With a 8x10 view camera in hand Walker Evans traveled to the South as part of the Farm Security Administration to document the conditions that the farms and the families were in during the great depression. During this trip to the South Evans took pictures and spent six weeks as guests with three sharecropper families in their homes. As Baldwin Lee stated in his lecture talk, it was “pretty remarkable for a photographer to get this kind of access” and for a family to just open up to him like they did and let him photograph him. “He really had to show that he was a trustworthy person,” Lee expressed.
I thought that those statements were very interesting. I believe that you would get a very different feeling from a portrait photograph of someone that trust you than of someone that you do not trust, and also you are going to get a different type of picture from someone that you just met and someone that you have known for a while.
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| Mr. Bud Field's Home- Walker Evans |
Walker Evans believed in the idea of taking pictures that showed ideas. Pictures such as Mr. Bud Field’s Home. There is a cotton pile on the porch of the house, and under it there are three cotton balls. These three cotton piles are essential to the picture Baldwin Lee expressed in his Lecture on November 12. He stated that Evans was focused on you seeing theses cotton balls in the picture, and was relying on your previous knowledge of the family to know why the cotton was so important to the picture. Thus the cotton represented more than just cotton. It represented their means of living and income. It was all they knew it was what they had to do in order to have the little amount of money that they had.
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| Floyd Burroughs - Walker Evans |
In the Image of Floyd Burroughs it is evident of the great detail that is present in Walker Evans photographs. Every little hair and miniscule detail is present and it is amazing how he got such great detail with an older process of camera than we use now.
This image has stuck with me ever since I went and saw “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” in the gallery at the UWEC campus. Floyd Burroughs shows a stark and serious but sincere face at the same time. His clothes are torn and are worn out being only made out of old flour sacks. It looks like he wonders if it will ever get better.
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| Homless Mike - Leroy Skalstad |
I think that Evan’s photographs from the 1930’s are similar to photographs of the poor today. Pictures of homeless people today show similar emotions as the ones shown in the portraits of Evan’s, and evoke the same kind of feelings when one looks at them. The photographer Leroy Skalstad is a current photographer that takes pictures of the homeless. This picture of Homeless Mike reminds me in some ways of Walker Evan’s picture of Floyd Burroughs. They both have the same kind of worried and saddened expression on their face and both are dealing with the same hardship in life of being poor.
Sources
-Kelly Farrar
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