Surviving Under These Circumstances

A major theme in Walker Evans’s work, especially in the FSA series of photographs of the sharecropper families in Alabama during the Great Depression, was the human capability to make the best the things under the circumstances which cannot be controlled. For example, as Baldwin Lee pointed out during his lecture at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, one can see this theme when similar photographs are placed side by side. Lee compared Evans’s photograph of a rich person’s mantle in their living room with one of a less-privileged person’s mantle. Seeing these two side by side may not have been intended originally by Walker Evans when he first made these photographs, but it is definitely no accident that they are both taken from the same angle and have a very similar composition.

Lee also spent some time talking about Evans’s photograph of the silverware nailed to the wall of one of the families in the FSA series of sharecropper families in the Great Depression south. To be honest, I personally did not see much meaning or significance in this photograph before Lee started explaining it during his talk. This image of silverware nailed to the wall is symbolic of this theme of people making the best out of their circumstances. This family did not have enough money to afford a cabinet to put their dinnerware in or for more silverware if any of it got lost. Even though this photograph, at first, only seemed to be a still-life of forks and spoons on a bare wooden wall, Lee’s insight into what Walker Evans wanted his audience to see inspired me to look further into these photographs for evidence of this underlying theme. This family may be struggling to survive, but they do what they can to get by. Evans wanted to do all he could to capture this idea.

-Paula Hagen