Push Aside the Big Picture
It’s evening in Miami. A haunting, diffuse glow lingers over the treetops, contouring an old bus parked on a residential street. The door of the bus stands open and Mary Trody can be seen sitting inside, her own profile glowing from the light of her television screen. From a distance, Trody looks like a strangely proportioned, soft-sculpted doll. She’s wrapped in a white blanket, her feet together as if tucked into a single slipper, her hair bunched behind her in a frizzy ball. She is watching President Obama address Congress, or so the caption tells us.
When this photograph by Joe Raedel appeared in Time Magazine two weeks ago, the accompanying text explained that Trody and her family are living in the bus, which they’ve parked outside their foreclosed home. The image gives a grave face to today’s tangled financial crisis, yet the dispersed light and the quiet inertia that envelops the scene is weirdly tranquil.
Seventy-three years ago, Dorothea Lange photographed a thirty-two year old mother and her four children as they rested under a makeshift tent. In Lange’s image, the figures are shabbily dressed, maybe malnourished. The oldest of the children, an adolescent girl, leans languidly into a stout rocking chair—possibly one of the few possessions remaining from the family’s previous life. The girl stares into Lange’s camera unflinchingly but not expectantly. She, along with her mother and siblings, doesn’t look to Lange for anything other than acknowledgment. Like Raedel’s image of Mary Trody, this photograph exudes an uncanny serenity, commemorating the self-reliant dignity of a few down-and-out Americans.
The United States is in a strange spot right now, wanting badly to look forward but terrified that history is about to repeat itself. Lately, however, the recession-motivated photographs cropping up in dailies and weeklies, such as Patricia Pedraza’s documentation of immigrants living under a dilapidated porch or Anthony Suau’s pictures of browbeaten Cleveland, resonate with pictures of the migrations and soup kitchens of the Great Depression.
While we are understandably reluctant to tie today’s downturn to the century’s worst economic disaster to date—why jinx ourselves?—the convergences between images of now and images of then may actually empower us, showing that self-respect is really too stalwart to be killed by insolvency.
Last year, when Anthony Suau decided to photograph the recession, he opted for a restrained approach. Rather than render people in the throes of despair or anxiety, he captured what was much more relevant: the daily stoicism of people learning to live with uncertainty.
In the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the traders stand with arms crossed against their chests, witnessing as numerical tragedy takes place on the screens above them. The young man in the center of the room, dressed in slack white pants, a jacket, and gym shoes, is pensive. But, despite his pinched façade, he looks like a capsule of potential energy. At any moment, he could lithely jump back into the momentum that has been sucked from the room. But, for now, he’s waiting.
Images of waiting appeared again and again during the Depression, just like they’re appearing now. In one photograph of 1929’s Black Monday—the photographer’s identity has been lost to history—crowds of men, most wearing pork pie hast and suit coats, linger outside the New York Stock Exchange. There’s no chaos, no theatrics. Just an army of well-dressed bodies standing, waiting.
In his February 24th speech (the one Mary Trody was watching when Joe Raedel photographed her), President Obama declared, “History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas.” History’s images suggest something slightly different, however: at moments of upheaval and transformation, people have pulled inward, focusing on the daunting task of living.
“This is a long process,” said Dorothea Lange, of the disenfranchisement that she began documenting in the early 1930s. “It doesn’t happen overnight. Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.” And then, when they do realize that the crumbling has turned into collapse, what is there to do?
Another photograph by Suau shows the line outside a Cleveland food bank as seen through a car window. The queued up bodies don’t crowd each other. Amidst the lightly falling snow and against the brick and mortar, these Clevelanders seem to live in a world that has momentarily slowed down.
Antonin Kratochvil recently photographed Cory Clapsaddle near the Wasua paper mill to which Clapsaddle devoted a decade of his life. He’s now been laid off and the factory behind him looks lifeless. Yet the sun—it must be nearing dusk—glares brightly around Clapsaddle’s downcast, hairless head, illuminating the snow and asphalt on the ground. Clapsaddle’s small son, Damien, is on the fringes of the sunlight, looking in at his father trustingly, contentedly.
In Eloy, Arizona, probably mid-way through the 1930s, two boys help their mother fill a bucket with water (the water has been provided by the Farm Security Administration). The boys, especially the bigger one in the foreground, take their job seriously. Surviving has become a family affair.
“That is why the recovery we seek, the recovery we are winning, is more than economic,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at Madison Square Gardens in 1936. “In it are included justice and love and humility, not for ourselves as individuals alone, but for our Nation.”
“If we come together and lift this nation from the depths of this crisis; if we put our people back to work and restart the engine of our prosperity; if we confront without fear the challenges of our time and summon that enduring spirit of an America that does not quit,” said President Obama on February 24th, “then someday years from now our children can tell their children that this was the time when we performed, in the words that are carved into this very chamber, ‘something worthy to be remembered.’”
It is, of course, a president’s job to focus on the future of the nation, and we want him to focus with everything he has. But most of us concern ourselves first and foremost with being people. Thinking about nationalism and “that enduring spirit of America” when you’re turning in resumes at every business in sight tends to be unrealistic. Questions about how to respond to rejection, how to keep up momentum, how to budget at the grocery store, how to reassure your family, or how to fix the car take precedence.
The images by Raedel, Lange, Suau, Kratochvil and the many other photographers who have documented past and present economic crises, push the big picture aside for a moment. They focus on the problems of living and they honor those who grapple with such problems. Standing in lines, filling up buckets, waiting. All of these are worth remembering.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
