Russell Lee: Saturday Night in the Nature Theatre, 1939
.
Couples at square dance, McIntosh County, Oklahoma: photo by Russell Lee, July 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
This is one of the most remarkable and affecting images I have ever seen. I suppose it's the colors, the uncomposed composition, the undefined intensity of expression on the faces of the two men (are they brothers or cousins?), the (to me) wonderful sociability of Saturday nights before we learned to spend them alone at the home television movies or in front of the computer. I don't know. And the Nature Theater addition/realization that makes this unique and in the nicest way possible a short trip to the Twiight Zone.
These are poor homesteaders in McIntosh, one of the early Land Rush destinations.
In their (as you put it so beautifully) "undefined intensity of expression" there is writ the whole inarticulate heroism of struggle and striving to survive of these people in these years.
This is one of the most remarkable and affecting images I have ever seen. I suppose it's the colors, the uncomposed composition, the undefined intensity of expression on the faces of the two men (are they brothers or cousins?), the (to me) wonderful sociability of Saturday nights before we learned to spend them alone at the home television movies or in front of the computer. I don't know. And the Nature Theater addition/realization that makes this unique and in the nicest way possible a short trip to the Twiight Zone.
ReplyDeleteThese are poor homesteaders in McIntosh, one of the early Land Rush destinations.
ReplyDeleteIn their (as you put it so beautifully) "undefined intensity of expression" there is writ the whole inarticulate heroism of struggle and striving to survive of these people in these years.