The Encounter, or, the Object Talks Back

This chapter looks at the rare occasions when poor people get to talk back to those middle-class people who have depicted them. Focusing on the famous photograph Migrant Mother, by Dorothea Lange, an analysis shows the hidden violence of being observed. Further, an account of Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the photograph, reveals her version of the encounter and her distress at being made to be the poster child of poverty. Walker Evans’s photographs are responded to by poet Maggie Anderson, and the people depicted in James Agee's and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men talk back to the issue of being exploited.