dilemmas of Art 143 10. Farm Security Administration Photography in the Aura of Art 162 11. The Nation’s Newsstands 194 12. The Photo League, Lewis Hine, and the Harlem Document 219 13. Seeing California with Edward Weston 246 14. Photography at High Tide 276 Afterword: “The Cultural Establishment of Photography” 293 Notes 303 Index 361 Photographs follow page 302