viz.

Image credit: Bill Ganzell

A few weeks ago I posted about rephotography projects—after thinking through some of the issues surrounding these images I began wondering why so many of these rephotographic projects appeared in the 1980s.   Two texts in particular caught my attention: Bill Ganzell's 1984  Dust Bowl Descent, and Michael Williamson and Dale Maharidge's 1989 And Their Children After Them.  Ganzell rephotographed several of the same images captured by documentary photographers during the Great Depression while Williamson and Maharidge retraced the steps of Walker Evans and James Agee for their 1936 photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Taken decades after the initial Depression Era images, these rephotography projects of the 1980s are a record of change. 

I suppose it is not surprising that the rephotographers of the 1980s took up their cameras just as it became clear that the earlier historical moment of the New Deal had disintegrated.  The decades between the ‘thirties and the ‘eighties saw a gradual decline in the influence of unions, the crumbling of the liberal-Left coalition, and a turn towards conservative politics and policy that favored the wealthy at the expense of the poor.  The decline of this "New Deal Order" is linked, according to Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order with the ascendancy of the Reagan administration.

Image credit: Arthur Rothstein

Image credit: page from And Their Children After Them

Michael Williamson, Dale Maharidge, Walker Evans

Williamson and Maharidge construct Children After Them with exactly the same format as Famous Men.  In their layout of the images—the original above the rephotograph both on one page—Maharidge and Williamson convey a sense of the passing of time.  The photograph and rephotograph of Maggie Louise Gudger shows the same woman standing before a wooden structure at two points in her life almost fifty years apart.  Although this reimaging suggests that Maggie Louise is still a victim of poverty and in need of aid, this second photograph evokes a kind of stasis.  It is as though she has been silently standing there all this time.  Maggie Louise stares hauntingly back at the viewer with a similar expression to that in the earlier image of her as a child.  The implication is that this woman is still living an uncertain life of fear and poverty.  Maggie Louise certainly had her own motivations for posing for this photograph, however, Williamson's decision to portray her exactly as Evans had in the 1930s robs her of the opportunity to convey any of that agency.  She simply seems trapped, stuck in the same place and socio-economic situation as fifty years earlier. 

I am curious as to how we should read these rephotographs—are they jeremiads calling the audience to reinvest in the effort to end poverty or evidence of the ultimate success of New Deal reform efforts?  Ganzell’s visual solutions and Williamson and Maharidge’s records of unchanging poverty suggest that the social action urged in the original image is no longer needed or was completely ineffectual.  Originally intended as rhetorical tools aimed at rationalizing the reform and relief efforts of the New Deal, the FSA photographs are reduced to talismans of a distant past in these reimages.  That past is present in these images from the 1980s, suggesting that it cannot and should not be forgotten.  At the same time, these rephotographs remove the uncertainty in these images of the past by showing us their future.