'Victims Won’t Get Much': Photographing Relief Stations during the 1937 Ohio-Mississippi Flood Disaster

This paper examines the representation of conditions in temporary shelters during and after the height of the 1937 Ohio-Mississippi floods. The publicity efforts of the US government’s Resettlement Administration led to encounters between photographers and evacuees in highly managed and racialised spaces. Russell Lee visited an improvised hospital in the Methodist church at Sikeston, Missouri. Edwin Locke and Walker Evans made their way to eastern Arkansas, where they photographed racially segregated tent cities in Forrest City and Marianna. In the context of a martial law order hastily declared by Arkansas Governor Carl E. Bailey, National Guard militiamen were called upon to support the Red Cross in running facilities; sites where boundaries between assistance and confinement became unclear. My main task is to analyse how official photographers addressed the difficult brief of reporting from these locations. The discussion will introduce and frame several of the ethical and practical problems that they encountered, reflecting on implications for ongoing journalistic coverage of climate instability. Broadly, refugees faced invasive observation from two opposing angles: from news workers and relief workers. Many of the images I will discuss trace brief, uneven, interactions within a crisis response that was characterised by militarism and mistrust. Within the paradigm of the flood, its aftermath, and persistent rural poverty in the South, I will discuss the limitations of these images as evidence and reflect on the differential time-perspectives of photographers and their subjects during such emergencies.