The Defeated Man, Sitting On The Floor With His Head In His Arms

(My third blog post, regarding images from The Great Depression and how they relate to the story.)

I must confess, when I first read we were to look at some photographs from the Great Depression, I had a fairly good idea what they were going to look like-as I am fairly familiar with the Great Depression, and with some of what it resulted in-, and what they were going to attempt at insinuating. However, I was not comepletely right; I was expecting a bombardment of graphic, emotionally exploiting photos of people living in unimaginable poverty-my speculation must have been tainted with all those tear-jerking commercials we have all seen-. However, much to my disbelief, this did not seem to be the purpose of those photos; nevertheless, there were some that fitted said description, but they were outnumbered by the photos that did not.

I decided to indulge and look at the art gallery as well (the illustrations); those images were no less stirring than the photographs, if not more. With photographs, you know that whatever is on the image, actally happend, that instance in time is a part of history; that alone makes a great impact. However, with illustrations, the artist has much more power and options to create an impact: the colors, the manipulation of images (changing things from what they actually look like, to what they want those things to look like), the power to add any detail, be it phisically impossible. For those reasons, I must say that the illustrations in the art gallery made the greatest impact on me; those images struck me the hardest.

I know that this called for the description and impact of a single photograph, but I feel I will be doing myself an emotional injustice by neglecting the illstrations that had my emotions more than stirring. If I had to chose one image-which I do-it would have to be the illustration No Work (1935) by Blanche Grambs. This was far from a great work of art, however, from the moment I layed eyes on it, I felt as though I had felt the worst of the depression. The defeated man, sitting on the floor with his head in his arms, who's face I could not even see; the man with No Work had me feeling more than any photograph could have possible made me feel. The depression had destroyed that man's spirit, the was a reject of that cruel world; it takes a lot for a drawing like that to make someone fell as I did, and for that reason, I could chose nothing other than that drawing to describe.

I think seeing these images enriched my reading expierience very much so. These images captured the context in which 'To Kill A Mockingbird' was written-as it is a depression era novel-, something that truly alows you to understand the characters and their decisions. Those characters were living where the depression struck hard, as the saying goes: desperate times call for desperate measures. Those characters were living in poverty, during a time where it was an employers market to say the least; people were being opressed left and right. Humans are only meant to be able to take so much, eventually they will have to resort to said desperate measures, and can they be blamed? These images allowed us to "climb into [the characters'] skin[s] and walk around in [them] (P. 33).


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