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Sorghum cane, Shawnee County, Kansas, October 1938
Farmer at sorghum mill, Lancaster County, Nebraska, October 1938
Sorghum cane from which syrup will be made, sorghum mill, Lancaster County, Nebraska, October 1938
Farmers Union Co-op elevator, Centralia, Kansas, October 1938
Farm children walking to one-room schoolhouse with lunch pails, Nebraska, October 1938
Photos by John Vachon (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
I’m from New York, from the suburbs and not the farm, and until seeing these I had never given sorghum much thought, but I’ll never forget the sorghum teepees and piles or the photograph of the sorghum farmer with the child. The image of the children walking to school stirs up a kind of universal memory, I think. All of these photographs, apart from the artistry they display, seem to paint John Vachon as a very decent man.
ReplyDeleteThis "country" aspect of the struggling smalltown rural areas of the prairie, and the basic decency of the people concerned, was something Vachon evidently understood quite well from growing up in Minnesota. There is a fairytale quality to the images in this post for me, though of course there are no fairies in poverty, and that too is part of what the post is meant to be about.
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