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Facing Poverty: Towards a Theory of Articulation
Author(s): Sleglinde Lemke

Source: Amerikastudien / American Studies , 2010, Vol. 55, No. 1, Poverty and the
Culturalization of Class (2010), pp. 95-122
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Facing Poverty: Towards a Theory of Articulation
Sieglinde Lemke
In the earliest stages, perhaps we spoke too much about the working class, about su
cultures. Now, nobody talks about them at all. They talk about myself, my mother, m
father, my friends, and that is, of course, a very selective experience, especially in rela-
tion to classes and the society as a whole in which we operate, and which we are tryi
to transform. (Chen, "Interview with Stuart Hall" 403)
The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.

(Lister, "Povertyism")
ABSTRACT
This article has four parts. The first part reviews the newly emerging field of po
and highlights the divergence between the social sciences and philology. It surve
research on representations of poverty conducted in American Studies before ex
representations of poverty. A study of the transformations of poverty portraiture
of American documentary photography starts with a close reading of Dorothea L
Migrant Mother. The third part elaborates the paradox of poverty portraiture v
American Pictures. A contrastive analysis of two of his photos published thirty
veals the challenge of mediating between aesthetic and documentary impulses. Th
identifies a middle-class gaze as a conceptual counterpart to Laura Mulvey's m
final section integrates Stuart Hall's theory of cultural representation. Since his n
lation acknowledges both relations of dominance and the intersectionality of rac
class, this article finishes by sketching the contours of a theory of articulation.
Facing Poverty
In light of the rising attention within our field to poverty and clas
ful to remember that Poverty Studies is a vibrant and well-establish
research in the social sciences. For more than a century, social scienti
persuasions and backgrounds have grappled with causes and effec
economic inequality. W.E.B. DuBois's study The Philadelphia Negr
Robert Ezra Park's investigation of poverty in Europe, The Man Fart
(1912), as well as his later research on Chicago's ghettos, represent g
ing quantitative studies. Apart from these urban sociologists, schola
other disciplines (e. g. anthropologists, political scientists, geographer
torians, and moral philosophers) have produced important studies on a
into poverty in the United States and beyond. Why then, I wonder,
Studies a sustained field of research in the social sciences yet remain
oped if not wholly overlooked in the humanities, and specifically in t

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96 Sieglinde Lemke
departments? Perhaps the question we should be asking is why Americanists con-

cerned with representations of social inequality are primarily interested in ques-
tions of identity or textuality.
Among the many socio-economic studies focusing on the plight of the poor,
each decade of the twentieth century has put forth at least one classic.1 In philol-
ogy departments, comparatively few scholars seem to be interested in the lived
experience of the economically marginalized. In German Studies Elke Brüns re-
cently proclaimed a need for a 'social turn,' and in American Studies Walter Benn
Michaels has identified the need to address inequality based on class, rather than
race or gender. Literary and cultural studies must work hard to catch up with the
scholarship of the social sciences.
Six years before Michaels cautioned against an enthusiastic embrace of cultur-
al diversity and refusal of economic inequality in his bestseller, The Trouble with
Diversity (2006), bell hooks published Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000). 2
Her autobiographical and essayistic monograph is a harbinger of the currently
growing interest within American cultural studies in matters concerning 'class.'
In it, hooks explores why poverty has been overlooked in philology and Ameri-
can Studies departments all over the country. Her seemingly flippant observa-
tion that "no one wants to talk about class [because] it is not sexy or cute" is
apt. Just as poverty can hardly be considered a popular topic in mass culture or
the media, it cannot be called a 'privileged' research category in the humanities.3
hooks's bold statement, "We live in a society where the poor have no public voice"
(5), is furthermore noteworthy for its larger repercussions for Poverty Studies in
the humanities. While hooks blames 'society' for 'othering' and silencing the im-
poverished, her statement points to the key epistemological challenge scholars in
American cultural and literary studies have to confront. Instead of indicting aca-
demia, society, and the media for othering the poor and for practicing 'poverty-
ism,' academics need to examine cultural expressions that represent the lives and
worldview of the poor.4 This, however, is easier said than done.
1 In the Forties, the work of the Nobel laureate and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal ap-
peared; in the Fifties, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis postulated his notorious concept of "a cul-
ture of poverty"; Daniel P. Moynihan released his report on the "Crises of the Negro Family" in
the Sixties; the Seventies produced Herbert J. Gans's "Uses of Poverty"; the African American
sociologist William Julius Wilson examined The Truly Disadvantaged in the Eighties; and Pierre
Bourdieu's groundbreaking La Misère du Monde was published in the Nineties. Significantly, fed-
eral funding for poverty research rose from nearly $3 million in 1965 to just under $200 million in
1980, turning "the poverty research industry" into a booming sector (O'Connor 213).
2 Interestingly enough, Michaels mentions neither hooks's monograph nor Cora Kaplan's
special issue of PMLA, Rereading Class (2000) while proclaiming that academia and the left
today "obsessively interest [themselves] in issues that have nothing to do with economic inequal-
ity" (19).
3 When poverty is shown on TV, e. g. in Oprah's "Special Report: Inside the Lives of Amer-
ica's Poor," it is presented as both sentimental and voyeuristic. On her website, Oprah Winfrey
announces this feature as follows: "The dirty secret nobody wants to talk about: Thirty-seven
million people live this way."
4 Lister coins the term 'povertyism' in relation to the more familiar phenomena of racism
and sexism. Povertyism is about the infringement of human and citizenship rights. It is about

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Facing Poverty 97
In contemporary art, literature, and culture, the experience of the forty mil-
lion Americans officially recognized as 'poor' remains virtually invisible.5 There
are hardly any artistic expressions by poor people for poor people, or by poor peo-
ple for the rest.6 In effect, the American who resides in a tent city, urban ghetto,
trailer park, or on the street remains the veritable invisible (wo)man in literary, vi-
sual, and cultural studies.7 And if members of the middle class document the lives
of the "other half," as Jacob Riis did a hundred years back and as David Shipler
and Jonathan Kozol did not so long ago, they try to speak for the poor, hoping to
give 'them' a voice. But as long as the (wo)man farthest down has no voice, there
is no corpus. There is no text in this class.
Among the handful of scholars in American Studies who have confronted
the neglect of poverty as a critical key term in literary studies is Gavin Jones.
His monograph American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature
1840-1945 (2008) faces this "categorical blind spot" (15) by engaging in a com-
plex analysis of poverty in American literature, drawing attention to the aesthetic
dimension of poverty and acknowledging the multifaceted nature of poverty. To
strengthen the literary critical contribution to the field of Poverty Studies, Jones
engages a number of fundamental problems and deficits. Since "poverty" remains
a vaguely descriptive term for an isolated category, he thinks it is necessary to
the lack of recognition and respect, Lister argues. It describes attitudes and actions in which
people in poverty are "thought about, talked about and treated as 'Other' and inferior to the
rest of society. A dividing line is drawn between 'us' and 'them' and the dividing line is imbued
with negative judgments that construct 'the poor' variously as a source of moral contamination,
a threat, an undeserving economic burden, failures in the meritocratic race, an object of pity or
even as an exotic species to be studied."
5 The official number given in the 2009 U.S. Census Bureau report is 39.2 million; however,
poverty measures are a highly contested terrain since the official poverty measurement reflects
the income level of the 1960s. Based on the guidelines of any given assessment, who qualifies as
'poor' can lead to very divergent results. For example, the 2009 Census report determines that
19% of America's children and teenagers are raised in poverty- a total of 14 million. Marian
Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, claims that the number is twice that high:
28.4 million or 39% of America's children live in low-income families (10); since her numbers
are based on figures from the year 2007, we need to adjust them. Extrapolating on her assess-
ment, one can induce that today, roughly one out of two American children live in low income
families.
6 An exception to this invisibility is the realm of music. In hip hop, rap, ska, punk, one finds
occasional explicit references to the living conditions in the ghetto. However, lyrics that openly
express social critique, such as the old school hip hop song "The Message" by Grandmaster
Flash and The Furious Five, are still rare in light of the more commercial. Likewise, the music
magazine The Wire talks about the world of the poor, yet the articles (I read) are rarely about
the socioeconomic reality and harmful effects of poverty.
7 This cannot only be blamed on the indifference of the middle class because empirical
studies by William Julius Wilson have shown that poor people are on average less articulate than
those of the middle class. What is to blame is a lack of education and, according to Wilson's re-
search, poor children's test scores and level of articulation improve significantly when given ad-
equate support and educational training. The diverging assessment between hooks and Wilson
regarding the inarticulate or silent masses also attests to the disciplinary divide and diverging
perspectives between literary/cultural critics and sociologists. Among the few exceptions within
the realm of the media is laurajeanette's blog.

