Mostly what you have are glimpses of ordinary and apparently not unbearable life: farms and farmers; families at home or out strolling; high school students chatting on a downtown sidewalk in Amsterdam, N.Y.; migrant workers and factory workers, none seeming obviously dehumanized by their jobs; commuters on trains and at Grand Central Terminal; new flat-roofed cinder-block homes in a New Jersey housing development; and worker housing in older company towns. If you had only these photographs and no wall text or labels to go by, you might not realize that they were images of a nation in crisis.
Many of the photographs are accompanied by labels with information copied from notes written on the backs of the pictures. It adds meaning to know that this farmer has suffered a catastrophic flood, or that that powerfully handsome man is "Mr. Miller — minister and only Negro farmer in the submarginal area of Rumsey Hill, N.Y.," or that the young woman on a sofa reading the newspaper to her young daughter is about to be relocated.
Still, whatever additional information may be provided, the photographs have in general a curiously distant, meditative mood. They are magnetically absorbing to look at, but more for the curiosity and nostalgia they make you feel than for any social urgency. The greatest historical resonance is in the appearance of things: how people once dressed, combed their hair and carried themselves; what cars, stores and neighborhoods looked like. The images are at once utterly specific and hauntingly otherworldly.
| Continue "Images From the New Deal, Full of Hardship and Hope," Ken Johnson's New York Times review of the New York Public Libary exhibition "Depression-Era Prints and Photographs From the W.P.A. and F.S.A."
posted in articles on January 10, 2004 1:16 AM | t (0)
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