Louise Boyle

Louise Boyle (February 17, 1910 – December 31, 2005) was an American photographer known for her images documenting the effects of the Great Depression on farm workers in the South, especially African Americans.

Life and career Boyle was born in 1910 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, one of two daughters of Effie L. Boyle and James E. Boyle. Her family moved to Ithaca, New York, when she was eight, and she would reside there for most of her adult life. She attended Ithaca High school and went on to graduate from Vassar College. In 1937 she was invited to photograph the life and work of Arkansas members of the SFTU, which had been organized three years earlier by struggling tenant farmers. Her photographs, shot with a Leica camera, document farmers and their families in the fields, at home, and at union meetings. Like the work of her contemporaries Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, her photographs unsparingly show the enormous difficulties faced by Southern farmers in this period, especially African Americans. At the same time, they record the strong communal spirit among Southern labor organizers and farmers. She also deeply studied and supported women's role in labor organizations. More than forty years later, Boyle returned to rephotograph some of the same people and places in 1982.

Publications Payne, Elizabeth Anne Payne, and Louise Boyle. "The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union." Southern Cultures 4:2 (1998), pp. 5–27.