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98 Sieglinde Lemke
develop "a critical language capable of recognizing both the cultural (racial, eth-
nic, gendered) and the socioeconomic (class) dynamics of the category" (18).8 Al-
though he does not use the term 'intersectionality,' Jones advocates an intersec-
tional approach to poverty that acknowledges the interconnections of race, class
gender, and ethnicity.
Regarding methodology, he urges literary scholars to engage in close textual
analyses as well as to work out a "theoretical or a critical framework to situate lit-
erary works that have grappled with the ethical, cultural, and linguistic difficultie
of poverty as a substantive category of social being" (Jones xiii). Such an encom
passing approach to this long-overlooked category is timely. His close readings
offer a first step towards specifying the multidimensional category 'poverty' in
fiction. It is not surprising, however, that Jones focuses on literary texts publishe
between 1840 and 1945- notably, the works of Melville, Crane, Dreiser, Agee
Wright- because during that time the figure of 'the pauper' was still a distinct,
almost clichéd character, and most of these authors had personally experienced
poverty. It would be difficult to extend his study into the present.9 A monograp
on more contemporary literary representations of poverty, covering the time be-
tween the Second World War and the current economic crisis, has yet to be writ-
ten. Apparently, there is a lack of material and, most likely, also a lack of interest
in facing poverty. Perhaps one has to turn to other media and art forms to fin
representations of poverty.
In the visual arts, there is Cara A. Finnegan's study of FSA photographs, Pic-
turing Poverty (2003), which examines the visual language in depictions of the un
derclass during the Depression. Keith Gandal's Class Representation in Moder
Fiction and Film (2007) scrutinizes recurring themes (e. g. slumming) in literary
and visual representations of the lower class. In this book, Gandal, who has also
published a monograph on the spectacle of the slum in the works of Jacob Riis and
Stephen Crane, moves on to study more recent artistic representations of poverty
from the Thirties to the Nineties, ranging from Their Eyes Were Watching God
to Fight Club, thereby including cinematic renderings of 'class.' He is an excep-
tion to the rule; the few explorations of poverty in the visual arts concentrate on
the period around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century or on the
Depression Era. Not a single critical work discusses representations of poverty in
contemporary America.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the shocking effects of the cur-
rent financial crisis, which has increased the number of poor by some 2.5 million
Americans in just one year (U.S. Census Bureau), it seems curious that politically
engaged and self-acclaimed radical scholars within English departments through
out the country have not yet responded to this political reality. The research fiel
of Poverty Studies remains a blind spot on the map of contemporary American
Studies. In spite of the Cassandra calls to make socioeconomic suffering a cen-
8 For Jones's revealing differentiation between the category "class," which refers to the system
of capitalist production and consumption, and the subordinate concept "poverty," see Jones 8-9.
9 William Dow's recent publication on Narrating Class in American Fiction (2009) is an-
other case in point: it also focuses on the period from the 1840s to 1950s.

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Facing Poverty 99
trai critical concern, class and poverty remain underdeveloped categories lack-
ing theoretical or methodological sophistication. Among the few public appeals
for changing this dire neglect is a short article published in the online news blog
Inside Higher Education, entitled "Poverty Studies." "One favorable outcome,"
prophesizes Keith Gandal in his appeal to his colleagues, "of the current eco-
nomic crisis might be that literary studies finally puts poverty near the top of the
agenda and the center of the field."10 The crisis, he argues, might provide a wake-
up call: "It has reminded many of us, in the most painful way, that socioeconomic
suffering is not merely the others' problem. Let's take this crisis as an opportunity
to put poverty on the front burner in our profession, along with race and gender."
He ends his pep talk with a call to action: English professors should take on "a
leading role in promoting poverty studies and affirmative action for the economi-
cally disadvantaged."11 Whether the economic crisis leads to the long-overdue ex-
pansion of Poverty Studies as a vibrant research field in English and American
Studies departments or to the implementation of policy measures for the poor
remains to be seen.
Let's just imagine the unlikely scenario of hundreds of scholars in the humani-
ties becoming engaged in scrutinizing representations of poverty in fiction, the
visual arts, new media, and popular culture. What would be the theoretical frame-
work? What guiding questions and what approach would they choose? A good
starting point for investigating representations of poverty, I propose, is the im-
portant research of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies-
most notably the work of Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, and Paul Willis- because
it has grappled with British working class and youth culture as well as with more
theoretical reflections indebted to Antonio Gramsci and Neo-Marxist thought. A
good starting point for a closer analysis of visual representations of poverty is the
classic genre of documentary photography.
Poverty in American Social Documentary Photography
Susan Sontag's claim that, "to take a photograph is to participate in another

person's [...] mortality, vulnerability, mutability," draws attention to the inter-
personal dynamics between the photographer and the people she portrays {On
Photography 15). Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans echoes Sontag: "Making a
portrait is a fundamental artistic act- and the process of it is a very direct human
exchange, which is what I find interesting about it; the actual dynamics of vulner-
ability and exposure and embarrassment and honesty do not change, ever" (qtd.
in Matt 204). One of his black-and-white portraits, Andy on Baker Street (1993),
shows a young man sitting on the side-walk whose outfit, tattoos and dog suggest
10 Gandal's rationale for the indifference to poverty is noteworthy; he points out that very
few tenured professors in English departments have experienced poverty.
11 He concludes that "poverty is a problem, of course, that won't go away when this eco-
nomic crisis has passed, but this crisis might leave the literary profession more connected to it."
And one might add: maybe.

