Final Analysis
Roger Hicks considers… ‘Boys fishing in a bayou, Schriever, LA,’ 1940, by Marion Post
Some pictures jump out and grab you, and it takes a little while to understand why. Obviously the extremely dramatic lighting plays a large part here, but the straw hats, dungarees, bare feet and fishing pole are important, too. They are the stuff of a thousand saccharine pictures in which modern kids are dressed up as poverty-stricken urchins from the 1930s and 1940s, photographed in black & white, and then hand coloured. The photographs, that is, not the kids.
Now, I do not want to imply for a moment that the children were not enjoying themselves. I can remember only too well what it was like to be a very lightly supervised child myself, exploring Malta with my brother. It was great. But what are we really looking at here?
Well, first, obviously, at kids enjoying themselves. But also at rural poverty, or at something that was probably uncomfortably close to it. This is a Farm Security Administration (FSA) picture of Cajuns from Terrebonne: I keep going back to the wonderful US Library of Congress.
A rural idyll, or more?
We’re also looking at something technically very interesting: a contrasty scene, photographed with notoriously contrasty early Kodachrome, but partially tamed by an uncoated lens. With the help of Adobe Photoshop I found that the shadow under the hat of the figure on the left is not a black hole: you can, with difficulty and a lot of fill, just about see a face.
You don’t need to, though. We assume an enormous amount. For example, that there is a face there. That the pole is continuous, though we have to look hard to see that it is. We swallow the frankly improbable colours, though if you’ve ever seen Louisiana bayous you know that they do look pretty much like that. We accept, on relatively slender evidence, that the hats are straw. A great deal of what I ‘see’, at least, is based on reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (and looking at the pictures). But what did people see in 1940? A rural idyll, sure, but did they also see poverty, and a government at least trying to pull people out of it? Or could they not see past the colour?
In the end, it wasn’t so much the FSA that pulled the USA out of the Depression. It was more likely World War Two, when the wealth of the British Empire was poured into buying American weapons, and then into servicing a 1946 American loan that was not finally repaid until 2006. Whether we’re talking about content, context, technique or composition, we’re always on thin ice when we try to analyse yesterday’s pictures today. And the less we know, the thinner it is.
‘It wasn’t so much the FSA that pulled the USA out of the Depression. It was more likely World War Two’