Interpretation of the images

The FSA photographers, following the director, Roy Stryker’s, instructions, crafted a particular story of America. This story changed through time, allowing the careful viewer to discern – even within the corpus itself – the constructed nature of the story told. This image, for example, is a Reading Photographs 101 delight:. Here is the distilled essence of The Planter. Arrogant, “his” Negroes arrayed behind him, Lange pinned him for eternity. The gesture, made more dramatic by Lange’s framing, embodied the archetypal image of corrupt power.

D. knew of Lange’s propensity for playing fast and loose with actuality, and doubted this photo – in which the nameless man was variously identified as a “plantation owner” (LC-USF34- 009599-C) and as a “plantation overseer” (LC-USF34- 009596-C). One day, after a lengthy interview with A. J. Cowart, a man in his 90s who had lived on the FSA Sunflower Plantation in Rena Lara, D. realized that he might know the story of this man. So we took out our PowerBook with a CD of FSA photographs of the Delta, found the picture, and showed it to him. Mr. Coward exclaimed, “That’s Mr. Partee, the meanest man there ever was.” It turns out that Lange had nailed the man. He was, in fact, what her picture showed him to be.

This is not the place to expand on the reading of individual images in terms of the visual coding within specific images, but any careful study of these photos must be sensitive to visual conventions that have to do with particularly the positioning of the eye – both of the subject and of the camera’s lens –, gesture, lighting, composition, and framing (see, e.g., Levine 1988).

Plantation owner. Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Dorothea Lange, June, 1936. LC-USF34- 009599-C