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100 Sieglinde Lemke
that he is homeless.12 In this case, the vulnerability, exposure, and embarrass-

ment belong to the subject more than the photographer. Andy comes across as a
sympathetic figure; he has a broad smile on his face while rolling his cigarette in a
casual manner. This portrait nevertheless demonstrates that "the meeting of two
subjectivities" changes depending on the encounter and the work produced by it
(Nochlin 29). Perhaps it goes without saying that in social documentary photogra-
phy and particularly in portraits of poor people the two subjectivities do not meet
on equal terms.
The impoverished subject is, obviously, more vulnerable than the artist. Con-
trolling the camera and the production of the photograph equals power. The sub-
ject, to use visual studies parlance, is the object of documentary photography pre-
cisely because he lacks capital. The poor person is relegated to the status of being
looked at. This is of course inevitably the case in all of portrait photography. In
light of the class hierarchy, this power relation has larger repercussions. Being a
passive object, the poor person is subjected to the professional gaze of the pho-
tographer and, once the portrait is exhibited, to the gaze of the spectator. Given
the stigma that the lowest class has to bear, the photographer has to confront,
willingly or unwillingly, a predetermined discourse.13
Even if the photographer's intention in depicting poverty is to raise an aware-
ness of the dire social conditions of the poor, and even if he manages to present
the subject in a 'positive' light, he runs the risk of engaging in voyeurism or being
patronizing. All photography invites voyeurism, but, given the class divisions that
are always already inscribed in poverty portraiture, the social divide and distance
between the two subjectivities is perhaps even more pronounced. To find his sub-
jects, the photographer assumes the role of an anthropologist. He enters a world
that is foreign to him, takes pictures, exposes the vulnerabilities of 'the other'; and
if he exhibits these photos, he does so to present these dire realities to a broader
(middle-class) audience. The photographer's good intention notwithstanding,
poverty portraits run the risk of visually exploiting the poor. Photographers have
increasingly become aware of this dilemma and have tried to find ways to change
the power structure (as I will show later). Yet, in poverty portraiture, 'subjectivity,'
or rather the relationship between the artist and the subject, is a thorny issue. The
imbalance between the photographer and the subject is a constitutive but precari-
ous element of social documentary photography. Artists working in this field are
confronted with the challenge to avoid hierarchical and potentially exploitative
relations.
From Jacob Riis to James Nachtwey, many documentary photographers have
used photography to pursue a political mission of documenting misery in an ef-
fort to effect social change. Their images often shock the viewer to shake us out
of our comfortable complacency; as such they run the risk of falling into the trap
of producing either blatantly propagandists or sensationalist, voyeuristic repre-
sentations of the poor. Portraits of poverty address head-on what the majority
of Americans, according to bell hooks, would rather not look at. These portraits
12 For a representation, see Tillmans.

13 See also Sontag, Regarding.

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Facing Poverty 101
reveal the nation's unpleasant, "dirty secret" and give us a glimpse into the lives of
the destitute. In Riis's photographs, for example, we see crowded, dirty, dark, di-
lapidated apartments, narrow, rat-infested alleys, and sad-looking, weary people.
Either the poor look frighteningly inhumane or they (often children) come across
as sympathetic creatures. These portraits of the so-called undeserving poor, a
term which in itself is a euphemism, tend to construct the poor as voiceless and
powerless. This well-meaning effort might lead to unwanted effects. By visually
emphasizing depravity, these images are prone to represent the poor as other,
which might evoke fear or disgust in the (middle-class) viewer. No empirical stud-
ies on the reception of poverty portraiture exist, but on a very general level it is
fair to argue that even well-intentioned representations of poverty can, unwill-
ingly, turn into negative representations. Whether we call it "othering" (hooks),
"povertyism" (Lister), or "pauperism" (Jones 20-23), the endeavor to engage ar-
tistically or academically with the poor is a risky affair.14
The most succinct but also simplistic assessment of the risks of portraying pov-
erty is "Staring Down Stereotypes: Writing about Poverty in America." In this ar-
ticle, the journalist Kathrine Boo somewhat flippantly refers to the two modes of
writing about, and we could add photographing, the poor as "poverty porn" and
"poverty pride." The former highlights difference and abnormalities, i. e. "aberra-
tional qualities of low-income people- gang banging, drug dealing, and the like"
(51). It tends to sensationalize poverty. The latter is the sentimental mode, which
presents poor people as innocent, deprived, suffering, and lacking in volition.15
The "poverty porn" school of reporting often concentrates on the heroic act of the
reporter because he risks his well-being to be part of the underclass. The "poverty
pride" school of reporting, in contrast, tends to pity the poor and blame the gov-
ernment. Concerned with what these commentators refer to as "the plight of the
poor," a phrase Boo finds patronizing, these writers elide the 'failings' of the poor.
Boo's catchy but apt distinction can be applied to visual representations of pov-
erty. Before I extend her argument to social documentary photography, however,
I would like to add that this dichotomy of what she calls poverty porn and pride
splits along a fault line in social scientific debates on the causes of poverty. For de-
cades, social scientists have heatedly debated if poverty is 'structural,' and hence
caused by an absence of human capital and a neglect of governmental support, or
'cultural,' and thus brought about as the result of aberrational, bad behavior. The
14 For more details on the concept of "povertyism" that Ruth Lister coins in relation to the
more familiar phenomena of racism and sexism, see her statement "Challenging Povertyism."
15 Boo's rhetoric and insight is worthy being quoted at length: "In the sentimental school
of poverty reporting, by contrast, poor people are rendered innocent, without volition- ciphers
subjected to horror upon horror in a monochromatically miserable place. You wouldn't know,
reading these stories, that violent crime and teenage births have declined in America in the last
decade or that in bad neighborhoods people sometimes laugh. Material privations are exagger-
ated, while the flaws of individuals are elided or racked up to government neglect. For writers
who care deeply about, to use a phrase I hate, 'the plight of the poor,' this insistence on virtue
is strategic, of course. But it contradicts something most of us know and accept in our personal
lives: that suffering doesn't always, or even usually, build character. So why do we expect people
with fewer resources and more social isolations to find it improving?" (52).

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102 Sieglinde Lemke
"culture of poverty theory," developed by Oscar Lewis and widely accepted in

liberal social science in the 1960s, emphasizes the cultural pathology of poverty
including the lack of self-esteem and the moral consequences of single parent-
hood. In his view, then, the behavioral pathology is what causes and sustains the
underclass. Of course, the term "poverty porn" does not presuppose that the poor
are to blame for their misery; nevertheless, it romanticizes the criminal aspects of
poverty: drugs, violence, gang life. This sentimentalizing of difference is, I would
argue, comparable to the psychic dynamic that underscores (race-based) primitiv-
ism.16 A fascination with the other, in this case the prowess of the 'underclass,' is
often generated by projections and emotional deficits of the self, in this case the
middle class.
Any photographer intending to depict the 'underclass' has to navigate the
Scylla of sensationalizing and Charybdis of sentimentalism. The paradox of pov-
erty portraiture- as a subgenre of social documentary photography- is grounded
in this very precarious dynamic. Over the twentieth century, photographers of
poverty have responded to this fundamental paradox in various ways. They have
come up with different strategies to resolve the paradox of poverty. To go beyond
the (overly) generalizing and hypothetical statements about the iconography of
poverty and its pitfalls, I propose to take a close look at one specific example:
Dorothea Lange 's Migrant Mother. Lange's classic portrait is a prototype of pov-
erty portraiture, and at the same time it illustrates the underlying paradox of rep-
resentation. This particular portrait has been dubbed "the celebrated icon of the
Depression" (Orvell 115) and "the American icon" of the Depression Era (Hari-
man and Lucaites 55). A close look at this visual icon of American poverty reveals
that its iconicity rests on a peculiar dialectic. It is almost a vexed image because it
shows economic scarcity as well as human dignity. While it affirms the visual rhet-
oric of Depression photography, this photo has transcended the era and emerged
as a universal icon of resilience becoming the emblem of mental buoyancy in the
face of severe economic adversity. Initially, the migrant mother appears endear-
ing and sympathetic, I venture to argue, and thereby it brings the viewer into close
contact with the subject.
The iconic power of this image is closely related to the cropping and compo-
sition of this particular black-and-white photo. Out of the six shots that Lange
took of Florence Owens Thompson, the one that ended up becoming popular and
thus widely circulated (reprinted nearly a million times), shows the mother in a
close-up. Instead of revealing the environment- the interior of the tent, the other
children, the frozen fields in the background- this photo zooms in on the facial
expressions of this destitute, hungry woman, who gracefully touches her chin as
she stares into an uncertain, bleak future. Her unkempt hair is tucked behind her
left ear, exposing an anxious expression on her worried, weather-beaten face.17
16 On this dynamic, see Lemke 86-88 and 144-46.

