Great Depression Photographers

There was a lot of photography taken during the Great Depression and many of these iconic images have lasted as continuing representations of Amercan Culture and have become representative of how we understand the impact of the Great Depression today.  These images have become inseperable from a prevalent photographic language that attempts to reveal the struggles of the working class.  Several of these photogaphers were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of farmers in western America during these hard years.  These photographs were distributed through the FSA to media sources to help create support for the New Deal. Arthur Rothstein later said, "It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them."

Walker Evans

 Dorothea Lange

 Arthur Rothstein

 Margaret Bourke-White

color photoraphs from the Depression

 Story follows three white sharecropper familes through their lives and struggles during the "Dust Bowl" in the South.  Evans photo of three men from book, Frank Tengle, Bud Fields, and Floyd Burroughs.

I really enjoyed our discussions about the painter Marc Chagall, because he is an artist I have never studied before.  I was very struck by his unique and innovative artwork.  You can really see him exploring many different historical art movements, such as surrealism and cubism.  Another thing I like about his work, is the fact that he retains a strong sentimental attachment to his home and his wife, and this helps the viewer connect and understand the things that Chagall was most passionate about in his life.  His invocation of dreams and illusions give a weighty yet whimsical look at the world as he saw it.  I liked the exercise we did in class when we played the poetry game and picked words and then spent time writing our own ekphrastic poetry based on this painting by Chagall, The Poet.  I wanted to put the poem that I wrote up because I like it and it has links to the poems written my my other class mates, which I think is interesting considering we did not discuss what we were writing until after we had all finished.  I thought it was neat how the poem could invoke different emotions in each viewer yet many of us still drew similar connections from the painting.  Here is the poem that I wrote in class:

One night,

I used the butter knife

To cut a small notch

On the top of my head.

I thought I would use it to

Pour in the vodka.

Instead I rotated my head

And let the thoughts pour out.

Blue thoughts,

They stained my suit.

I wondered if my head would get stuck,

Like this,

Turning green from loss of blue,

Upside down,

It felt so good.

But then my last thought dripped out

And I forgot what it was I was doing and

How to put my head back on and

Whatever else thoughts teach you, I forgot,

Frozen here

My cat sat by, lapping up

My warm blue thoughts,

Until it realized better things,

And wandered off.

I have written poetry for a while, but never seriously, always just as something fun, another way to express feelings and ideas.  While I was writing this I had been reading a lot of William Carlos Williams and Elizabeth Bishop, so I was thinking about line sequencing and phrasing and also expressing the scene in straight, simple fashion (one syllable words for example).  Reading back over this poem to post it to the blog, I do see myself being influenced by the poets we have been reading for class.  I also really enjoyed giving a personal narrative to the painting, before this class I had never been exposed to ekphrastic poetry and painting and I find the numerous examples we have been studying and the various choices in painters and methods, very fascinating.  It never occured to me to combine the two, but I have no idea why it never did, it makes perfect sense and it is so enriching on many occasions, to give the artists and the readers/viewers the combined beauty of a visual work and a verbal work together is something that I personally have been very affected by and grateful to be introduced to. 

If it Weren't for you Meddling Kids!

Children's Games

William Carlos Williams

I

This is a schoolyard

crowded

with children

of all ages near a village

on a small stream

meandering by

where some boys

are swimming

bare-ass

or climbing a tree in leaf

everything

is motion

elder women are looking

after the small

fry

a play wedding a

christening

nearby one leans

hollering

into

an empty hogshead

II

Little girls

whirling their skirts about

until they stand out flat

tops pinwheels

to run in the wind with

or a toy in 3 tiers to spin

with a piece

of twine to make it go

blindman's-buff follow the

leader stilts

high and low tipcat jacks

bowls hanging by the knees

standing on your head

run the gauntlet

a dozen on their backs

feet together kicking

through which a boy must pass

roll the hoop or a

construction

made of bricks

some mason has abandoned

III

The desperate toys

of children

their

imagination equilibrium

and rocks

which are to be

found

everywhere

and games to drag

the other down

blindfold

to make use of

a swinging

weight

with which

 

at random

to bash in the 

heads about

 

them

Brueghel saw it all 

and with his grim

 

humor faithfully 

recorded 

it

I enjoyed this poem, Childrens Games, by William Carlos Williams because it was light hearted but heavy at the same time.  The first two stanzas make it seem like happy innocent child's play, but then the third stanza turns dark and sinister, expressing the possibility of dangerous, hurtful things happening under the guise of innocence.  I also thought this poem was interesting because it reminded me of a couple of Blake's poems that we read earlier in Songs of Innocence and Experience, for example, the Nurse's Song, that is seen in both sections of his book (Innocence and Experience), this seemed like a good comparison to Williams as both he and Blake are exploring the ideas of childhood innocence and the dangers that can be underneath the surface.  In William's poem, the children are the ones with the potential for violence hidden under the guise of play, whereas in the poem by Blake in the Experience section, it seems that it is the adult, the Nurse, who is jealous of the care-free innocence of the children and wants to suppress it.  

