In this black and white image you can see a family of five and a dog standing on what looks likes a front porch. By the worn down clothes they are wearing and the poor state of the building they stand by, you can assume that they are a working class family and are struggling with poverty. You are immediately drawn to the man standing in the middle of the image, in front of the rest of his family. This may have been done on purpose to represent his importance to the family as the typical ‘bread-winner’, as during this era it was the husband who worked while the wife and children stayed at home.

The Great Depression was the worst economic downfall that has happened in American history. The stock market crash in October 1929 was the beginning of the Great Depression, and due to this by 1933 unemployment was at 25% and more than 5000 banks had gone out of business. The average family income during this time was $1,500, 40% less than what families usually earned before the start of the economic downfall, in turn leaving families stressed with just under half of their usual income gone. For his series ‘Cotton Tenants : Three Families’, Walker Evans photographed three families who were struggling with poverty to capture the effects of the Great Depression in Hale County, Alabama, and to expose the effects of this to the world. The people in the image above was one of the many families in that area who were facing destitution due to the economical decline during that era. At the time Evans photographed these three families, it was the height of the Great Depression and this was the time where people were finding it the hardest to cope. You can clearly see the effects it had on this family – they wouldn’t have been able to afford clean clothes, as portrayed by the rags they wore, nutritious food or the right equipment to fix and clean their house.

In this image you can see two women sat on the floor in the middle of the black and white image. They both look at the camera with two different expressions, the older woman having a slight frown on her face while the younger woman looks a bit happier with a hint of a smile on her lips. They look like they’ve been interrupted from the middle of a conversation that they were having. They seem comfortable in each other’s presence, which indicated that they’ve known each other for a while and have a bond. The older woman looks to be the younger woman’s grandmother, as they both look similar to each other. The room they’re sitting in seems to be the living room, with the television and numerous other decorations, including the grandfather clock in the background. By the look of the room they don’t look like they’re struggling with money, but they don’t look like they are a middle or high class family either.

In Latoya Ruby’s series ‘ The Notion of Family’, she looks at the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, through the use of her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania which became financially depressed after the fall of the steel industry in the 1970s-1980’s. To look at these issues she focuses on three generations of her family – her grandmother, her mother and herself – and photographs them in their home. She follows the social documentary style of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to create images which were inspired by Gordon Parks, who promoted the camera as a weapon for social justice. Her images, including the one above, are raw photographs of her family and captures the authenticity of the moment. With the use of black and white images, she is able to highlight the beauty of her home town and how this place has affected her family’s life along with the other people who lived in the area.

Comparison :

Both images include family – in Walker Evans’ image you can clearly see the family of five standing together on the porch, and in Latoya Ruby’s image you can see a grandmother and her granddaughter. When it comes to the contexts of their images, they are similar in the way in which they both look at the effect of economic downfall on families. Evans was exploring the effect of the Great Depression on families within small communities, while Ruby was looking at her own family in the time of racism and economic downfall in her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. However it is different in the way which while Evans was looking at multiple different families and how they were effected by a country-wide event, Ruby was only looking at the effects of economic downfall on her small hometown, and her own family. As Latoya Ruby was looking at her own family, she had more of a connection with those who she was photographing and knew them well, so she could shape her photographs to suit their personalities, lives, ect, whereas Walker Evans didn’t know the families personally and did not have that connection, so he may not have been able to take images which truly reflect who these people are. – unfinished