In early December 1941, Jack Delano, sitting in the back seat of a "single-engine, cloth-covered biplane," landed at San Juan airport, in the United States Virgin Islands, ready to begin an assignment for the federal government's Farm Security Administration [FSA]. The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and the nation was at war. Everything was about to change; everybody knew it. Everything, that is, except the photos that Delano made during his 10 days in the islands. Despite the coming of war and despite the exotic location, they look just like the photos that he and other FSA photographers had been making on the mainland for past several years. As powerful, richly evocative, and beautiful as these documentary photographs undoubtedly are, there's little about them that's specific to their time and place. Not even the color film was new.
Jack Delano: Farm Security Administration borrower, vicinity of Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941. (All photos are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection, at the Library of Congress. Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)
Delano's assignment was two-fold. To make pictures that would accompany the governor's report to Congress and to document the efforts of the FSA to assist poor farmers. (The United States had purchased the Virgin Islands, a former Danish possession, in 1917.) It was the sort of thing that the agency had been doing ever since it was created in 1935.
The FSA photographers understood that a large part of their job was to create images that would build popular support for the agency's work. That required, among other things, getting the public to identify, to some degree, with the people it was helping. Not surprisingly, the photographers made many portraits. (Dorothea Lange's are the best known.)
Jack Delano: Farm Security Administration borrower, vicinity of Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941.
Kodachrome color slide film (which was introduced in 1935 and has only recently been discontinued) had been part of the FSA photographers' tool kit for about three years. The new film had done little to change the photographers' styles. Delano's color photos, for instance, often look like hand-tinted versions of those the he made (in far greater numbers) in black and white.
Jack Delano: Farm Security Administration borrower cultivating his sugar cane field, vicinity of Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He lives in one of the homestead houses. 1941. (This seems to be the man in the first photo.)
Color or black and white, images of back-breaking labor were a standard part of the FSA repertoire.
Jack Delano: Cultivating sugar cane on the Virgin Islands Company land, vicinity of Bethlehem, Saint Croix. 1941.
Photos of people, usually African-Americans and usually in the South, doing field labor in gangs are well represented in the FSA archive. Here in the Virgin Islands, the crop may have been sugar, rather than cotton, but the resemblance to the South is more than coincidental.
Jack Delano: Ruins of an old sugar mill and plantation house, vicinity of Christiansted, Saint Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941.
The Virgin Islands, like the American South, had been a society that was based on the labor of African slaves and their descendants. Sugar was king, and slaves generated great wealth for their Danish masters. When slavery ended, in 1859, the slaves received nothing but freedom, just as in the US. Without access to land and without compensation for their years of unpaid labor -- that is, without the means to become truly free and independent -- most found themselves forced to go back to work for former slave owners. As sharecroppers and labor tenants, they found themselves trapped in cycles of poverty.
Jack Delano: The main shopping street, Christiansted, Saint Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941.
Sugar and cattle were the economic base in the coutryside. The cities depended on tourism and their role as ports.
Street scenes and cityscapes show up frequently in the FSA photographic collection. It was natural for Delano to make a few in the islands.
Jack Delano: One of the steep hillside streets, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas Virgin Islands. 1941.
Sometimes the urban landscapes documented social conditions. At other times, as in these photos of Christiansted and Charlotte Amalie, they served more as establishing shots.
Jack Delano: The old fort built by the French, Frederiksted, Saint Croix island, Virgin Islands. 1941.
Color was incidental to Delano's vision, and that's really no surprise. He had come of age as a photographer in a black and white world, and, throughout his life, as a photographer, film maker, and TV producer, that's where he remained. (The great majority of the photos that he made in the islands were black and white.) Even for photographers who, unlike Delano, were committed to the new medium, there was a steep learning curve.
It's also not surprising that his photos from the Virgin Islands look so much like those that he made in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or, for that matter, Puerto Rico. He had a job to do and only 10 days to get it done. There was no time to capture those things that were unique to the islands.
None of this keeps these photos from being a fascinating footnote in the history of the FSA. Delano was the only FSA photographer to visit the Virgin Islands, and, luckily enough, some of the film he brought along was color.
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The color photos in the FSA collection (about 1,600 out of a total of 165,000) have received a considerable amount of attention. In 2006, The Library of Congress produced Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943, a major exhibition, and published a book by the same name.
Delano talks about his stay in the Virgin Islands in his wonderful memoir, Photographic Memories (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). It's out-of-print, but any good used bookseller will be able to easily find an inexpensive copy for you.