Seeing, sympathy, self (beyond one's own)

Walker Evans, but not Alabama

Bill Holm, in "The Music of Failure," writes about Jame Agee and Walker Evans portrayals of Alabama tenant farmers in the 1930s.    Agee uses "hundreds of pages of thundering prose" while Evans made "simple, direct photographs."  Holm asserts that both men showed that "at the bottom of everything is skin: under that, blood and bone."  That this is true of all human beings.  The difference is only that some are more able to mask this truth with "money earned, suit brand, car model, school degree, powerful army, big bombs, bootstrap rhetoric."

Later in the essay Holm offers his plea for authentic humanity (not his terminology).  Let me link it back to Agee and Evans.  Holm writes that a strong self, the ego, "requires first the power to sympathetically imagine something outside itself."  Wlaker's words and Evans' images help this happen by showing the "lives of other human beings."  Holm continues, the second necessity is "the capacity to love something outside the self."

Again and again this semester we have confronted this reality:  people are different from each other.  We are divided from each other by membership in various sorts of groups, "classes" if you will determined by biology, family, economic resources, social categories, place of residence, and the like.  Some have power and opportunities that others do not.  Again and again we have confronted the dilemma: how are we to bridge those differences?  And asked, is there commonality as well as difference?

Holm's answer: yes there is fundamental commonality and it is grounded in the human potential to see "death in things."  Yes, there are bridges built from recognizing that commonality that moves us beyond our individual-self and beyond our collective-self.  Yes, music, and photographs, and literature do this.

All well and good.  Two questions lurk:
1) We still wonder about some photos as intrusive and exploitative.
2)  I wonder about the photos we take of our selves and post for all to see.  Notice how seldom those reveal that we are "skin: under that blood and bone."
Evidently there is music, literature, and photography that obscures rather than showing the truth.