Looking back on yesteryear's despair gives hope today | GARY COSBY JR.
Being a photojournalist has been the greatest privilege you can imagine. It's like having a front seat to history. As such, I have always been fascinated by the work of those who came before me and none more so than the photographers of the Farm Security Administration.
Those photographers worked for the FSA, documenting the entire country during the Great Depression. They not only documented the terrible parts, but they also documented the numerous projects around the country that were designed to aid the recovery. Their photographs are both shocking and beautiful.
My favorite image, and I would think the favorite of most who have seen it, is "The Migrant Mother," a photograph taken by Dorothea Lange. It is the single most iconic image from the Great Depression.
But there are other images that stick in my mind. A couple of them were shot in Hale County here in Alabama. The one that I most think of was taken by Walker Evans and shows Bud Fields and his family in what appears to be an old farm house. Bud sits with one of his children, who is naked from the waist down, leaning back against him. His wife sits on a bed at the left side of the image, holding a small child who appears to be asleep. The oldest child stands beside the bed wearing a soiled shirt, and a woman sits at right who appears to be a grandmother.
No one is clean, the house appears to be run-down, and all the people look completely worn out. In many ways, it is a heartbreaking image filled with despair. But there they are, posing for a photograph, and one wonders what life was like for them. It was obviously difficult, and that probably understates it by an order of magnitude.
Every time I think of that photograph it makes me so grateful for the country we have today. We have struggles, to be sure. There are many homeless people in the country, many who are underfed or poorly fed, many who are unemployed or underemployed, but I have never seen anyone in this time who even comes close to looking as forlorn as that poor Hale County family.
We have fights over ideas, over politics, over nothing. Come what may, most of us will never face the struggles that Bud Fields and his family faced, never. Not in the prosperous society in which we live where even the poorest person can easily get enough help to be in better shape than the family in that photograph.
There are horrors from which we are nearly completely protected, horrors that regularly overwhelmed our ancestors. Just think of the terrible poverty of the Great Depression. Almost all of our social welfare network was born out of that nightmare. Back then, there was no social welfare program of any sort. If you didn't have it, you didn't have it. If you couldn't pay for a doctor, you didn't got to the doctor. Forget about help paying for medicine. There was none. If you were hungry, you were hungry. There were soup kitchens if you were in a city. Out in rural Hale County, Alabama, I don't imagine there were any soup kitchens.
You had to depend totally on yourself, your family, or your neighbors. Often, they were in as desperate a situation as you were and had nothing to give. People knew if they didn't work they literally didn't eat and sometimes they didn't eat even when they did work. It was far different a hundred years ago. These were most definitely not the good old days.
In fact, we live in the good old days right now. There has not been a time in human history where a culture was in as good a shape as we are in America today and not only in America but also across all the "first-world" nations. As much as we fight and fuss about government spending and waste, no one, and I mean literally no one, wants to go back to the conditions of a hundred years ago.
I think the one thing about America that I most appreciate is this idea of never going back, of always pressing forward. We have a lot of work to do across many areas of life, but we have made progress, are making progress, and will continue making progress because that is who we truly are.
When I look around at the political situation today, I sometimes lose hope, but then I think back to the way things used to be and remember the Bud Fields family and the Migrant Mother and all those photographs that stirred my soul ,and I regain my sense of purpose, my sense of hope, my joy at being lucky enough to be born in the United States.
I still have my likes and dislikes, my opinions on politics, religion, war, climate, you name it, but I know for sure I and most of those around me won't have to face what the folks living in this region a century ago had to face. And thank God for that. It helps to remember and be thankful and then, with renewed resolve, press on to make this world a little bit better tomorrow than it was yesterday.
Gary Cosby Jr. is the photo editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Looking back on yesteryear's despair gives hope today | GARY COSBY JR.
