The chapter opens with two dismissive telegrams from Roy Stryker, head of the Resettlement Administration's Historical Section, to photographer Cleo Allfrey. He rejects her latest batch of negatives as unusable and warns her that her photographs of interracial harmony in rural Nebraska, while moving, will antagonize Southern Democrats whose votes sustain the New Deal. He instructs her to focus her lens on White subjects.

Cleo, narrating, describes her growing disillusionment with Stryker. She admires him and is grateful for the job, but cannot abide his constraints. She recalls her first meeting in D.C., where Stryker insisted photographs be objective documentation, free of tricks or embellishments. She remembers her mother's discomfort with photography, viewing portraits as a kind of "misremembering" that severs people from their bodies.

Cleo recounts being belittled by a Fortune editor and watching Stryker hole-punch her best negative—a moonlit shot in Vollum—into the "Anti-File." She learned later he did this to all his photographers, but the wound felt personal. At an R.A. reception, Dorothea Lange privately advised her to give Stryker what he wanted while making the work she truly wanted to make.

Cleo reflects on the racial calculus underlying the project: White suffering galvanizes Congress and the public, while Black hardship is invisible. Stryker has rejected her photographs of Black farmworkers and a labor strike, calling the rejection "pragmatic," not artistic. Reading his latest telegram in a room above the Country Jentleman saloon, Cleo feels both fury and shame at disappointing him.

She compares herself to Arthur Rothstein, whose Fleeing a Dust Storm has been reproduced everywhere while none of her work has been published. She admires Rothstein and recognizes that his iconic image was clearly staged—posed for dramatic truth. When she said as much to Stryker, defending artful arrangement as a way of revealing invisible truths, he firmly rebuked her: no staging, no props, no gimmicks. The chapter closes with Cleo affirming her conviction that documentary photographers are artists who must sometimes rearrange reality to make the unseen visible.