17 Cf. Trebord. Taken in a migrant camp in Nipomo, California in the winter of 1936, where
crops had frozen, this woman sold car tires to buy food. Other shots in this series use this scene
with a different frame that shows more of the environment and parts of the wagon in which
the migrant mother sits. Only this full-size portrait, however, is able to fully communicate the

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Facing Poverty 103
The woman is framed by an infant on her lap and two children with their backs
turned towards us, leaning on her shoulder.
The cropping turns the mother into a compelling pietà figure. Like Madonna
and her child, this American woman appears holy in light of her ability to endure
hardship. This image then denotes the burden of motherhood as exacerbated by
dire economic condition. Casting the mother in an aura of despair, it evokes the
pathos of destitution and deprivation. The image appears larger than life and be-
comes what Liz Wells calls "an icon of nobility and sadness in the face of destitu-
tion" (41). Indeed, this photo exceeds its own national and historical origins (the
American Depression Era) and comes to represent something universal about the
human spirit, exceeding Boo's simplistic dichotomy of porn and pride.
Looking at this desolate woman burdened with the responsibility of having to
raise her children in the face of an incredible hopelessness, the viewer, I would
argue, feels a sense of empathy and possibly even compassion. This photograph,
thus, allows us to transcend the anonymity of poverty. The viewer feels connected
with the subject and recognizes and truly acknowledges the mother's nobility and
stamina. Looking into her eyes, the spectator is granted a glimpse into her tor-
mented soul. In other words, depicting the pathos of destitution, Migrant Mother
invites a voyeurism that evokes empathy. Lange struggled with the line between
voyeurism and povertyism without turning the poor into the prototypical other.
Known and respected among critics and photographers for her sense of human-
ism, Lange overcomes the visual distance that is constitutive of the genre by con-
structing compassion. According to her own (self-deceptive) account of Migrant
Mother, "there was a sort of equality about it."18
Walker Evans's portraits of the Depression era, collected in the famous Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men, present another example of poverty iconography. The
difference between the two photographers is best expressed by Andrea Fisher who
acknowledges that both played an integral role in the construction of documen-
tary rhetoric, but that Evans was "more widely recognized as the paradigmatic
figure of documentary photography. Where Evans was thought of as a guarantor
of honest observation, with his flat-lit frontal shots, Lange was lauded as the keep-
er of documentary compassion" (Fisher 131).19 According to this gender-based
distinction, Evans's portraits of the tenant farmers are more 'honest,' carrying a
anguish, despair, and dignity of this family. This cropping turns her emotional anguish into the
center of attention.
18 In "The Assignment I'll Never Forget: Migrant Mother," Lange recollects driving by a
pea-pickers camp. Summoned by an inspiration, she approached the "hungry and desperate
mother, as if drawn by a magnet": "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age,
that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding
fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.
There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know
that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it." Her
sentimental account suggests that she was projecting.
19 The distinction between a female photographer, who is supposedly more compassionate,
and a male photographer, whose observations are more 'honest,' seems in itself question-beg-
ging. Evans's comments about his work, which include passionate assertions about his "love for
photography" (Rathbone xv, 35-36, 255), confirm this impression that he is primarily interested

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104 Sieglinde Lemke
studio-like quality, whereas Lange embodies documentary compassion. The pio-

neer of American social documentary photography then stands for the 'objective'
approach, and his female colleague prefers a subjective approach.
One major difference is, of course, that Lange's images stand alone whereas
Evans's photos are accompanied by James Agee's long and elaborate text. The
collaboration between the writer/journalist and the artist amounts to a unique,
multifaceted representation of poverty. Although I will refrain from a longer dis-
cussion, it is noteworthy that Agee was obsessed with the relation between them,
the artists, and their subjects. He romanticized the life of the poverty-stricken
tenant farmers, effusively praising his "beloved" poor (386). He lauded their hab-
its of decorating their shacks and repeatedly expressed a fondness for their pre-
sumed spiritual strength. According to Boo's definition of the term, Agee would
be a prime example of 'poverty porn,' not least because Agee's ruminations and
self-reflections of the genre of documentary draw the attention towards himself.
He incessantly laments the power of the observer over the subject, obsessing over
his guilt. While much can be said about Agee's tormented narrative, it suffices to
argue at this point that his response to the paradox of representation amounts to
a combination of a paternalistic attitude and self-deprecation.
The distance between the artists and their subjects is also captured in the images
themselves.20 Evans's portraits of poverty capture the pathos of destitution without
necessarily inviting compassion.21 Neither Agee nor Evans were able to transcend
the class divide. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men therefore the poor embody the
other. This is very common in depictions of poverty, Jones argues, because the texts
he examined in American Hungers envision the poor "as virtually another species
in their cultural-psychological-biological damage"; and Jones adds dryly, "such con-
tradictions are always possible when poverty is the text" (124). In the visual rhetoric
of povertyism and through this sentimental representation of the poor, the subject
comes across as virtually other and as such as practically inarticulate. In contrast,
Migrant Mother articulates a vision of poverty. To avoid making unwarranted as-
sumption, I shall move on to discuss more recent examples of poverty portraiture.
Jim Goldberg's Rich and Poor (1984) offers an interesting example because
each image is underscored with captions provided by the subjects themselves. His
expansive catalogue is an 'imagetext,' to use a term coined by W. J.T. Mitchell,
because all of his photos are accompanied by a short text such as "I don't like this
picture. I was acting for the photographer. I am not a lonely person in a busy room.
I have spunk" (n. pag.). Often the pictures and the captions underneath are not con-
in pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent" (qtd. in V. Goldberg 509) and is look-
ing for "truth and direct simplicity and honesty" (Interview with William Ferris 38).
20 The fact that Evans used a large-format 8 x 10 in view camera, which he therefore placed
directly in front of his subject, enhanced the distance between him and his subjects, thus creat-
ing the impression of a dispassionate perspective.
n Whereas Agee stayed for a time in the tiny tarmhouse ot one ramily, bvans chose to
stay "in a nearby hotel" (Journey). They mostly felt uncomfortable interacting with the tenants,
who, in turn, thought of them as intruders. A recent interview revealed that "the son of Floyd
Burroughs was also reportedly angry because the family was cast in a light that they couldn't do
any better, that they were doomed, ignorant" (Whitford).

