DAY 180

SOCIAL & POLITICAL COMMENTARY

Family Structure

PYRAMID OF LIFE

A cotton sharecropper family snapped by Dorothea Lange in Cleveland, Mississippi, June 1937, reveals a portrait of a family struggling with poverty and the needs of a growing family. What the future holds for this family is unknown but clues are exposed in its composition.

The arrangement of the family members speaks to the social structure of a traditional family unit. The rectangular format of the photograph implies perspective or direction and, in this instance, pinpoints a moment on the trajectory of family life. Framed inside the construction of the home and porch, the dominant figure, a father, leans against the porch post, reflecting his position in the family at one glance as a means of support and at another the downfall of the family if removed. The father’s young children spill out next to him, falling into a pyramid arrangement. The mother figure sits at the pinnacle of the pyramid appearing to be far away, but because of her placement in the pyramid she becomes the actual perspective point to the whole arrangement.

The future metamorphosis of family life is revealed in the squirming children whose feet and bodies begin to break out of the pyramid shape and dangle away from the frame of the porch. Their movement indicates the perpetual motion available to enter the social and political fabric of life. —MLR

Cotton sharecropper family near Cleveland, Mississippi, 1937; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.