Visual Culture-1930s USA

The Great Depression of the 1930s was an era of such extreme poverty and dramatic economic decline that it remains permanently etched on our collective psyche.

One major reason for the lasting impression made by the most widespread and deepest depression of the 20th century is that it coincided with the growth of photography as an art form and the period was well-documented as a result.

One of the most famous American photographers documenting the era was Walker Evans, who’s beautiful and sometimes haunting photographs captured such detail and emotion that the subjects feel more alive and closer to the present than the past.

During a decade of profound transformation, Evans created a collective portrait of the Eastern United States through his work for the Farm Security Administration that now acts almost as a Modernist history of photography.

The 2013 installation of Walker Evans' work maintains the bipartite organization of the originals: the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social contexts, while the second consists of photographs of American cultural artifacts - the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses.

The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter.

 

 Not my own work copied from varies of websites