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David McLellan

Does Her Face Foretell Her Fate? | Walker Evans, Lucille Burroughs, Daughter of a Cotto... - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3467004575574162690573540.html

#class #documentary #history #daughter

shared by David McLellan on 04 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Walker Evans's "Lucille Burroughs, Daughter of a Cotton Sharecropper. Hale County, Alabama" (1936).
  • Evans's portrait of Lucille is elegant in its simplicity. She is shown from the shoulders up, her face framed by a straw hat, standing against the wooden planking of one of the outbuildings of the farm the Burroughs family worked as tenants. There is nothing superfluous, and the 8-by-10 negative of Evans's view camera captures the textures of the included elements with great specificity. The rust bleeding from the nails in the untreated wood is a clue to the family's economic condition, but poverty is not evident elsewhere in the picture.
  • But it is Lucille Burroughs's face, the center of the image, that holds our attention. Our face-recognition apparatus sees she is young, white, of apparent Anglo-Saxon heritage, and although her features are regular, and even attractive, there is something in her face—in the picture of her face—that lets us know she was not born to wealth. More difficult than culling that sociological information is trying to suss out her expression. Her eyes are focused intently on Evans, the photographer who commands the black box with its bellows and dials and its one great all-seeing eye, a city man, a New Yorker, who came to their farm looking for what?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In "And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,'" Dale Maharidge traces the later histories of the sharecropper families in Agee and Evans's book. Lucille Burroughs was married when she was 15. She divorced, married again and had four children. Her husband died young. She never became a teacher or a nurse, as she once dreamed, but picked cotton and then waited tables. She was poor. In 1971, at age 45, she committed suicide by drinking rat poison. You go back to look again at the picture of the 10-year-old, to see if any of that awful story was foretold, to see if there wasn't a way to make it come out better.
  • David McLellan on 04 Oct 13
     
    Here is the portrait of the Lucille Burroughs, daughter of Allie Mae Burroughs, taken by Walker Evans.  This gives a little more information into the lives and struggles and eventual history of the Burroughs family who were depression era share croppers in Hale county Alabama.  
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