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Convicts from Greene County, Georgia prison camp at the funeral of their warden who was killed in an automobile accident 
Convicts from Greene County, Georgia prison camp at the funeral of their warden who was killed in an automobile accident 
Convicts from Greene County, Georgia prison camp at the funeral of their warden who was killed in an automobile accident
At the funeral of Mr. Lov Smith, former warden of the Greene County, Georgia prison camp 
Convicts and guard, Oglethorpe County, Georgia
Photos by Jack Delano, May 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Tom, thanks for all these posts of the work of Jack Delano. Quite fine. This one, in particular, has a narrative quality as laid out that is simply devastating.
ReplyDeleteDon, thanks for responding.
ReplyDeleteI think Jack Delano is a great underappreciated American artist.
It's not hard to see why he is underappreciated. His Library of Congress "Creator" page, for one thing, comes up as "Not Found".
This photo archive is a vast and in many respects also a lost resource.
Dorothea Lange lamented the fact that despite the valiant efforts of the FSA director Roy Stryker, the greatest part of these files went unseen even at the time they were made, and in later years the general ignorance of just what is in these files has been compounded.
There are something like 160,000 FSA photos, many uncatalogued or incorrectly catalogued, hidden away in various side-tunnels of the labyrinthine library archive. So the research task has involved extensive searching, sorting, as well as a fair amount of mind-reading, trying to understand what the photographers were after and what they found, so as to organize the sprawling miscellaneous files into mini-narratives (like this one) -- and then, at the end of the day, to avoid overdetermining these stories by eschewing further textual comment and trying to simply step out of the way of the thrust of living truth and natural fact.
Don, to be honest the work has been humbling. The glaring evidences of a massive social inequity, the apparent failure of compassion before a staggering superplus of human suffering, the tale told by our national history... pleasant as it would be to dismiss all this by saying, "but that was then, and it's all so different now," I don't know.
Don, in case you may have missed it, there's a very useful interview with Jack Delano and his wife, which I've drawn from at length (to accompany a portfolio of Delano's great colour work) here.
ReplyDeleteform and content
ReplyDeleteafter reconstruction
the penal system
in some southern states
became a front for
slave labor
this existed until
World War II
inmates were sometimes
imprisoned on frivolous
charges on work farms
to supply labor
"I'm a fugitive from a
chain gang" The movie
with Paul Muney antedates
the photos by approximately
a decade
And then there was "Cool Hand
Luke" with Paul Newman
There have been a lot of stories
over the years on the content
of Delano's photo
Tom,
ReplyDeleteThese photos are amazing, "a narrative quality that is simply devastating" as Don writes here. JOhnny and I are looking through all these now (we got through the first set of Heard County Georgia yesterday), had been watching Olivier's Hamlet the other day, with the scene at Ophelia's grave (a far cry from what we SEE HERE). . .
9.5
light coming into sky above still black
ridge, silver of planet beside branches
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
that is aspects are visible
again, these structures
frequently there, particular,
want to hear each other
grey-white of fog against top of ridge,
circular green pine on tip of sandspit