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Facing Poverty 105
gruent, thus allowing for a tension between the image and the text that opens up
an interesting semantic space. The captions symbolically empower the subject and
therefore undermine the power relation between the photographer and the subject.
As each caption is a direct quote, it gives its subject a voice, and Goldberg's proj-
ect turns into a collaborative act of self-representation. The viewer learns about
the subject's worldview and self-understanding, he is implicated in this process of
collective self-representation. Compared to the conventional image-spectator rela-
tion in portraiture, Goldberg tries to enhance the visual interaction. His vision of
poor people differs from that of Lange and Evans as he undermines the constitu-
tive divide of documentary photography by blurring the boundary between viewer
and subject. This implicit claim to authenticity is part of Goldberg's strategy to
claim further authority for his own project, and as such, it is also somewhat self-
congratulatory. Nevertheless, these images don't invite compassion; they openly
articulate opinions, feelings, fears, self-betrayal, and dreams.
Similarly Howard Schatz's Homeless: Portraits of Americans in Hard Times
(1993) endeavors to also let the subjects speak for themselves. These well-lit por-
traits of interesting and often attractive homeless people have a more pronounced-
ly artistic quality than Goldberg's. Schatz's captions are much longer, and Schatz's
assistant also conducted interviews that are published in Homeless. They give the
subjects more than a voice.22 In this collaboration between photographer and sub-
ject, the poor are able to articulate their opinions, their worldview, and their self-
understanding, all of which are then communicated to the (middle-class) viewer.
Schatz and Goldberg's new approach to documentary photography, Orvell argues,
was motivated by their efforts to increase the visibility of the poor at a time when
they (the poor) were forsaken by the government (153-54). It was during the 1980s
and 1990s that public assistance and welfare programs were drastically cut, exac-
erbating the paradox of poverty amidst plenty.
When considering the diachronic dimension of American documentary pho-
tography and poverty portraits, a paradigm shift in representations of the poor
between the Great Depression and the Reagan and Bush eras is unmistakable. In
the works of Goldberg and Schatz, published in the 1980s and 1990s, the scale tips
slightly in favor of the subject, as Orvell maintains: "The voicing of the subject-
through subject-authored captions or through the subjects taking of pictures-
represents a conscious break with tradition and a healthy enlargement of the dis-
course of photography" (155). This break or enlargement coincides with a move
from representation towards self-representation. It foreshortens the distance that
has been constitutive of the genre.23
22 For example, the caption to the portrait of Penny Rodriguez reads in part: "I live in the
park. I try to get a place to stay. I hustle. I try to stay alive. I get things and try to sell them for a
higher price. Weed, crack, little dresses; I go in shops and I steal, and sell it for a lower price. I've
been living like this for about three years. I was abused. All through my life. It still happens now.
My parents are well off in money, but they're not well off in the brain. My parents are separated;
my mom, her main concern is herself. [. . .] I did a lot of things I regret [...]. I'm pregnant [...]. I'm
going to have the baby, and I'm going back to school" (qtd. in Orvell 154).
" Another example is Jim Hubbard, who empowered children living in homeless shelters
by letting them shoot their own photos. Thus, they were given a voice, metaphorically speak-

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106 Sieglinde Lemke
Recent approaches to poverty portraiture try to avoid the pitfalls of poverty-

ism. Instead of othering the poor, they attempt to empower them. Instead of being
the mere passive object of the gaze, the subject talks back. Does this paradigm
shift also disrupt the mode of reception? Although Lange 's and Evans's portraits
try to bring out the personality and humanity of their subjects, they neverthe-
less turn poverty into a spectacle. In spite of Evans's passionate concern with
representational honesty and truth, his images of people in poverty turn them
into fascinating figures, often set against a well-chosen background, to attract the
viewer's gaze.
One of the most radical attempts to overcome the social hierarchy that is quint-
essential to documentary photography is Jacob Holdt's American Pictures (1977).
Published between the two representational paradigms discussed above, his pic-
tures portray the devastating reality of poverty and racism in the Southern United
States. His documents of poverty, Orvell observes, "are among the most shocking
and disturbing images ever made about American life" (131). What we see are
over a thousand often appalling depictions of impoverished people, drug-addicts,
the homeless and the working poor, as well as a few images of rich Americans.
The Danish photographer Holdt was able to produce this remarkable reportage,
Orvell maintains, because he was seeing America "from the outside."24 1 would
argue the opposite; Holdt is actually a cultural insider to the world he so vividly
portrays in American Pictures.
Holdt is the son of a Danish minister and therefore of a middle-class origin.
At the age of twenty-three, the high school drop-out and hippy Jacob decided to
hitchhike across North America. Touring the United States for five years (1970-
75), this sympathetic young man with long hair was frequently invited as an over-
night guest. On his Odyssey he stayed in the homes of prostitutes, drug addicts,
single mothers, or with the most destitute families. There were times when he
slept on the street or in bug-infested shacks with rats and cockroaches crawling
over him. What is so remarkable about Holdt's portraits derives from his hav-
ing lived with his subjects, whom he considers his friends and with whom he has
kept in touch by now for over thirty years.25 This sets him apart from Lange, who
merely exchanged a few words with the migrant mother, as well as Evans, who felt
ing, and quite literally speaking, the means by which they could produce images that articu-
lated their own perspective. Shooting Back: A Photographic View of Life by Homeless Children
(1991) presents their environment through their own eyes. Thus, they were able to represent
themselves, at least to a certain extent.
24 "America Seen from the Outside" is the title of the subchapter in Orvell's American Pho-
tography that discusses Holdťs American Pictures next to The New American Ghetto, a docu-
mentary photography book by the Chilean-born Camilo José Vergara (131).
25 When he gave a lecture at the University of Freiburg recently, his slide-show included
the original images from 1977 as well as photos he took in the last four years when visiting with
his friends; many of whom were still living in the same destitute place, some had ended up in
prison, and others Holdt visited on their death bed. Thus, he bridges the world of the lecture hall
and the homes of his poor friends. Interestingly, Holdt's slide shows, which he has presented on
various campuses across the United States, including all the Ivy League schools, draw a large
crowd. They have a turn-out of up to 2,000 people, which suggests that Americans are eager to
confront this tabooed topic.

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Facing Poverty 107
extremely uncomfortable during the entire time he stayed with the tenant fami-
lies. Holdt, however, had very close and often sexually intimate relationships with
his subjects.26 To his African American friends and lovers, the young Dane must
have come across as an exotic, charming outsider, whom they endearingly called
the man "with a braided beard."27 But at the same time he was a tramp and a vaga-
bond with little or no money in his pocket. He slept on the street when he couldn't
afford a hotel, and when he didn't even have the money to buy his next roll of
film, he donated blood.28 In other words, his portrait of America almost quali-
fies as a portrait of the poor by the poor. The close or synecdochical relation of
the photographer Holdt to his subjects distinguishes him from most documentary
photographers. Furthermore, he used a very cheap camera (a thirty-dollar Canon
Dial) when interacting with his subjects, which contributes to the impression that
American Pictures presents an insider's view.29
His paradigm of representation is strongly based on intimacy, which changes
the power dynamics. Nevertheless, Holdt is aware of the hierarchical relation that
shapes his encounter with his subjects:
The only thing that has any meaning for me in my journey is being together with these
lonesome and ship-wrecked souls. My photographic hobby is really, when all is said and
done, nothing more than an exploitation of the suffering, which will probably never
come to contribute to an alleviation of it. But still I can't stop registering it, because in
some way or other it must get out to the outside world. (76-83)
His confession points to another pernicious paradox at the core of poverty por-
traiture: on the one hand, there is the desire, or political agenda, to show the
world the nightmare of American poverty. On the other hand, there is the con-
cern that these pictures, once they reach a middle-class audience, sensationalize
and exploit human suffering. To account for the nuances, we must take a closer
look.30
26 In a matter-of-fact tone of voice, he writes: "Many of these relationships were sexual in

origin. It was often as if you had to pass such a threshold to reach the intimacy that lets you
open up to each other" (americanpictures.com). Of course, cross-racial sexual encounters did
not come naturally. Particularly, in the early seventies, interracial sex and marriages were still
uncommon. One might surmise that Holdt, being from Europe, was more welcome in the South
than a white American.
27 This as well as the following quotations, and the additional information provided in the
following footnotes, are taken from Holdt's website americanpictures.com. The photographs
collected in American Pictures are also available on this site.
28 At one point, his camera was damaged, but he could not afford to get it fixed. It took him
an entire year until he had saved enough money ($26) to be able to pay for the repairs.
29 I believe that Holdt is the only photographer who went to such length to portray the poor.
Although he is from a middle-class background, he identified as poor.
30 Orvell describes Holdt's style "as unsubtle, at times brutishly naïve [deliberately eliding]
aesthetic issues to make the content, the literal reality of the images, speak to the viewer in lan-
guage that is unembellished" (132).

