My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose throats are also dry.It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and the strangeness of their voices deafened me.
I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled.
I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)
Jean Toomer, from “Harvest Song,” within Cane
The four harvest-themed photographs below are drawn from the collection of Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. During the FSA years (1937-1942), the photographic documentation project focused, among other subjects, on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. This topical emphasis is evident in Russell Lee’s two photographs — the 1938 Louisiana rice harvest (upper row, left) and the 1941 Washington wheat harvest (lower row, left) — and in Dorothea Lange’s 1939 photo of a migrant family’s arrival to hire-on for the Oregon potato harvest (upper row, right).
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Following the U.S. entry into World War II, the Office of War Information (1942-1944) succeeded the FSA as the visual documentation emphasis shifted to the war mobilization effort and bolstering the homefront citizenry. Ann Rosener’s September 1942 photograph illustrates this revamped aim as women took on work in factories and field, in this case picking asparagus in Illinois (below, right).
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Learn More:
- View Russell Lee’s 1938 photographs of the steps involved in the harvest in “rice country” in Louisiana.
- Three years later, Lee’s 1941 photographs of harvest time in the wheat fields of Walla Walla County, Washington, include striking portraits of the field hands engaged in this work.
- Last year’s Thanksgiving blog post was on Cornucopias, the “horns of plenty” symbolic of the bounty of harvest season.
- Still hungry? See more than 800 photographs which capture aspects of the harvest season in the collection of FSA/OWI Black-and-White Negatives.