Looking Backward: Voices of the 1930's

According to David Kennedy, “no fiction, not even John Steinbeck’s melodramatic Grapes of Wrath later in the Depression decade, could do full justice to the desolate facts of American rural life”(192). Therefore, I can interpret that Kennedy would answer this question with a simple yes. In his opinion, the only way to truly understand the horrors of the Depression era are through a person’s eyes. Words in books won’t do the trick for Kennedy.
A part of me agrees with Kennedy and another part doesn’t. It is true that a certain emotion can be seen in a picture. A look in someone’s eye can tell more about how that person is feeling than any amount of words can. However, sometimes words are necessary to describe the extent of a certain situation. Take Grapes of Wrath as an example. One of the most resounding images of the first 11 chapters is that of the tractors in the fields. Steinbeck explains that the tractors came like “great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects”(35). He furthers his description saying the tractors were “raping methodically, raping without passion”(36). Sometimes, words are necessary to beef up an image in the reader’s mind as even more dramatic. A picture of these tractors would not do justice what Steinbeck is trying to get across to his reader.
Additionally, I must take into account any bias. It was disturbing to find out that Dorothea Lange staged her pictures. I have no doubt that the people in her photos were struggling and in despair, but to me the integrity of each photo is hurt. A person looking at a picture cannot be sure of the situation and this means that pictures must sometimes be taken with a grain of salt.
In terms of books, a bias exists as well. The author gets to decide what the reader reads or ‘sees’. The author has the ability to paint the reader’s images through his words. The reader doesn’t come to any conclusions alone. There is a clear bias when it comes to words.
All in all, I do think a picture is worth 1000 words. But in certain situations I would take the 1000 words over the picture.

Adam, about the staging of the photos, I don’t think it was such a big deal, because most of them look like portraits. Maybe the subjects are not at their usual farming posts doing their farm jobs, but all of their expressions seem genuine, and I think the expressions are what is most effective about the pictures.

Becca, I completely agree with you. Dorthea Lange’s photos and writings like the pieces done by Kennedy and Steinbeck work together very well. On one hand, we have the visual, which is important to stimulate a person, but we also have the writings, which puts the photo into context and gives the reader a better overview of what was going on at the time.

Julie, I completely agree with you about making assumptions about photos without descriptions. Without a description, we assume what the person is like and how they got the way they are. that’s why I think having a caption for a photo is useful, even if it’s just a line about where the photo is taken place, or how the person lost all of their money.

I understand what you are saying (to Gianni and Adam) but I think the purpose of her photos wasn’t to be particularly artsy or even capture people in action. She was sent out to see what life was like, and I think her pictures do that perfectly. She shows how desolate the land was and how Spartan the clothes and food and shelter were of the people living on the land. The positions of the people are less important than the dirt on their clothes and the shoes not on their feet.

All pieces of art can be interpreted differently. The true beauty of photography is being able to capture any moment in time, and having different individuals interpret and take away what they can from the photo. A good literary author builds and develops an image in the reader’s mind, which adds visualization to the words. These pictures that we interpret in our mind help shape how situations are perceived. Therefore, a picture can be worth 1000 words.
Steinbeck is an author that is capable of helping a reader interpret his words with an image. In Chapter 7, Steinbeck describes “garages with blazoned signs – Used Cars, Good Used Cars. Cheap transportation, three trailers, ’27 Ford, clean…Come in and look. Used Cars. No overhead”(61). Instantly, this passage brings forth an image that many people can relate to: a used car parking lot with signs pleading for people to come in. After placing this in context with the time period, one could build many images of the situation. There can be a Used Car parking lot full of cars due to desperate people selling their cars. There can also be a Used Car parking lot not selling any cars, which makes the owners, urge buyers to actually buy. This image can tell a lot about the time period, and gives the reader the opportunity to feel the moment, to get a glimpse of what society would have been like at that moment.
Dorthea Lange’s photographs also strongly demonstrate a feeling of the Great Depression. Her photos give off the feeling of sadness, poverty, and struggle, but in a few pictures, happiness can also be interpreted. The picture of the man smirking while smoking the pipe can give off the emotion of happiness due to his facial expression, but then again the image of his wife in the background gives off sadness due to her weary eyes. Viewers can also see the extreme poverty that goes on, but then again a viewer can interpret the strong bond that the families have or the togetherness they demonstrated during this time of the depression. The time these photos were taken can either demonstrate happiness or sadness depending on the mood of the photo or how the photos were actually taken.

