Other absences expose sensibilities and agendas of the time. Several scholars have studied the FSA photographers and photographs, using the available records, such as Roy Stryker’s instructions to the photographers. Their work was always harnessed to national narratives, in which the local and particular lifted off of its specificity and became exemplary of some universal. This was the era of modernism, both “high” and “low.”

Scott, in his influential book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, analyzes what he terms "high modernism." High modernists, he claims, placed their confidence in a science-based progress, believing that the rational design of society and nature would allow virtually unlimited satisfaction of human needs. This ideology, when harnessed to a state apparatus, Scott observed, centralized power in ways that was fundamentally anti-democratic and insensitive to local variability.

Jess Gilbert, in "Low Modernism and the Agrarian New Deal," argued that, in contrast to New Deal leaders like Rex Tugwell, the founder of the Resettlement Administration, who could be termed a "high modernist," other U.S. Department of Agriculture leaders were "low modernists" -- people who sought to build local knowledge into state procedures, and who retained a skepticism about the efficacy of science as a solution to all human problems.

Anyone who has worked with local photo collections knows that people devote enormous care to naming everyone possible. The gap between this sensibility – of remembering one’s friends and neighbors, and the documentary photographer’s desire to capture an exemplary moment – reveals the disconnect between the FSA photographers’ cosmopolitan view of their subjects and the subjective reality of those they photographed. That critique has been made over and over, and we do not need to repeat it here.

We are more concerned, in our research, to unpack the social data available inside the photographs, particularly in reference to the dynamics of class and race. Our research has shown us that the experience of the white sharecroppers who were given opportunity by the FSA projects varied greatly from that of Mr. Partee and his fellow white supremacists, as well as from the cosmopolitan intellectuals who, in the 1930s, were animated by a romance of “the people,” of whom mostly white tenant farmers were one important subset.