The Situation Your Essay Addresses
Two of the authors we’ve read for this unit, Charles Cunningham and James Curtis, open with a vivid account of the situation—a historical event and/or photograph—that their essay addresses. This brief narrative works to draw the reader in, and at the same time it sets up a core issue for debate. Curtis tells the story of Lange’s rainy afternoon photo session to signal his interest in the concrete circumstances that led to the creation of “Migrant Mother,” thereby setting up an implicit challenge to those who regard that image as a “timeless and universal symbol” divorced from the political and economic circumstances that led to its creation. For his part, Cunningham tells the story of how Life Magazine editors cropped another of Lange’s photographs, signaling his interest in how media coverage of poverty promoted an ideal of gritty striving, and providing him with a basis for challenging another scholar’s assessment of the same event:
On the last page of a series of articles in its June 21, 1937 issue on the so-called “DustBowl,”Life Magazine ran a full-page, head-and-shoulders photograph of a grizzled man above the caption “Dust Bowl Farmer is New Pioneer”. The farmer, a man who appears to be in his fifties, peers into the camera, a grim, determined look on his weathered face,his thin-lipped mouth a downward crescent that mirrors the curve of his whiskery chin. Credited only to the Resettlement Administration, the precursor to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the image was in fact cropped from a photograph made by Dorothea Lange in California earlier that year. Lange’s original photograph showed three men—Life’s “pioneer,” flanked by two others with their heads lowered, perhaps in worry or discouragement. Assigned to take pictures depicting the need for more government-funded migrant camps in the region, Lange had titled the photograph: “Ex-tenant farmer on relief grant in the Imperial Valley, California.”
Remarking on Life’s manipulation of the meaning of Lange’s photograph, Lawrence Levine argues that it points to an ambivalence in Depression culture itself between a desire to witness both the “despair” and the “dignity” of those impoverished by the economic crisis (33-37). While Levine may be right about ambivalence in the culture, he fails to register what it meant that Life manipulated the photo and its caption so as to rid it of ambiguity. Life’s version of the image excises the insecurity and despair in favor of a paean to the “pioneer” spirit, a move that suggests that despair was not part of the experience of poverty.
Cunningham’s intro goes on for several more ¶s (as is appropriate in a 20-30 page essay), but you can already see how his account of Life Magazine’s decision to crop Lange’s photo serves to engage the reader in thinking about the core issue of his essay (how representations of the poor encode assumptions about what makes some poor people deserving of help, and others undeserving). And you can see how, in the second ¶, Cunningham opens with a summary of another scholar, whose view of the situation serves Cunningham as Counter-Thesis (a species of Preliminary Understanding): a backdrop against which Cunningham asserts his thesis claim.
Write a 2-¶ introduction for your essay. Use the first ¶ to give a vivid account of either your photograph or the circumstances of its creation. Use the second ¶ to voice both a preliminary understanding and a thesis claim. Your account of the situation should, ideally, raise an implicit question about the photo: for example, if you stress the photograph’s impact on X, you are working to engage your reader’s interest in what makes the photo have that impact. That implicit question gets answered twice in the next ¶, first by the essay’s preliminary understanding and then by its thesis.
In writing ¶1, take note that the essay assignment limits your use of sources to the CourseDocs site, and to webpages directly linked from its pages. If you need more information on your photograph than is presently found on the CourseDocs site, make sure you let me know.
Paste your intro into the comment field below, taking care to add an extra return between your ¶s.