First we have to determine what we mean by “worth.” Do we mean by the adage, “a picture is worth a 1,000 words,” that the words and the photograph make us feel the same way emotionally? Do we mean that we are able to picture a photograph given a thousand words describing that same photograph? Do we mean that we are able to get the same amount of information from a photograph as we are from a 1,000 words? Looking at a picture, a person might be able to gain the same insight, if not more than he or she would have after having read a paragraph about the same subject matter. However, other times I think photographs leave more up to interpretation than do words, not to say that words are always straight forward.
In class we viewed photographs by Dorothea Lange of the parched land in the midwest in which we are able to see the dust and land raked up by tractors. In one glimpse of Lange’s photo we are able to see what Steinbeck takes the first couple of pages in The Grapes of Wrath to describe—”Every moving thing lifted the dust into the air: a walking man lifted a thin layer as high as his waist, and a wagon lifted the dust as high as the fence tops… the dust was long in settling back again” (2, The Grapes of Wrath). In this case Lange’s photos seem to tell the same story as do Steinbeck’s words, albeit perhaps more succinctly, if that word can be applied to photography. Lange’s photos are also very telling of peoples’ emotions, conveying peoples’ exhausted mood at the time as well as the overall depressing atmosphere of the country. However, they cannot include, as Rebecca and Julie have said, to the same extent, as can the excerpt we read from Kennedy’s Freedom From Fear, the details and statistics of the Great Depression.

I have to agree with Becca when she says that pictures and words serve two different purposes. But I would like to go further into that. It always depends on the photo and it depends on the writing.
Compare two photos that Dorothea Lange took: the mother looking off to the distance with an empty bowl in front of her and the house with a windmill standing in the middle of a desolate field.
They tell you two different stories. When you look at the photo of the mother, it is automatically assumed that she has had a hard time, and just by looking into her eyes and the plate in front of her, you know that she has lived a hard. But you still want to know more. It is not uncommon for poses such as these to be fake. Photographers ask for their “models” to take certain positions in order to emphasize and dramatize the actions taking place in the photo.
The photo with the house in the field gives you one word: emptiness. There is absolutely nothing more to tell and you don’t need to ask anymore questions. You don’t need to know where this house is from or who lived here. I believe that this image describes the hard times that everyone went through, and it shows that in no way was this building tampered with by the photographer. (In short, what I am trying to get across with the photo analogy is that understanding the story of a picture depends highly on what picture you are getting your story from).
Now, the writing in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was detailed in both a positive and negative way.
Beginning with the negative way, it was filled with adjective after adjective, detail after detail, when certain images (such as Casy and Joad sitting underneath a tree) did not need so much explanation.
However something that Steinbeck was able to integrate into his story were the feelings of the people and what they felt during this depression. If it was exaggerated so be it, but not by much. His words told a better story than some of Lange’s photos.

To Emily Southwick:

I agree with you when you say that the question can be interpreted in many different ways? And in those many different ways, we could effectively begin an exploration of what we as readers and “artists” view as a good enough example of what life was like during the great depression. I also understand when you say that photographs can be left to interpretation more so than writing…[even though those words are chosen by a writer, they can also be interpreted by the reader, for we each have our own imagination and make up our own worlds to the words that we read.]

I think that Dorothea Lange’s photos capture the feelings of the people suffering during the Great Depression. In response to Adam and Gianni, they may have been posed, but the emotions on the faces of the subjects are genuine. While something like The Grapes of Wrath does give one a very good idea of what life was like and how people felt during that time, a photo can provide a very obvious emotion that is representative of how many felt.

I agree that both pictures and words are important and one cannot replace the other. However, I believe that when studying a time in history as impoverished as the great depression, words cannot completely portray how awful the living conditions had been. It’s hard to understand and identify with a group of people who lived before us solely through a bunch of words. It is not until we see an image, such as Dorothea Lange’s photography, that the descriptions and stories we read in ” The Grapes of wrath” become less like fiction and more like reality. Pictures also help us to sympathize with people in ways that words cannot. When we see a photograph such as Dorothea Lange’s where a mother is clutching her baby and dressed in rags, it forces us to think about our own family and what we would do if placed in similar conditions. I do believe that literature is unique in it’s ability to immerse us into a different time period however in order to fully study and comprehend the horrifying conditions present during the great depression we need the aid of a photograph.

I think that in general it’s very easy to take the expression “a picture is worth one thousand words” and turn it into something it doesn’t really mean. Sure, a picture can be worth one thousand words. But what words? A picture, for all intensive purposes, is still just a picture. Words have the ability to tell you what was being thought and the emotions that were being felt, and capture much much more than a picture frame can. Words give you the entire environment, the backstory, the present and the future. A picture is only an instant, and is just in general not capable of providing a deep connection like words do.

A picture can give you a crystal clear image of something. It doesn’t leave it up to interpretation because there’s nothing left out of it. When I read Harry Potter, I always imagined Voldemort to be incredibly pale with long jet black hair and empty black eye sockets, and that he was always wearing a deep purple robe. When I saw the movie, it all became clear to me, and there was nothing left to my imagination. “Oh. THIS is what Voldemort looks like.” But pictures are all about the surface, where as words can give you a deeper meaning, and delve into themes and symbols. When a picture is taken of a person, there’s a lot of guesswork about what the person is thinking, but you know exactly what the person looks like. When you write about a person, you know exactly what they’re thinking and what’s going on within them, but you don’t know exactly what they look like. I think for me, that just about sums up how I feel about the expression “A picture is worth 1,000 words.”