Eudora Welty, Carrying Home the Ice, 1936
I've stared at this photo endlessly, and until reading what the author had to say about the relationship between photography and writing, my reasons for the attraction haven't been clear.
Apart, of course, from being pissed off at the bullshit factor of heavily under-compensated kids being forced to carry heavy shit around on a scorcher. And the endlessly refracting paradoxical fact that without the sun, this ice couldn't be a lens, etc.
What I understand now is that this scene was always intended to be translated into words and, therefore, was probably never intended to be more than a mnemonic.
E.W. was teaching herself to see rather than trying to change the meaning of the scene with structural dirty tricks. The heavy utility value appeals to me—photography as a tool.
“The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there’s so much more of life that only words can convey—strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer’s direction from the start, not a photographer’s, or a recorder’s.”
Some other questions which the photo sparks:
-could a master be waiting for an after lunch coolant seeing as the sun was just past its zenith?
-was the master a relative of Eggleston, or young William Eggleston himself?
-are the kids looking down to avoid the sun or do they feel subservient to the photographer?
-had E.W. seen August Sander's Young Farmers hence the formal repetition?
-will the ice blocks have melted by the time the carriers reach their destination?
-will ice cool light which passes through it(no)?
-will the kids lie back, when no-one is looking, and place the ice blocks on their teen chests?
-will the ice carry the shallow, undernourished convex shapes for a time?
