Although Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers aimed to fulfill the project’s goal of creating a documentary record of American life for posterity, their primary task remained publicizing the successes of the FSA’s programs. Here too, photographers featured quilts in their compositions to support the FSA’s public relations campaign.

Two separate visits by FSA photographers to Gee’s Bend, Alabama—from April 1937 and May 1939—serve as a before/after FSA intervention series. Now one of the most famous quiltmaking communities in the United States, Gee’s Bend first received national public attention during the New Deal.

In 1935 the Resettlement Administration (RA) began providing agricultural loans and home economics training to this isolated community, tucked in the bend of a river and nearly inaccessible due to an unreliable ferry. When in 1937 Congress was considering new farm tenant legislation, the FSA sent Arthur Rothstein in search of a tenant farmer community to document, in order to show the harsh conditions of tenancy. Compelling photographs would demonstrate the need to legislators and the general public. At that point the RA (soon to be FSA) had purchased the Pettway plantation and two adjacent parcels, comprising around 10,000 acres, and was preparing to divide the land into five-acre parcels with houses and outbuildings to be sold with low interest loans with adjacent 95-acre fields leased to 100 Gee’s Bend families. The goal was to end the tenancy cycle and create small self-sufficient farms.

In May 1939, just over two years after Rothstein took his series of photographs in Gee’s Bend, Stryker sent Marion Post Wolcott back on assignment to take “after” photographs documenting the changes the FSA funding had brought to the community.