the great depression
The Great Depression ushered America into an era of social consciousness and liberal reform. In the decade of the 1930's, under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, writers, artists, photographers, musicians, and performers were marshaled to create works which documented American life, sponsored by government programs such as the F.S.A. (Farm Security Administration) or the W.P.A. (Work Projects Administration). The Great Depression, in itself, had been a rude awakening from the escapism of the Roaring Twenties, so it was not surprising that realism would become the preferred style for creative artists. And what more realistic genre than the photograph? The 1930's and 1940's saw a golden age in photojournalism in America in which photographers such as Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White created visual corollaries to the writings of Erskine Caldwell (TOBACCO ROAD), John Steinbeck (THE GRAPES OF WRATH), and Archibald MacLeish (LAND OF THE FREE). Another highly respected photographer who had already been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before he joined the F.S.A. was Walker Evans, whose master images have been preserved in two published volumes. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, November 3, 1903,
At last we come to the heart of the exhibit: the squalor of the Fields family-Lily and Bud Fields and their three children, and the wrenching portrait of Katy Tingle. The picture of husband and wife confronts us: the coarse-featured Lily seated on the corner of the bed, holding the sleeping child, the much older Bud, scrawny and bare-chested, with his frowning mustaches, sitting on a chair at the bedfoot, arms folded, legs crossed at the knee; the couple joined compositionally by the barred parallelogram of the bedrail; the soiled ticking of the caseless pillow; the calico bandana carelessly draped around Bud's shoulders. All these details resolve themselves into the piercing gaze of the two pairs of eyes, staring down the lens of Evans's camera. Neither humble nor proud, neither miserable nor content, but with an invincible dignity, the couple addresses Evans with the simple request to "take us as we are." Evans himself possessed a contagious dignity, and no doubt he made the most of what they had. Our eyes are drawn to the bare feet. This photograph, and the companion frame of the same scene adding a prepubescent girl in a grimy smock, a naked toddler, and a wizened, suspicious grandmother, deliberately highlight the family's feet, dirty, calloused, scabbed. These tell the story of the farmer's cruel battle with the earth, with the elements, in an unforgiving time. Only grandmother is shod, in ruined brogans. If Evans had asked her to remove these, for symmetry, the guarded old lady surely would have refused, knowing herself already too much exposed. Finally we behold the pathetic, foreshortened figure and pleading eyes of Katy Tingle, the childlike old woman dressed in a homemade shift like a baby's gown clasped at the neck and breast with safety pins, unimaginably filthy and ragged, her bare feet on the earth the color of soil, as if she were growing out ofz the earth, or about to sink into it. The tenant farmer's series showed the industrial world with a crystal clear view exactly what was happening to these farmers. Everybody that saw these pictures was in a way changed or moved or awakened about the concurrent situation. This art and this series protruded pity, and promise to all of America, and Walker Evans will foreve
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1513
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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