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108 Sieglinde Lemke
American Pictures: A Close Reading
Fig. 1: Jacob Holdt, Untitled, American Pictures.
The composition of this dark colored photograph by Jacob Holdt draws the
viewer's attention to the person on the left, the table in the middle, and then on to
the rustic wooden door on the right-hand side of the photo, which stands ajar. Its
rough edge is splintered. Without a doorknob, one runs the risk of hurting oneself
when closing it. The middle part of the photo shows food items scattered on the
table. The makeshift quality of these items that seem carelessly displayed denotes
scarcity. There is no cabinet, and the predominance of starch and sugar bags on
the table points to an absence of nutritious food. The wall in the back with its
broken wooden panels, awkward brick imitation, and torn wallpaper expose the
dilapidated state of this cabin. Yet, this still life of scarcity and malnutrition also
includes a tablecloth and a curtain.
On the left-hand side sits a slumped figure. Is it a man or a woman? In any
case, the body language- the clasped hands, drooping shoulders and sullen facial
expression- suggests that the subject is lonely, weary, and downtrodden. This part
of the image conveys a sense of hopelessness and despair. One can almost feel the
heavy burden on his or her shoulders.
The documenting eye of the photographer captures the interior of this shack to
connote pain (door), dearth (table), and despair (person). It also allows the viewer
to glimpse the material surroundings of poor Southerners, suggesting that people
in poverty suffer from a sense of constraint and powerlessness. In trying to capture
this with his camera, Holdt had to confront his own sense of powerlessness: "The
powerlessness I felt as a photographer towards these stifling sensations mirrored
the powerlessness they impose on the trapped poor. Even if I could have afforded
a wide angle lens to record the narrowness, such psychic sensations simply can't
be photographed for an outside observer who doesn't already know them" (63).

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Facing Poverty 109
Holdťs pictures testify to human suffering. These shocking snapshots are devoid
of artistic embellishments; they refrain from idealizing poverty. Far from showing
the humanity and dignity that Lange constructed in Migrant Mother, Holdt paints
a darker picture of Ida, which is the name of the woman on the left. His manifes-
tation presents poverty in its domestic context without aesthetizing it. Holdt has
repeatedly and explicitly stated that he has "never been interested in photography
as art" and thinks of himself as a "traveler" whose photos are nothing but visual
narratives on racism (americanpictures.com).31 Accordingly, he comes across as a
social activist, rather than an artist.32
In spite of Holdťs insistence, Christoph Ribbat points to a fascinating trans-
formation in which the snapshots of the Seventies become "high art" thirty years
later; Holdt "creates high art using low tech" (178). His new catalogue United
States 1970-1975 (2007) presents a collection of the original photos in a modified
glossy and colorful style, thus turning his documentary snapshots into works of
art.33 Thanks to the photographer's "incorruptible eye" (171), Ribbat maintains,
these artistic photos remain "teaching material against racism and injustice"
(178). When Ribbat goes on to claim that Holdt represents a "difficult case in
contemporary art" (179; emphasis in the original), he refers primarily to the racial
problem of depicting "the suffering of black America": "This constitutes a prob-
lem in so many ways right there, because every white observer of the non-white,
no matter how generous, high-spirited, and long-haired, will always frame things
from the point of view of the powerful. [. . .] And doesn't Holdt exoticize the black
body here?" (179-80). This rhetorical question is followed by his assessment of
"the photographic act as a re-humiliation of those already humiliated by poverty"
(180).34 While his statement reconfirms the aforementioned paradox of poverty
portraiture, the significance of United States 1970-1975 is precisely that it tries
to work against this paradox. This new edition tries to counterbalance the bleak
reality by enhancing the aesthetic dimension. By Photoshop-ing Holdťs originals,
the remakes take on a pronounced artistic aura. In contrast to American Pictures,
which hardly qualifies as 'high art,' the images in United States live up to that
label.35 To gain a better understanding of the before-and-after effect, I shall con-
31 He considers himself a "traveling person- a white, male, foreign, outsider, heterosexual,

Christian, oppressor, un-educated, penniless hitchhiker" (americanpictures.com). In American
Pictures, he refers to his "hobby" of taking photographs and declares that his camera served as
a diary allowing him to remember the people he met on his travels.
32 See Kippenberger. On his extensive website, Holdt exceeds his role as a photographer
who depicts shocking social scenes because he elaborates on the causes of racism. There is an-
other video of a young, blue-eyed blond male who admits to having killed so many African
American men that he cannot recall the exact number. Holdt then comments on the psychologi-
cal disposition of this murderer.
33 Holdťs exhibition at Copenhagen's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2009), which
presents Holdťs photos as large colorful prints, further indicates this shift towards a more ar-
tistic style.
34 To do justice to this quote, I want to add that Ribbat also cites Holdťs statement about his
self-doubts concerning the exploitation of the suffering poor (179).
35 It might be noteworthy that it was not Holdt himself who reworked those images, but the
project was initiated by Gwin Zegal, the curator of the exhibition United States.

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110 Sieglinde Lemke
centrate on one particular image, Holdt's "Ida and Joe," also taken in the shack
discussed above.
Fig. 2: Jacob Holdt, "Ida and Joe," United States, ed. Sother and Cottin.
In the back of the catalogue we read that the two people depicted in this scene
are named Ida and Joe.36 The overall mood of this image differs drastically from
the original. Ida is giggling; Joe kicks back in his chair laughing. There is a pro-
nounced narrative dimension to this photo depicting the couple's interaction and
mutual affection. Due to the lighting, the middle part of the image assumes cen-
trality. The pink curtain, the rifle, the kerosene lamp, and the bright, ripped piece
of wallpaper, which looks like a ready-made glued to the wall, draw the spectators'
attention towards the center. Instead of a three-part composition, a number of
details and objects structure the image. The dark red ring on Ida's pinky finger,
inexistent in the original, represents what Roland Barthes calls the punctum. It is
a detail that sticks out and attracts the viewer's gaze. It pricks {se pique) or wounds
the observer. The ring attracts our gaze and leads it to register other details of this
scene such as the rifle in Joe's lap. Although the visual references to poverty are
36 The entry in the list of plates reads as follows: "Ida and Joe in their shack in Alabama.
Ida and Joe have lived together most of their lives far out on the back roads in Alabama's dense
forest, where hardly anybody knows them. Over the years, they have become some of my dearest
friends, and they love when I bring Scandinavian visitors with me on my visits" (n. pag.). Thus,
Ida is neither a lonely person, nor is she ashamed of her modest home.