I couldn't quite decide what to think or how to feel about Blake, but I really enjoyed Lauren's blog post about this poem, and how it shows the dual nature of love. So for now I will just put this song up and hopefully add more later: 

Paper Bird - Blue Sparks

I wanted to expand my thoughts on Blake and just talk generally about the interesting juxtapositions in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and the way that he utilizes the language of traditional religious iconography to encourage his readers to become active participants in his work as opposed to mere outside viewers.  It seems as if Blake is taking this theme of traditional iconic expression and manipulating it for his own purposes.  He often seems to be utilizing the icon and the traditions it has, as an aid in his critiques of these traditional institutions, manipulating their meaning into messages that explore the darker side of these institutions.  In Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake approaches the world from two different angles, through the lens of the naive, malleable mind of the innocent, and the corrupted, jaded mind of the experienced.  These two opposing forces, often with "sister" poems in each section help to support this theory that Blake is taking the glorified, holy traditions of the iconic ideals, and bringing them down to earth, where it is unavoidably messy.  Blake seems to feel that this traditional icon expression is unrealistic, and he tries to humanize these images by taking them out of their religious context and inserting them in with the human fallicies explored in this set of poems.  This idea that Blake is utlizing is interesting because I think that Blake is a religious person, as he makes many refrences to Christianity in his poetry, but it seems that he is crititquing the institution of his time and perhaps wanting to shed light on what he sees as the foolish notion of perfection and peace that is encouraged through the church.  It is obvious that Blake wants to explore the human condition in its reality and not its ideals.  This is a topic that I would like to do more research on and perhaps expand into an even longer discussion of Blake's style and influences.

Monet's Waterlilies by Robert Hayden

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

This poem by Robert Hayden, seems to create a safe haven inside Monet's painting.  The art becomes a place to find peace and serenity in an otherwise chaotic, war torn time.  While it creates this space for reflection, it also has a feeling of war.  When I read it again, it almost seems like it is describing a bomb exploding, "the seen, the known / dissolve in iridescence" reminds me of those photographs and video clips of atomic bombs dropping and wiping out everything with a blast of white hot light.

The last stanza then could be the aftermath of the bomb, the silence and gravity that is felt when we realize what it really is we have done and destroyed, things we will never be able to undo, and we must live with the knowing and the consequences.  So the last line, instead of a reassuring reminder that we can still catch glimpses of lost joy, is instead an ironic, bitter statement that forces us to open our eyes to the realities of war, that we sometimes forget in our eagerness to win.

I thought of this song while studying the painting and thinking about the poem, it is Elephant Revival singing their song Cosmic Pulse, which I feel like you can hear in the painting and the text.  The live video I found has another of their songs Ancient Sea beforehand but it seems to fit so I included it in here.

Click here for these 2 awesome songs

West Hell

Sin, thy name is this
wait—this place—
a long ways from Here
to There, from where

last we were
in love, or lust, or not
even close. It's hot
most the year

& by noon this town shuts
doors, down, the bass
burrowing in the bot-
tom—even our mudfish

with nowheres to go.
The days dry as envy,
we trawl the shallows
& perfect our lies—

the morning's catch we could
have landed, the ladies
or mens jealousies
we wear as badge, avoid

not at all. How humid
the heart, its messy
rooms! We eat spicy
food, sweat like wood

& smolder like the coal
mine that caught fire
years ago, yet still smokes
more than my uncle

who will not quit—
or go out—

- Kevin Young

I chose to respond to this pair of art and poetry from our readings this week simply because it struck me as my favorite.  Kevin Young, who wrote a set of poems to go along with the "projections" of Romare Bearden really brought these pieces to life.  I love when I can look at a piece of art and hear sound, and with Young's blues-y style of poetry alongside Bearden's work, you can really begin to feel a rhythm.  When I read this poem out-loud, I find myself putting emphasis on the last word in each line (a good blues touch). Young writes in short phrases, breaking the line in odd places or creating space to force the reader to stop short and think about the different meanings that can be drawn sometimes from one phrase or sentence.  I am drawn in by the first two stanzas of this poem: 

Sin, thy name is this
wait—this place—
a long ways from Here
to There, from where

last we were
in love, or lust, or not
even close. It's hot
most the year

    I like how he creates an uncomfortable feeling, we start by reading the title, "West Hell" and then he begins talking about sin and lust and not quite knowing where we are, here? there? and then ending with the short statement, "It's hot", but he cleverly gives us a bit of relief in the last line, "most of the year", that "most" giving the reader some kind of reassurance that perhaps its not always so uncomfortable.  

Bearden's work fits this style of writing because you can see the choppiness and the disconnectedness in his collages.  Initially they may seem a bit strange and perhaps disconcerting, especially this one "Pittsburg Memory" where Bearden has created two faces, one large and looming towards the viewer, both looking confrontational and unashamed, as if saying to the viewer, "what are you looking at?".  After reading the poem and going back to the collage, you can almost feel the simmering heat of the summer and the resilience of the two characters, surviving and refusing to "go out" even in the hot humid surroundings.  

Howlin Wolf comes to mind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0MIQHymToA&feature=related

This may be a little too upbeat for this art and poem, but it kind of goes along with the idea that there is the possiblity for that "most of the year" to subside for a minute to offer a bit of relief.  Plus its a great example of music and awesome illustration.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYk_dU4IWVg