The federal test: the Farm Security Administration did not photograph this city

1935–1943 — a searched negative, printed whole

The test and its answer: The Farm Security Administration's photographic unit — Roy Stryker's shop, with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee and their colleagues — made the canonical picture of Depression America, and whether it pictured South Bend is a question this section was set to answer from the record. The answer is no, at the strength of the unit's Indiana record as the state's own study guide states it. Farm Security Administration Photographs in Indiana: Study Guide and Curriculum Materials, published through IUPUI ScholarWorks from the Indiana collection, states that "the only city in Indiana photographed was Indianapolis," naming Fort Wayne, Gary, South Bend and Evansville as the state's other cities of roughly 100,000 people that received no city coverage; the unit's Indiana work was the farms and small towns — the resettlement communities and the agricultural counties. The companion volume, John A. Reid, ed., Back Home Again: Indiana in the Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935–1943 (Indiana University Press, 1987), carries the same geography. So South Bend has no Stryker file number, no Lange or Lee frame; its Depression and mobilization were pictured by the LIFE photographers of the preceding entry, by the companies, and by its own newspaper — and the absence is itself a fact of the city's visual history, stated here so that no later account supplies a federal coverage that never happened.

Sources:

1. Farm Security Administration Photographs in Indiana: Study Guide and Curriculum Materials (IUPUI ScholarWorks) — "The only city in Indiana photographed was Indianapolis," with Fort Wayne, Gary, South Bend and Evansville named as the other ~100,000-population cities not given city coverage; the unit's Indiana subjects were farms and small towns.
2. John A. Reid, ed., Back Home Again: Indiana in the Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935–1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) — the published Indiana selection, of the same geography.