Cotton Pickers Waiting in Line to be Paid Off in Plantation Store 1939

Here is a photographic print made by Marion Post Wolcott. Wolcott’s photography has always struck me because of its simplicity and raw emotion. I can only imagine what it was like for her to wander the American South, documenting the lives of people during the Great Depression. The image is of children waiting to be paid for their work. What were they thinking? What was it like for them to toil in those fields? You can almost feel the textures of the cotton, and the thickness of the air. The expressions of the children speak to a profound sense of knowing. This is a photograph as an act of witness. I'm reminded that painting, like photography, can be a form of embodied expression which embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, allowing for multiple interpretations and meaning over fixed or definitive readings.