Cotton Pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas (October 1935)

A day with a cotton crew

Shahn joined the photographic unit of the Resettlement Administration in 1935, and that autumn he set out on a long drive through the South. In a 1964 interview he summed up the trip in one line: "in other words I covered the mine country and the cotton country." The Arkansas leg produced this series, made in October 1935 in Pulaski County, the county around Little Rock.

The original captions, typed on the Farm Security Administration caption cards and kept by the Library of Congress, read like a timetable. Some frames are titled "Cotton pickers at 6:30 a.m., Alexander plantation" or "Cotton pickers ready for day's work, 6:30 a.m." Others show "Picking cotton," "Bringing in cotton for weighing" and "Weighing in cotton," and a last group is captioned "Cotton pickers at close of day" and "at end of day's work." Read in order, the negatives follow one crew from the morning start to the scale at night.

Who and what the photograph shows

The frame most often reproduced, catalogued simply as "Cotton pickers, Pulaski County, Arkansas," shows four young Black workers standing in the grass in front of a plank building with a slatted window. Each carries the long canvas picking sack on a strap over one shoulder. The man at the left holds a bundled coat; the man in work overalls leans on a stick; the young woman beside him, in a cloche hat and skirt, is smiling; and the man at the right, in a pale hat and trousers, carries what looks like a lunch pail. Their names were not recorded on the caption cards.

A second frame, taken moments apart, moves in closer on three of the same people. Its caption adds the fact that gives the series its weight: "Cotton pickers receiving sixty cents a day, Pulaski County, Arkansas."

What sixty cents a day meant

Shahn remembered the day nearly thirty years later. In his 1964 interview with Richard Doud for the Archives of American Art he recalled arranging to meet a group of cotton pickers who left at about 5:30 in the morning, early enough that their breath steamed in the cold. They took water in big milk cans that were warm by nine o'clock, and, he said, "those poor people were there, say twelve hours, at 5 cents per hour." Twelve hours at five cents comes to the sixty cents in the caption. He added that when he drove them back to the company store they spent about a quarter of their earnings at once on soft drinks.

The pictures were made at a hard moment for farm labor in eastern Arkansas. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas explains that the federal Agricultural Adjustment Administration paid planters to plow under part of the cotton crop, that half of that money was meant for tenants and sharecroppers but planters kept almost all of it, and that many planters then evicted their tenants. In July 1934 Black and white farmers in Poinsett County, in the northeast of the state, formed the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union in response, and the encyclopedia records that violence against its members was common from 1934 to 1936. Shahn's captions do not mention the union, but his series shows the wage labor at the center of that fight.

The young cotton picker

One of the most affecting frames in the group is a close view of a child in a sun hat picking cotton beside another worker's long sack. Its caption reads: "Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for colored children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking." The Library of Congress notes that this fuller title comes from Documenting America, 1935-1943, the 1988 book by Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan. The word "colored" is the caption writer's 1930s term; the point of the caption, that Black children's schooling was scheduled around the harvest, is a record of segregated education in the cotton South.

How Shahn made the pictures

Shahn worked with a small Leica and an attachment he called an angle finder, a viewfinder that let him look in one direction while the lens pointed in another. "I used what is called an angle finder," he told Doud, explaining that it let him "take away any self-consciousness" in the people he photographed. That helps explain the ease of the group by the wall: some of the pickers look off to the side, and one is mid-laugh. He also said that he thought of his pictures less as photographs than as "documents for myself," raw material for later work.

What to look for: the texture of the boards and the slatted window, which Shahn keeps parallel to the frame; the sacks, each worn the same way; and the film rebate and sprocket holes visible at the edges of the scan, a sign that the Library of Congress digitized the full, uncropped negative.

Which photographs this archive holds

This page is about the whole Pulaski County cotton series. Its main image is the Library of Congress negative LC-USF33-006028-M3 (digital file LC-DIG-fsa-8a16191), the group of four against the wall. The archive also holds the closer frame captioned "receiving sixty cents a day" (LC-USF33-006028-M4), the 6:30 a.m. frames from the Alexander plantation, the field, weighing and end-of-day frames, the "Young cotton picker" negative and several untitled frames the Library lists as possibly related. The Library of Congress dates the series to October 1935.

Later gelatin silver prints from the same negatives exist in museum collections. Harvard Art Museums, for example, holds an 8 x 10 inch print (P1970.3443) stamped "Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress" and inscribed on the back "Oct. '35 Shahn" and "Cotton pickers, Ark."