Bud fields and his family, Hale County alabama (1941) from the book below
The first publishing of Let Us Now Praise Famous men came out in 1941. Taken on in 1936 the book grew out of a magazine assignment about white sharecroppers in the southern United States. Exploring the quality and conditions of life for some of the poorest members of society during the New Deal Era Walker Evans shot some of the most iconic photographs of the time if not in US history. The subject of work, the hardest kind, in the most dire of circumstances was not only a matter of journalistic human interest. The work explores life at losing end of the economic latter. In my project the central question between the photographs "is what are they selling?". In the work of Evans the answer is that these poorest segments are selling their very lives. I am attempting to create work that asks the viewer to examine their own relationships to each of my characters, are they buying the image, protection, or salvation temporary and otherwise. In contrast to Evans' stark portrayals I choose to construct images slick and magazine ready, with clear sunny days overhead. the kind of image we are used to seeing in the visual lexicon of our advertising environment.
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