As a realist form, documentary photography needs to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism. The FSA photographs were able to bring a force to bear on their contemporary audiences because of the realist purchase that documentary has as a genre, and because they were produced in the 1930s, when visual media had a particularly powerful cultural currency.

Like other realist forms, documentary functions through the myth of objectivity. Documentary photographs appear to be self-generated and unmediated; the conceit is that they allow real conditions to speak for themselves. The photographer is usually absent from the field of the image, and we are in his or her place, left to imagine that we would process the scene before us in exactly such a way if we were actually there ourselves. Photohistorian Abigail Solomon-Godeau argues in Photography at the Dock that the apparatus of photography confirms this effect:

this structural congruence of point of view (the eye of the photographer, the eye of the camera, and the spectator's eye) confers on the photograph a quality of pure, but delusory, presentness... the image in a photograph appears to be in it, inseparable from its ground; conceptually, you cannot lift the image from its material base. (180)

The mechanics of photography help photographic images to seem "pure" and "transparent." This effect thus protects documentary photography, to some degree, from what would be a customary interrogation. Some scholars argue that what is perceived as realism at any particular historical moment is by necessity that which confirms the epistemological and ideological sentiment of the time. In this sense, the realism documentary conveys through its mechanics, rhetoric and subject matter gives the genre a powerful persuasive capacity.

To point out the ways that ideas work subtly through the medium of documentary is not to foreclose the possibility that such photographs have many productive truths to share with us as historical documents. Such a critique should invite creative ways of reimagining the method or the various mediations involved in documentary photography so as to open up richer interpretations. FSA historian Nicholas Natanson points out that "as visual texts, as 'readable' documents, photographs are both supremely compelling and supremely slippery- emerging as odd syntheses of what has been captured by intention (the photographer's, often mixed with the subject's) and what has developed through serendipity, or through 'subliminal vision,' as photo-historian Richard Whelan calls it" (7). This vision of the process of documentary photography touches upon the degree of complicated and problematic collaboration going on between photographer and subject and emphasizes the subtle ways documentary can manipulate its viewers without making the leap to the determinist position that all documentary images emerge from a program of fixed ideology.

The FSA photographs have also to be placed as visual media in their historical context: the 1930s, a time when the printed word had ceased to hold the same persuasive force for Americans and the visual image came into its dominancy (Stott, Susman). Analysts of consumer trends suggest that during this period of great economic decline, when expensive hobbies must have seemed like frivolous impossibilities, more and more Americans took up photography (Daniel et al viii). Photo magazines grew into staggering popularity in the 1930s; Life, started by Henry Luce in 1936, was followed by Look, Click, Focus, Foto, Photo, Picture and See. "In 1939 Life boasted it was 'the greatest success in publishing history' and attributed its appeal to its 'new picture-and-word editorial technique' which 'makes the truth about the world we live in infinitely more exciting, more easily absorbed, more alive than it ever has been made before'" (Stott 130).

All in all, the nature of cultural communication changed during the 1930s, and the FSA photographs took an ascendant place in the new order. The terms of persuasion had changed, and as a cultural program wedded to a political platform, the FSA had in its methods of communication and public relations a powerful ideological tool. As Warren Susman says of the 1930s, "the shift to a culture of sight and sound was of profound importance; it increased our self-awareness as a culture; it helped create unity of response and action not previously possible; it made us more susceptible than ever to those who would mold culture and thought" (Culture as History 159-160).