Small Budget, Big Issues
Survey Graphic had a smaller circulation and a smaller budget than its mainstream contemporaries. These included:
Survey Graphic's audience consisted of middle-class professionals
who had an interest in social welfare issues and, in many cases, the
power to make decisions that could influence American lives. 
As a nonprofit publication, its chief goal was to educate these citizens
so that they could make more informed decisions.
addition to commissioning photographs from longtime associate Lewis
Hine and historian/illustrator Hendrik Willem Van Loon, the editors
obtained photographs from wire photo services such as Ewing Galloway,
Black Star, Keystone, and International News. The magazine was also
a vehicle for publicizing the federal government's Farm Security Administration
(FSA) photographs and the mural paintings of the Federal Art Project.
Photography was another form of documentary expression controversial, but nonetheless, effective in presenting different perspectives on life in the 1930s.
Writing in Photo Notes in January
1939, art critic Elizabeth McCausland explained the power of documentary
photography, which came into prominence in the 1930s:
By virtue of this new spirit of realism, photography looks now at the external world with new eyes, the eyes of scientific, uncompromising honesty. The camera eye does not lie, is lightly said. On the contrary, the camera eye usually does nothing but lie, rationalizing the wrinkles of an aging face, obligingly overlooking peeling paint and rotting wood. But the external world is those facts of decay and change, of social retrogression and injusticeas well as the wide miles of America and its vast mountain ranges. The external world, we may add, is the world of human beings; and, whether we see their faces or the works of their hands and the consequences, tragic or otherwise, of their social institutions, we look at the world with a new orientation, more concerned with what is outside than with the inner ebb and flow of consciousness. 
Photographs, then as now, reflected the ideologies of the photographers who took them and the clients who commissioned the work. As historian Lawrence Levine has pointed out, photographs of Depression-era culture revealed both external and internal realities, "not only appearances but also beliefs." 
The editors of Survey Graphic
understood that documentary photographs could support their articles
on America's hardships during the Depression by providing "evidence"
to their readers that the conditions they discussed did exist.
Survey Graphic, the two media complemented each other in articles
such as Paul Taylor's "Again the Covered Wagon" (July
1935), which combined migrant family interviews with photographs
by Dorothea Lange, and Gertrude Springer's "Men off the Road"
1934), which told the story of men working in relief camps using
portraits from Lewis Hine.