Photography began acquiring documentary authority in the nineteenth century, when the daguerreotype first appeared. Later, as equipment improved, it began to assert itself as an art form that tied artistic fidelity to passivity. Later still, having joined forces with literary realism and naturalism, it reinforced aesthetic doctrines of direct presentation and authorial impersonality. During the thirties, it allied itself with history, as a recording instrument, and to a lesser extent with sociology, as an analytic tool. Large-scale efforts, including several funded by such government agencies as the Farm Security Administration, were launched to create photographic records of faces and scenes. In a related move, with the example of the camera in mind, writers began using words to record and preserve objects, faces, and scenes. Like Asch’s The Road (1937), Louis Adamic’s My America (1938) reports without photographs, but the recording instinct of the social reporter informs his work, and so does the example of the camera. In books like Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties (1939), Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), and Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), words and photographs comment on one another. In each of these books, however, the text tends to become subordinate to the photographs, as MacLeish acknowledged by saying that, having begun as “a book of poems illustrated by photographs,” his project had become “a book of photographs illustrated by a poem.”