Great Depression and Photography

¶ … Great Depression, Walker Evans worked primarily as a photojournalist and documentarian, using the medium of photography to capture American life in visual detail. Many of Evans's most famous photographs appear in his book, co-written with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book was in part funded by grants issued by New Deal programs the Roosevelt administration designed to address systemic poverty. Photojournalism was integral to achieving the goals of the New Deal, which is why Evans and Agee were able to compile their historiography. In the photo of Allie Mae Burroughs, Evans depicts the primary purpose of his research: to offer proof of the effects of income disparity and economic exploitation. In 1981, Sherrie Levine reproduced several of Walker Evans's images, including that of Allie Mae Burroughs. Reproducing the photos transformed the original images, not necessarily in terms of its content or form, but in terms of its politics and semantics. The original photo situated the photographer as actor empowered by the state against the subject. Thus, Evans engaged in "othering," even if he intended to communicate the abject poverty of American sharecroppers. Levine redefines the role of photography, divorces the medium from the message, and opens the image up for ongoing discursive action.

In the photograph, Allie Mae Burroughs stands against what is most likely a barn building. The image is a true portrait, which captures the head and bust of the subject. Her dark hair is parted to one side and pulled back. Burroughs is thin; both her cheekbones and collarbones are visible. Her brow is noticeably furrowed, and likewise, her lips are pursed. With the pursed lips and frowning eyes, Burroughs appears tense, concerned, and possibly even angry. The shape of her lips also suggests that she may have lost most of her teeth. Even if the viewer of the image had no idea that it was taken in Alabama during the Great Depression, it would be apparent that this is a portrait of a poor woman. When the image is fully decontextualized as with the Levine reproduction, it does not entirely lose its documentary power because the content of the image does have a universal and timeless quality in that it conveys the human condition: including salient elements like poverty and oppression. Yet most viewers of Levine's work knew as much about the context and content of the photo as Evans's viewers knew about the content and context of his. For Levine, the image of an image becomes a commentary not just on poverty and oppression, but also on the potential for journalism to become an exploitative medium.

Levine creates a reflexive discourse with her work, using photography essentially to comment on itself as a medium. Photography is the tool that can show why photography is a powerful and potentially politically dangerous one, one that can denote systems of power between the observer and the observed. Evans possessed a tremendous amount of power over his subject, and Allie Mae Burroughs lacked this power. She simply exists as a token emblem of a generic "poverty" or the concept of "Great Depression." Moreover, Evans's career was clearly boosted by his work photographing the sharecroppers. Levine shows that by profiting off the poor, even if indirectly and with good intentions, Evans is somewhat complicit in the capitalist power schemes that gave rise to the Depression in the first place. It is not that Evans failed to achieve the ultimate political goal of documentary photography, for in fact the documentary evidence like that which Evans produced did raise awareness to a degree that could not have happened otherwise. Photography as documentation and forensics evidence can expose a reality in order to create meaningful social or political change.

Levine's work is no more or less meaningful than Evans; it is completely different. She views the role of photography from two different angles or lenses: one as the pure documentary capture and the other as the "order of simulacra," that generates the global consumer society, as Phillips (1982) puts it (p. 27). Evans captured his original subject in a straightforward way, reflecting only on the reality he perceives. As a photojournalist, he attempts to attain objectivity but fails because it is impossible for a portrait to completely omit the bias of the photographer. The fact that Evans compiled a book on the subject highlights the journalist's honest lack of objectivity in his work. Evans meant to make a statement with his photographs every bit as much as Levine does.

Levine reflects on the act of photography as a powerful interaction between the subject and the objectified, the object and the subjugated. This is the primary way that Levine distances herself from that which she imitates. Barthes (1977) would point out that Levine is engaging in a new form of encoding through her work; she is not creating a "simple agglutination of symbols," but rather something that has meaning in itself (p. 152).