American Art Collaborative

Throughout the late 1920s and early ’30s, Margaret Bourke-White produced dramatic photographs of the American machine age. Her pictures of factories, dynamos, and machines capture the power and beauty of American mass industrialization; but as the 1930s wore on, the photographer began to turn her camera toward the human subjects upon whom the devastating effects of the Depression were taking their greatest toll. On July 18, 1936, she and the novelist Erskine Caldwell embarked on a two-month journey through seven states in the American South, speaking with and photographing the people they met. They returned to the South in March 1937 for additional material; and in November of that year, they published, to great critical acclaim, You Have Seen Their Faces, their illustrated book with 75 photographs by Bourke-White and text by Caldwell. Helen Caldwell Cushman, Erskine Caldwell’s first wife, and later a resident of Mt. Vernon, Maine, gave this vintage print, along with nine others from the You Have Seen Their Faces project, to Colby in 1964.Bourke-White took this photograph of a mother and her two young children in Clinch County, Georgia, near the Okefenokee Swamp, on July 21, 1936, only three days into her travels with Caldwell. She would often photograph her subjects in various poses and settings—a practice she used in Clinch County. Two photographs of this family are included in You Have Seen Their Faces: in one instance, the family gathers for a modest meal, and in the other, the mother nurses her infant child. The photograph in Colby’s collection—an image ultimately not included in the book—depicts the mother and her two children in the close confines of their bedroom. We know some details about this family from a journal that Bourke-White kept during her travels that summer: the mother is Lizzie Steedley, a widow with two children, ages three and one, who are pictured. She lived in the house of another widowed woman, Mrs. Knight, and her twelve-year-old son, and the Steedleys received support from the county in the sum of $5.00 a month. She was unable to find work or a place of her own to live.Bourke-White’s photographs for You Have Seen Their Faces exist within the context of 1930s social documentary photography and government-sponsored programs like the Farm Security Administration (FSA) that sought to picture the economic and agricultural crises wrought by the Great Depression. Yet within this context, Bourke-White established her own unique style of documentary; her pictures of the rural South are often characterized by high drama and sentimental narrative, as in this image of Lizzie Steedley and her children. Rather than using a single flash attached to her camera, Bourke-White lit the scene dramatically from the left, casting mother and children in bright light while the area behind the bed frame is hidden in shadow. Bourke-White’s use of harsh contrasts highlights the starkness of her subjects’ social conditions. Signs of poverty fill the domestic space: bed ticking stuffed above makeshift purlins hangs over the family, and flattened cardboard boxes insulate the wall; an exposed mattress and ramshackle bed frame slant diagonally across the composition at an angle that appears to tilt Lizzie Steedley and her children into the lower left corner of the photograph. While an intimate space, this is not a picture of domestic security: this is not, after all, a home that they can call their own. The fussing infant, who leans to the left against her mother’s arm, serves to emphasize the slope of the bed and the instability of their circumstance in the face of the Depression—a time when neither present nor future conditions were certain. Sharon Corwin