Walking Into the Dust

The farmer and his sons walk from left to right across the frame. The photograph is nearly square and black and white. Its whole upper half is airborne dust, grey and featureless, and there is no horizon line; the ground simply pales into the air. Left of centre sits a low shed of rough boards, its roof of corrugated metal sheets with some loose and bent up. A board door with a wooden latch bar stands in the wall, and at the right end a window opening is covered with a sheet of metal or board. Drifted dust lies against the base of the shed and up its walls.

Right of the shed stands a length of fence of upright boards and a few posts; beyond it, to the right, a wire fence on leaning posts runs away into the dust. The three figures pass in front of the shed. The man wears a dark coat and a wide-brimmed hat; the boy beside him wears light clothes and keeps his head down. Farther right, a smaller boy in a white shirt and dark trousers walks last, one arm raised to his face. The man's dark coat and the boys' light clothes are the strongest contrast in a grey photograph.

The ground underfoot is bare, drifted dust rippled like sand, with the stubs of fence posts and dead plants poking through the foreground. No vehicle, no animal, no crop, no tree, no lettering appears anywhere in the frame.

April 1936, Cimarron County

The Library of Congress catalogue entry for the photograph is short. The title is "Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma." The maker is Arthur Rothstein, 1915–1985, listed as photographer. The date is given as 1936 April, with no day. The medium is a black-and-white nitrate negative, 35mm, scanned under the digital ID ppmsc 00241. The negative is held in the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information collection, the New Deal documentary file, and the reproduction rights are listed as public domain; the scan can be downloaded freely.

What the photograph was made for, the record does not say. There is no assignment note and no caption beyond the title. The record names no one: not the farmer, not his sons, not the owner of the shed. It does not say where in Cimarron County the farm stood, what time of day the shutter opened, or what became of the family or the building. No wind speed, no visibility, no acreage, no crop. None of those facts appears in the record.

The shed, the fence, the three figures

Cimarron County is the westernmost county in Oklahoma, the far end of the Panhandle where the state runs out against New Mexico. The record says the photograph was made in April, but the frame shows none of April: no green, no planted field, no softening of the ground. Spring is the windy season on the southern plains, and the frame shows what wind does to bare ground. Dust lies drifted against the shed's walls as snow drifts against a barn. The roof sheets are bent up at the edges, and the shed's window opening is covered with a sheet of metal or board. The wire fence leans the way the three figures lean, all of them given the same direction by the wind.

What the frame does not show is the rest of the farm. No house appears in the frame, no well, no road to town. No vehicle stands in the yard; no livestock moves along the fence; no crop rises out of the ground. No road runs through the frame, and no other building, and no sign of any neighbor. There is no horizon, so the frame cannot say where the land ends and the air begins. It cannot say what time of day it is, because the light is flat and directionless. It cannot say how far the nearest town was, or what came next: whether the three went inside when the wind died, whether the family stayed on the place or gathered what could be carried and left. The photograph cannot show the grit in the air the three are breathing, or the noise of the wind. Rothstein is somewhere outside the frame, and so is everything after the shutter.

The three figures walk on past the shed into the dust. The man leads, and the boy beside him keeps his head down. The smaller boy's arm is raised to his face.