Çiftlik Güvenlik İdaresi’ni Eleştirel Teori ve Kültür Endüstrisi Kavramı Işığında Yeniden Düşünmek

The subject of this research is the photographic documentation work carried out by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which is defined as the largest documentary photography work in the history of the United States and is characterized as a pinnacle in documentary photography. Conducted between 1935 and 1943, this collective documentation work, referred to as the FSA for short, aimed to bring photographic visibility to the harsh conditions of agricultural workers, who were most affected by the Great Depression, drought and sandstorms, and to bring about social change by creating public opinion about the problems. Therefore, the documentary photography project carried out under the umbrella of the Farm Security Administration was also a project with ideological implications and consequences. The photographic medium, especially photographic approaches, which are characterized as "straight" and "documentary" and are assumed to represent the world in an "objective" and "direct" manner with a naturalistic understanding, are a product of Enlightenment thought and traditional theory, which are the foremost critical haunts of Frankfurt School theorists. Therefore, it can be easily argued that the FSA project, which is a documentary photography project documenting the negative effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s on rural areas, is a project that can be subjected to critical readings of Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Adorno and Horkheimer. For this reason, this research aims to understand and explore the political value of the photographic images produced by FSA photographers in the light of the concept of culture industry and critical theory developed by the Frankfurt School, and in order to achieve this goal, the semiotic method, one of the methods of image analysis, was used. Documentary photographs produced within the scope of the FSA project are signs that represent people, events and phenomena and convey their meanings to the receiver. Therefore, discovering the meanings hidden in the ...