Text by Bruce Berman Milk was available in New Mexico during the Great Depression, although not always accessible to everyone. The Depression significantly impacted New Mexico’s economy, affecting both dairy farmers and consumers. While some individuals and families might have struggled to afford milk, it was still produced and distributed to some degree. Dairies still exist in New Mexico but the privately-owned dairies –like everything else– are rapidly disappearing.
Daragh Vaughn from Dublin Ireland at McDonald’s in Truth or Consequences, NM. He had had surgery for a genetic deformity. He already had the same surgery on his other hand. “To top that,” he says in his Irish brogue, “I’m a piano player!”
It’s probably hard to believe it, but I never saw this image of Russell Lee’s until this morning. This keeps happening. It either means I’m an unoriginal wannabe, or that there is still a lot out there that is similar to what used to be out there, and it’s still good “Cannon Fodder,” for a photographer.
The Postmistress, Iola Alvarez, in Garfield, New Mexico, claims these mailboxes were first installed in 1919.
New Post Office rules require that no one can look into another person’s mailbox,” so, says Iola, “I covered them up a “few years ago.”
Ila Alvarez has been at her current job in Garfield since 1988.
She loved the old mailboxes so she found a magazine, bought several issues, cut up the pictures of American flags that she found on its pages, snipped out the “stripes,” and turned them vertically and taped them into each box.
Problem solved. History preserved. A touch of patriotism achieved with a “defaced,” flag.
June 2010, Roper girl texting, Portales, NM, by Bruce Berman
1936, Daughter of Drought stricken farmer, by Russell Lee/FSA
Commentary by Bruce Berman
Hard Times. That’s what they called the 1930′s.
We hear this word a lot now, too, to describe our times.
These two photos, above, might be a good description of what are the differences between now and then.
In the 1930′s the material wealth of people diminished greatly as the country fell into Depression. Eventually, there got to be, for many people, well, nothing.
In the 2010′s, it may be, we got to a point where, well, we don’t have everything.
September 1938. Girls at a carnival in New Mexico by Russell Lee for the FSA.
by Mary Lamonica
If you compare Russell Lee’s photographs to those of other FSA photographers, Lee’s images often evoke the idea that people might have been laid low by the depression, but they certainly had not given up.
In their thousands of miles of travel for the FSA, Russell and Jean Lee found pride, optimism, and courage among the people they photographed and interviewed during the Great Depression. Jean Lee recounted what she felt were Americans’ defining qualities during that difficult era to interviewer Richard K. Doud of the Smithsonian Institution in June 1964:
“It was a tremendous pride that they all had. We saw them along ditch banks and they didn’t have anything, They were living on the ditch banks, they were picking wild berries to eat, because there was nothing else. But it was very seldom that you found a person who really felt whipped. Somehow they were going to go on until this afternoon, at least. Now they didn’t know what was going to happen tomorrow, but until late this afternoon, somehow it would work out all right. There was tremendous pride and tremendous courage; we found it everywhere.”
Drive through New Mexico today and you’ll find a state awash with vibrant cultures. Hispanics, Native Americans, Anglos, African Americans, and Asian Americans all call New Mexico home. Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Russell Lee and his boss, Roy Stryker, the head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) which employed Russell Lee and the other FSA shooters (including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon), knew many Americans were unfamiliar with Hispanics and Hispanic life. Racial laws supposedly providing “separate, but equal” facilities were anything but. Stryker and Lee were determined to do their part to change the situation by sending Lee on a lengthy documentary trip through the Southwest to showcase Hispanic life. New Mexico’s more than 221,000 Hispanics were the key draw.
Lee appeared to have first photographed Mexican Americans in 1937 during a swing through Minnesota. Lee encountered Hispanic sugar beet workers bringing in the year’s harvest. He and his wife Jean so loved Mexican culture that the two took their honeymoon in Mexico. Detailing Hispanic life became a priority for the photographer. The Lees made a preliminary trip to New Mexico in 1939 for the FSA, photographing Hispanic and Native American life around Taos.
Filling station in New Mexico. Boys pulling water from a well, photograph by Russell Lee
Essay by Mary Lamonica
Cars. By 1929, more than 26.5 million automobiles cris-crossed American roads. Between one-third and one-half of all families owned a vehicle when the stock market collapsed in October 1929.
Although many Americans lost homes and jobs during the Great Depression, those who could hung onto their automobiles and their radios. Both brought dreams of a better life, but cars might actually be able to get people there.
Cars, therefore, were more than mere vehicles of transportation during the depression years. Cars were hope. Cars were freedom. Cars often were homes, too, as abundant FSA photographs attest. It’s not surprising that so many people developed a bond with their cars during the 1930s.
The Great Depression forced other Americans to move backward, away from the burgeoning car culture. The FSA photographers frequently captured images of horses or mules hitched to wagons, headed down rural roads and main streets. Not everyone could afford (or maintain) Henry Ford’s $300 Model T (or a Dodge or an Oldsmobile) when jobs became scarce.
America’s car culture had far-reaching effects by the time of the Great Depression. Cars meant mobility, certainly. But cars also meant jobs, and not just for assembly-line workers in Michigan. As automobile ownership shifted from the province of the wealthy in the early 1900s and into the realm of the middle- and working classes by the 1920s, whole industries sprung up. Oil workers, service station mechanics, and attendants were needed. Roads had to be improved. Hotels and restaurants sprang up, seemingly overnight in some places, to meet travelers’ demands. Russell Lee photographed many such places as he traveled the nation’s new byways.
Commentary by Bruce Berman FUNK! Americans loved in 1939 and Americans love it in 2024. Not only that, but, the rest of the world loves that Americans love it. You don’t see giant hot dogs along the roadside in Belgium. Russell Lee recognized that the roadside was where Americans liked their “art.”
October 1938. “Princesses on float at the National Rice Festival parade.
Crowley, Louisiana by Russell Lee for the FSA.
Text by Bruce Berman
Russell Lee went to a lot of parades, festivals and public events. So do I. Most information-oriented photographers do. It’s a good place to shoot because people are busy having fun, not thinking too much about what purpose a photographer might have for the photographs and a good photographer can come home with a lot of images that show people doing things, living life, interacting.
Some call this Street Photography.
One thing about the two photographs above that are interesting to me: the “Queens,” in the Lee photographs are young. In mine, the Queen is in her sixties. The places I went in New Mexico did seem older. People, in the country, perhaps, were mostly Baby Boomers. There are young people in the rural areas of New Mexico but they reportedly head to the cities looking for work, and, perhaps, excitement. Some head to college and never return.
Whether my experiences can be substantiated by data, I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter because that’s not how I work, anyway.
I don’t go out to gather facts and data. I hunt for “feel,” and impression and, in the end, moments of magic. Whatever the facts are I can live with th the one you can read in a photograph. I do believe what I see and I see that rural, New Mexico and Texas is ageing. Perhaps it was this way in Russell Lee’s era, but I doubt.
My next step will be to go to more cities that Lee visited, places I know the young population of America has attracted, places that attracted Lee in his youth -Chicago, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Kansas City- and see if my theory “holds wa
