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Joanna Ng

Walker Evans in His Own Words - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

#class #insight #documentary

shared by Joanna Ng on 04 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Joanna Ng on 04 Oct 13
     
    A real treat, this YouTube video is a peek into the mind of Walker Evans and his photography during the 1930s. He speaks of his work, his journey, and hearing it come from his point of view and voice makes a huge impression.
Jacqueline Alley

Dorothea Lange - 0 views

www.theartstory.org/artist-lange-dorothea.htm

#class #GreatDepression #documentary photography #immgrants

shared by Jacqueline Alley on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Jacqueline Alley on 07 Oct 13
     
    Dorothea Lange was another photographer during the Great Depression. Her images were focused on sharecroppers, migrant workers, and displaced farmers. She shows the plight of the lower class. Dorothea Lange's most famous for her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. She was a 32yr old mother who sold everything she owned to take care of her children, eating birds and frozen vegetables. Her collection is viewable on the right side gallery. She was able to document the hardships the lower class endured through her photographs.
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.  
David McLellan

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - 0 views

xroads.virginia.edu/...letus.html

#class #austerity #poverty #documentary

shared by David McLellan on 04 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • "Evans believed his photographs were self-explanatory; the presence of words implied that the image was somehow deficient." Keeping the images separate from Agee's text brought more recognition to the images themselves, and it was a total break from the trends of photo-journalism, which used images to illustrate text. The images are quintessential of Evans' "documentary style"; Evans' dis-interested approach to these families resulted in portraying them with dignity and strength, although they lived in complete poverty. He sought to show the beauty of order and respectability within such an impoverished condition.
  • David McLellan on 04 Oct 13
     
    The famous Depression Era photographs and portraits of Walker Evans were originally rejected by Fortune but later published in a short book titled 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'.  In Evans' photographs, especially his portraits, he attempted to portray a sense of dignity regardless of social or economic class.  His images were so strong that he refused to provide captions for his images, rather he preferred the images to speak for themselves.
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