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Facing Poverty 111
still there, they play a secondary role. By Photoshop-ing the left-hand side, dark-
ening it, the demolition of the wall panel is rendered invisible. The documentary
quality recedes into the background, and an artistic, staged, and fictional quality
comes to the fore.
Ida does not appear to feel trapped or powerless; there is something mysteri-
ous about this image. Looking at Ida's face, the original shows her averting her
gaze, but in the remake her facial expression is lit up. The gaze of the viewer wan-
ders from the ring to her face inviting the observer to grapple with the punctum.
What is the source of visual pleasure that we gain from looking at this portrait?
What kind of gaze does the remake invite and how does it differ from the other,
the solitary, Ida?
To determine the middle-class gaze that these images presuppose and con-
struct, I rely on Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."
Mulvey bases her argument on the premise that the patriarchal is a phallocentric
society and therefore recognizes the male gender and the sexuality of men as the
dominant norm. If one were to apply her argument to class issues, it suggests itself
that the middle and upper-middle class assumes the normative position in capital-
ist societies. Just like phallocentrism depends on the image of a castrated woman,
capitalism depends on the image and threat of economic castration. The comfort-
able class- and this has been one of the painful messages of the economic cri-
sis-fears the descent into poverty. Moreover, there is the phobia of redistribution.
The idea of woman as lack (of a phallus) drives phallocentric culture, and it
also determines classic Hollywood cinema. Mulvey's conception of the male gaze
postulates a masculine subject at the core of all social interchanges, including the
cinematic apparatus. Thus, looking at the subjugated woman brings visual plea-
sure: "The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on
the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world," writes
Mulvey (438). Likewise, poverty portraiture in a capitalist society depends on the
image of a humiliated low-income subject to give order to the middle-class world.
In that sense the middle-class gaze, as it were, gains visual pleasure from look-
ing at images such as Evans's or Lange's, or Holdt's photo of Ida, because it expos-
es America's 'dirty secret.' Looking at Holdt's 2007 version relates to the colorful
and aesthetic presentation. By raising poverty to the level of art, the liberal viewer
(myself included) enjoys and denies the pain of others. The source of visual plea-
sure is of a slightly different nature. When 'the real' is sugar-coated with the gloss
of high art, this image becomes 'poverty light.' The staging of the real turns Ida
and Joe into objects of the spectator's scopophilia. Interestingly enough, Holdt
himself foresaw the fate of his images championed by the liberal gaze and com-
mented on the dangers of co-option by "the buffer-troops of capitalism."37
37 Holdt calls rich liberal whites concerned about the "problems of the ghetto" "the buffer-
troops of capitalism" because they "absorb any critique of the system and distort and avert it
by consentingly raising it to the level of art. This is also what may happen with my photographs.
These affluent liberals, whom I came to hate and love at the same time, will give me all possible
support in publishing and exhibiting my critique of their society, shocked at the things I have
seen in America and ashamed" (qtd. in Ribbat 177).

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112 Sieglinde Lemke
What have we gained from looking at and comparing these two images? At
a first glance, the 1977 image of a solitary sitter presents a seemingly powerless,
apathetic person. This impression confirms the cliché that poverty weighs people
down and makes them inhuman. The poor epitomize the other. Since this image
presents otherness at the intersection of class and race, it perpetuates povertyism
in spite of its intentions to negate it. The 2007 image, by contrast, captures a light-
hearted, erotic, and more humane mood. It is an artistic and, to the middle-class
gaze, probably more appealing representation of poverty. The fact that this image
might be more appealing to the middle-class spectator makes it, one might specu-
late, appalling. To put it in a nutshell, the aesthetic and the documentary impulse
make up the janus-face of contemporary poverty portraiture. This very juncture
also provides the source of the images' aesthetic appeal.
What we gain from this contrastive analysis then is threefold. Firstly, analyzing
poverty portraits demands a self-critical attitude towards preconceived notions
regarding the misery of the economically impoverished. Counterfactual evidence
lurks behind the corner. There is despair, there are moments of comic relief, and
there is the full range of emotions often overlooked in assessments of poverty.
Secondly, any analysis has to address the mode of reception to determine the
middle-class gaze. Thirdly, what sets these two images apart from the represen-
tational paradigm of the Depression Era relates to the close bond between the
photographer and the subject. This connection influences the iconography of pov-
erty portraiture in significant ways. When the photographer assumes the role of a
participant observer who establishes close ties with his subject, his photos become
autobiographical statements. American Pictures represents a multi-facetted ver-
sion of poverty portraiture since it is a combination of self-portrait, snap-shot,
and documentary.38 On a theoretical level, Holdťs photos are shocking, I believe,
because they disrupt our understanding of the concept of representation.
Theories of representation- Stuart Hall offers a good example- focus on the
cultural work of an image or a text, thereby foregrounding its constructed nature
and political effect. Etymologically, representations presuppose that someone
speaks for someone else. As such they are inherently political. Compared to those
relationships between the artist/photographer and the subject that are based on
a metaphoric relation- one based on substitution-, Holdťs relationship to his
subjects is of a more métonymie nature grounded in contiguity.39 His friendship
with Ida is clear in both photos through Ida's obliviousness to the presence of the
photographer. As discussed above, these two photos express different structures
of feeling that are not only fundamental to living in poverty: they are fundamental
to what it means to be human regardless of socioeconomic status.
On an analytic and theoretical level, Holdťs life work, which spans thirty years
of portraying poverty, offers an example of poverty portraiture that goes beyond
38 The mode of production is unique because of Holdťs "insatiable longing for contact," as
Ribbat aptly puts it (179), but also because this photo book combines a number of genres includ-
ing travel writing, political essay, letters, adventure tales, poems, philosophical reflections and
assessments of the American way of life.
39 The distinction goes back to a conversation I had with Ulla Haselstein. I believe this dis-
tinction is helpful in establishing the concept of articulation.

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Facing Poverty 113
the established understanding of representation. It provides the starting point for

rethinking the concept of representation. Since Stuart Hall provided the most sus-
tained and comprehensive approach to cultural representation, identity, and the
intersectionality of race, gender, and class, I shall first discuss his definition of the
term before introducing an alternative concept that might be helpful in analyzing
representations of poverty.40
Representation
Stuart Hall's interest in representation congeals in his work on racial stereo-

types, yet his approach, and particularly his volume Representation: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices (1997), offers a good starting point for
theorizing representations of class and poverty. In chapter four, Hall elaborates
on the spectacle of the other by analyzing how racial difference is constructed
in various visual texts (photos of black athletes, colonial images and paintings,
etchings of slaves, screen shots from movies starring black actors, etc.), ranging
from the Hottentot Venus to Mappelthorpe. His semiotic approach accords with
the constructivist assumption that meaning is never fixed or inherent, but always
already constructed and therefore relational. As cultural codes, conceptual maps,
and our language shape our understanding of a particular representation, its
meaning is produced in a process of encoding and decoding. The artist encodes
social conventions and codes while the viewer makes sense of it according to his
personal experience and the socio-historical context in which he lives. This "sig-
nifying practice," to use Hall's subtitle, is also subject to change as meanings shift
and as the cultural codes change. Signification is, ultimately, an open and chang-
ing process.
Hall develops his theory of representation in a discussion of Foucault's reading
of Las Meninas. Given that Diego Velasquez's famous painting depicts, as the title
indicates, maids of honor and two midget servants, as well as the princess (Infanta
Margarita Teresa) and the Royal couple (Philip IV and Queen Mariana) seen in
the mirror in the background, this painting captures the hierarchy between the
(dwarfed) servant and the (monarchic) sovereign. In his attempt to make sense
of Las Meninas in particular and the "the work of representation" in general,
he raises the question "Where is 'the subject'?" The quotation mark signals that
Hall's understanding of the concept coincides with Foucault's poststructuralist
critique of the notion of an autonomous subject. Both Hall and Foucault seem to
agree that the subject of this representation is neither the princess nor the royal
couple. Accordingly, he answers the question as follows:
40 To my knowledge, there is no sustained theory of cultural representation that focuses

