Roger Hicks considers… ‘Distributing surplus commodities’, St. John’s, Ariz., October 1940, by Russell Lee
It’s a food bank. Well, not exactly. Close enough, though. From October 1933 onwards, during the Great Depression, ‘surplus commodities’ were bought by the US government from farmers who could not otherwise sell their goods; sometimes processed to a greater or lesser degree; then given away, or sold on at heavily subsidised prices, to the impoverished and to schools for school meals.
Admittedly they had tried another approach. In summer 1933 the government had paid farmers to plough crops back in, or let them rot in the fields, and to slaughter six million hogs and dispose of them other than for food. A public outcry forced them to consider the possibility that it might be a better idea to help the poor rather than to try to keep prices up via artificially induced scarcity. So they founded the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, ancestor of today’s Emergency Food Assistance Program.
Quite apart from the socialistic implications of such a government-run agency – very different from leaving food distribution to charity – this photograph is interesting for two reasons. One is for itself. The boxes of oranges are fresh and new; as they would have to be if they were not to go bad. Their freshness and the new-cut wood of the boxes somehow makes things more immediate: ‘then’ becomes ‘now’. The early morning light lends a sense of urgency too: be there early, or there may not be anything left. The seated man is riffling through what looks to be a box of filing cards, but may be food stamps. Who is he? To his right, men are standing, presumably awaiting their share. Who are they? What happened to their livelihoods? Then there is the lady to the right, looking suspiciously at the camera.
She leads us to the other reason to think hard about the picture. You can imagine the same expression on the face of a food bank user today in some grey warehouse. Or can you? How many photographers would have the nerve to take such a photograph? And what would be the risk of one of the people in front of the camera taking severe or possibly violent exception to being photographed? You could put this down to a commendable decline in deference, or to a rather less commendable decline in our collective grasp on reality. The question of the decline in mutual support – ‘there is no such thing as society’ – also warrants reflection.