Depression Era Rural Family Photos
August 4, 2007
Shorpy constantly has interesting photos, but the recent pictures of a rural Depression era family are quite moving. The one linked from the thumbnail below really caught my attention, not least due to the strange trick of light and wood that made me think the young boy on the right was wearing glasses. It was so incongruous and yet at the same time made me realize that these people from a different time were no different from us. I am constantly guilty of seeing pictures from even 50 years ago and subconsciously imagining the people pictured as being as different from me and my children as aliens from some indescribable planet…
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history, Photography
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August 4th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
This image reminds me of th depression era photography of Walker Evans (here is another classic by him -link). If you are interested in this period, James Agee and Walker Evans collaborated on a phenomenal book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men -wherein the two documented the rural South during the depression -a Masterpiece -particularly Agee’s introduction. Well worth a read if you haven’t already. Many of Evans’s images of the Depression are integrated into Agee’s textual accounts -a nice documentary mashup of textual and visual representations.