The Bessis Levee, along a subsidiary of the Mississippi River, near Tiptonville, Tennessee. The levee has been augmented with sand bags during the 1937 flood

The FSA (Farm Security Administration) is famous for its well known influential photography program that portrayed the challenges of rural poverty. Creating false perceptions of individuals (A prime example of situational manipulation), photographers were hired to report and document the plight of poor farmers. In 1935–44, eleven photographers would come to work on this project. They were: Arthur Rothstein, Theo Jung, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and John Collier. In total, the black-and-white portion of the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives.