Depression Era photo evokes memories from ‘The Pandemic Diaries’
By Chris Honoré
Was 2023 our first full year when we felt as if the pandemic was truly behind us? Or will it be, for we who lived through it, always a memory, however dim?
Over the span of some three years, I wrote occasional essays titled “The Pandemic Diaries.” Those vignettes attempted to capture, like a snapshot, what we endured when the COVID-19 pandemic was in full force. And for those of us who experienced those endless months, saturated with uncertainty, now, upon reflection, can still seem surreal.
I realize now I was often searching for an analog. A resilient comparison. What follows below is but one example.
For millennia artists — writers, painters, sculptors and, more recently, photographers and filmmakers — have been driven to capture their meditations on periods of extreme dislocation, suffering and apprehension.
We who lived it will carry with us those stark, disturbing images of the pandemic, many memorialized: eerily empty streets; gowned and shielded health-care workers, their exhaustion written in their vacant stares; the haunting whisper of ventilators connected to the desperately ill; stretching lines of cars waiting at food banks; school halls and classrooms eerily silent, waiting; stores, both large and small, shuttered; refrigerator trucks idling near hospitals, shrouded in a fearful finality.
We lived in the all of it, the arc of history bending inextricably toward the unknown.
I came across the classic photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, a period in our history often used as an analog to profound social disconnection, sustained desperation, deep personal loss and economic ruination experienced by so many during the pandemic.
The stark image by Lange is of a migrant mother and three of her children, huddled together under a canvas lean-to tent. She is sitting, cradling a sleeping infant in her arms. A young boy stands next to her, leaning in, shielding himself, his back to the camera, as does his small sister, her face hidden behind her mother’s shoulder.
They are refugees of the heartland, a place of desiccated farmland, a landscape of unrelenting wind, their lives seemingly unbearable, all that was left behind layered with a patina of dust and despair. Their only choice was to drive west in hard-used cars and trucks, laden with what was salvageable.
Lange’s image captures the woman’s face, all angles and creases, her brow furrowed, her lips pressed together in a tight line, as if she had not felt, even fleetingly, any emotion that could beseech a smile or a shred of hope. Her eyes are narrowed against a harsh light as she grimly stares, unseeing, into the distance. Her sweater, covering a checkered shirt, is worn, one frayed sleeve revealing wispy threads hanging loose, unraveling, easily a metaphor.
What she endured can only be imagined. How did she come to be in this place? What has her journey been like? The photograph’s caption reads “Nipomo, California.”
And what is just outside that tent? A camp of sorts? A rest stop, if only for a night? What wave of harshness brought her to this moment? And if her gaze is lost in another place — perhaps filled with memories of where she began, or of thoughts about where this journey might end — then her emotions are clearly defined by an unrelenting apprehension.
Her moment is the Great Depression, an economic riptide that swept millions of Americans away, a time made manifest by breadlines, shanty towns, desperate men and women lost, their experiences to be etched forever in their memories, a referent voiced forever as before and after.
The images from the Depression are vastly different from ours; yet, in many ways, they are the same. Our neighborhoods were silent, doors closed, drapes tightly drawn, families, friends, perhaps strangers waiting inside. Unspeaking masked shoppers stood grimly in hushed lines in grocery stores and pharmacies. And taking creased bills in change, silently wondered where they had been before, whose hands they had passed through?
Everywhere the floors were marked with small red and blue admonishments to keep one’s distance. How close was too close? Even the hint of a greeting smile was lost behind cloth. Is this the new normal, we grimly wondered?
Or now, today, will our cascading memories, once so close, be burnished and distorted by time and only dimly remembered?
Email Ashland resident Chris Honoré at [email protected].
