Life of Luxury

We like to believe that we live in a life of luxury.  A life where we work about 8 hours a day, go home and not have a care in the world.  For the people of the great depression that is not something that they could do, they had to always be ready for anything.  Work was not something that they could easily forget, sure there were those few days where the work would be light or certain conditions were meet where they couldn’t go out and work.  But, those were also the days that they didn’t bring in any sort of income and the next day they had to go out and the work that they missed the day before.  They didn’t have the weekend off to relax and recuperate they worked all year long.

The time that we have off we take advantage of because we don’t have to perform such laborious tasks anymore.  We can easily call someone else to do something meaningless to us for a certain fee.  This even relates to our children.  When we have children we want them to have the best, and do great things in their lives things that we couldn’t do for one reason or another.

During the great depression era to keep children busy they had to use their imaginations.  Baldwin Lee said it the best about the picture of the silverware holder, “there is no Xbox or Playstation 360.  Someone in this household liked to play with forks, leaving someone else without a fork to eat with.”  When looking closely at the picture you can see that there are 5 or 6 spoons and 3 forks being held up there.  The next thing that should be noticed is the fact that there are 2 dark lines below the holder, showing that someone has been growing and continues to play with the forks.  Children grow up it’s a fact of life and realizing that these children were playing with forks instead of toys is a sad thought, but it is one that shows the struggles that these parents went through to provide for their children.

Works Cited

Casper, Jim. “Echoes of Walker Evans.” Lens Culture Weblog. N.p., 18 Feb. 2005. Web. 12 Nov. 2010. <http://www.lensculture.com/‌mt_files/‌archives/‌000034.html>.

Ross Austin