If we wish to examine what images Stryker thought ultimately worthy of keeping, we must also consider the question of what images he thought were worth taking in the first place. Groups like Latinos and Native Americans, for instance, are underrepresented in the File. In a 1937 letter to Lange while she was on assignment photographing tenant farmers in Texas, Stryker advised her to “take both black and white, but place the emphasis on the white tenants, since we know that these will receive much wider use”. That latter part was indeed borne out by the fact that exhibitions and newspapers more readily selected white images from the File than non-white. More broadly, the FSA’s focus on the madonna, the stoic striver, elevated a certain class of “deserving poor” above those who were beyond the bounds both of being photographed and receiving material aid. For the government, of course, these two things were tightly interwoven: the purpose of the FSA’s photography program, after all, was to drum up support for the New Deal among an American public that had long viewed poverty as a moral stain. In the course of resettling white tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta, the FSA forcibly uprooted Black families throughout the region — families whose suffering, it appears, did not rate high enough to make it into the File. When I viewed Stryker’s negatives together, they seemed to be posing questions not just about the work of the FSA but about the future of the country they sought to document: both “who should get a farm loan?” and “who cuts a heroic enough figure to advertise them?” Not only “whose grief do we recognize?”, but also “whose grief is deserving of succor?” Who will be kept and who will be killed? Who will survive in America — and what image of this land will these survivors bear into the future?