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Monday 11 April 2011

Some Scenes from Old Kentucke: Ben Shahn, Smithland, Kentucky, 1935


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Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Scene in Smithland, Kentucky: photo by Ben Shahn for U.S. Resettlement Administration, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)




Moment lost in time, it was nice almost knowing you. You almost didn't exist, in fact might not have existed. But then, you pretty much had to be there
in order for there to be a next moment, and so on.


There one stood, by the bank. And the long
day slowly passed.



Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Bank in Smithland, Kentucky: photo by Ben Shahn for U.S. Resettlement Administration, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Scene in Smithland, Kentucky: photo by Ben Shahn for U.S. Resettlement Administration, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Post Office in Smithland, Kentucky: photo by Ben Shahn for U.S. Resettlement Administration, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Billboard advertisement for gasoline service station, Middlesboro, Kentucky: photo by Ben Shahn for U.S. Resettlement Administration, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Scene in Smithland, Kentucky: photo by Ben Shahn for U.S. Resettlement Administration, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

2 comments:

Elmo St. Rose said...

artists sometimes tend not to
look at generative people

usually where art has flourished
in modern times...since the
Renaissance, there is a healthy
middle class

TC said...

In early 16th c. English, the borning days of the mother tongue, "health" and "wealth" had the same meaning.

You can find the usage of "wealth" to mean "health" throughout the poems of Wyatt, for example.

But of course Wyatt died a good two and a half centuries before the mother tongue gave birth to the modern meaning of "class". He wouldn't have understood what it meant.

Standing outside the bank in Smithland, Kentucky in October 1935, maybe it was one of those cases of "you had to be there".

(A special kind of historical desolation, I guess I mean...or for that matter standing outside of anything that ever held the money, anywhere, at any time.)