Old New England
Jack Delano, "Connecticut Town by the Sea" (Stonington, CT, 1940)
In this Great Recession, we are constantly being reminded of the Great Depression. And when we think of the genre of Depression photos we tend to think of the migrant workers of the rural South and West, the food lines, and the close ups of human misery. But the Depression hit different parts of America differently, of course, and it was just as significant in the North, in cities, and among factory workers. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer who documented this “other” Depression the best may have been Jack Delano, who spent several months on assignment following migrant workers up the Atlantic Coast from Florida to Maine.
Born in the Ukraine, Delano was a transplanted American, but in New England he came face to face with its art history as well as its economic conditions. This photograph reads like a painting, and you’ve seen it before — it is a Winslow Homer seascape, it is every picture postcard of a small coastal town…. Delano, who studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, seems to be paying subtle homage to a deeply American tradition. If there is social commentary here it is indirect — in the flat sea juxtaposed with the heavy clouds, in the relative isolation of those miniature figures in the foreground. There is smoke, but where is the fire? Delano points us toward something bigger and deeper than a particular fact or source. In an interview conducted in 1965 he said,
speaking for myself, I felt that I was part of an organization which was basically interested in the cultural values of America, which had nothing to do with politics but had to do with the American tradition, with the bad things, the good things, the difficulties, the problems, the joys and inspirations and everything that went with it. And it could be a tight little Jewish community someplace in Colchester, which we covered, including the synagogues and everything that went with it, or it could be a horse show at a county fair in New Hampshire somewhere. It was all part of what was making the United States and what the United States had come from, and this was the exciting thing for us. Through these travels and the photographs I got to love the United States more than I could have in any other way.
This mission statement goes beyond the FSA’s directive to document the results of Franklin Roosevelt’s economic policies. It’s an outsider’s effort to make a visual record of an essential America.
In: documentary, landscape, photography, seascapes · Tagged with: Jack Delano, New England, WInslow Homer