on class binaries, nor is there a convincing Marxist theory of representation. A Google search
"Marxist theory of representation" produces five entries, all of which deal with Ethiopia. Al-
though there are a number of important Marxist interventions in cultural studies, most notably
Fredric Jameson's and Gayatri Spivak's works, they have little to contribute to Poverty Studies.
In that light, Hall's theory of representation is a good starting point.

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114 Sieglinde Lemke
First of all there is us, the spectator [...]. Then there is the painter who painted the scene
[...]. We may also say that the scene makes sense in relation to the court figure standing
on the stair at the back [...]. Finally consider the mirror on the back wall [...]. Somehow
the discourse of the painting positions us in the place of the Sovereign. (60-61)
In accordance with Foucault, Hall emphasizes the open process of signification.

In Hall's reading, Las Meninas is not about class hierarchies (between the maids
and the princess), but rather about the practice of looking, which makes the spec-
tator the subject of Las Meninas.41 His account of this visual representation fo-
cuses on the process of looking, which explains his fascination with an image that
illustrates the visual ambiguities underlying "the discourse of the painting," Hall
concludes in poststructuralist parlance (59).
There is a striking discrepancy between this chapter, "The Work of Repre-
sentation," in which Hall elaborates his overall theory of representation, and the
chapter in which Hall applies his semiotic approach to the construction of racial
difference ("The Spectacle of the 'Other'"). The latter, he claims, moves beyond a
Foucauldian theoretical approach because it actually applies these general ideas.
What remains unclear is if and how Hall's theory of representation differs from
that of Foucault and if Hall's theory can be applied to representations of class
differences.42
Two chapters of Representation offer close readings of visual representations
of race, two concentrate on gender, and a chapter by Peter Hamilton grapples with
"Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Post- War Humanist Photog-
raphy" (75). This chapter analyzes roughly forty photos portraying the classe
populaire. Looking at social documentary photography, Hamilton determines
the contours of what he calls "the representational paradigm of humanist pho-
tography." While all images present 'common' people in commonplace settings,
Hamilton singles out ten recurring themes (the streets, family, love, clochards,
children, etc.). A case in point is Henri Cartier-Bresson's well-known photo, Mi-
chel Gabriely Rue Mouffetard, Paris (1952), in which a boy walks down a street.
Clothed in short trousers and a dark sweater and holding a wine bottle in each
arm, the boy smiles proudly as he passes by two girls who remain barely visible
in the background. This portrait of a cheerful French boy captures a charming
humanism, argues Hamilton, while celebrating 'Frenchness.' Images of homeless
people are also included in these idealized representations that supposedly boost
a French national identity. The figure of the clochard is a part of this strategy of
turning Frenchness into the epitome of humanity: "Free of all attachments, of all
41 He writes: "The discourse of the painting quite deliberately keeps us in this state of sus-
pended attention, in this oscillating process of looking. Its meaning is always in the process of
emerging, yet any final meaning is constantly deferred" (59).
42 Those are his exact but evasive words: "There is a great deal to learn from Foucault and
the discursive approach, but by no means everything it claims is correct and the theory is open
to, and has attracted, many criticisms. Again, in later chapters, as we encounter further develop-
ments in the theory of representation, and see the strengths and weaknesses of these positions
applied in practice, we will come to appreciate more fully that we are only at the beginning of
the exciting task of exploring this process of meaning construction, which is at the heart of cul-
ture, to its full depths" (62-63).

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Facing Poverty 115
conventions, he [the clochard] is humanity in its purest form," writes Hamilton

(128). In any case, Hamilton also draws attention to the close connection between
the photographer's viewpoint and that of the classe populaire. Apart from these
themes, characters and the 'commonality' between the photographer and the sub-
ject, the humanist paradigm is based on a set of constitutive elements such as uni-
versality, historicity, solidarity, quotidienality, and monochromaticity (since the
endearing classe populaire is represented in black-and-white). To conclude, Ham-
ilton's theory of representation- or rather, its application to French social docu-
mentary photography- discusses how social representations construct a sense of
national identity while sidetracking issues of class altogether. In other words, 'the
subject' of his chapter is not the portrayal of the working class or the economi-
cally marginalized, but rather the visual construction of nationality. This chapter
is indicative of the overall thrust of Hall's volume as it provides fascinating read-
ings of masculinity, nationality, popular culture, gender, race, ethnic otherness,
yet economically based otherness persists as a critical blind spot.43
The paradox of poverty amidst plenty remains mostly ignored in theoretical
accounts of American cultural studies. And although there are a number of theo-
rists who acknowledge the intersection of class differences with race and gender,
a strict theory of representation of those class differences remains unseen. In an
effort to confront this research desideratum, I suggest approaching portrait pho-
tography-as well as other media such as films and literature- with an eye for
representations of the poor. In an attempt to introduce a language that might cap-
ture the nuances, ambiguities, and paradoxes of representations of poverty, I shall
discuss the related concept of articulation, which has its roots in a neo-Marxist
understanding of class. Although taken up by various theorists within British and
American cultural studies, all of whom I shall introduce in the following section,
articulation has not emerged as a key term in the field. To my knowledge, it has
never been applied to visual representations.
Articulation
In revising Karl Marx's deterministic conception of the relation between base

and superstructure, Antonio Gramsci elaborated on his notion of hegemony in
the context of articulation. Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe built on Grams-
ci's idea and used the concept to emphasize the connection between power, ideol-
ogy, and discourse, "to specify the elements which enter into the articulatory rela-
tion" (96).44 According to the OED, this usage of the term denoting the relation
43 This is also mirrored by the index, which has no entry on poverty. Under "class" there
are the subentries "discourse and power, French humanist photography, upper class/lower class
(235)." And when turning to page 235, we read: "white/black, men/women, masculine/feminine,
upper class/lower class, British/alien to capture this power dimension in discourse." Among
those five binaries, that between the upper class/lower class is subsumed under the abstract no-
tion of power in discourse.
44 In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), they proclaim: We must, theretore, begin by
analyzing the category of articulation, which will give us our starting-point for the elaboration of

60.254.0.139 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:18:03 UTC
1 16 Sieglinde Lemke
between different unities makes sense in light of its etymological meaning (the
Latin word articulare means "to divide into distinct parts, to express" "articulate,
v.") as well as its lexical meaning ("jointed segment" "articulate, adj., n").
The question that suggests itself at this point is what linkage or connection
is at stake in sociological or cultural studies. Or more specifically, how does the
concept of articulation relate to the field of social documentary photography? To
the broad question about the linkages in cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg
succinctly answers: "Articulation links this practice to that effect, this text to that
meaning, this meaning to that reality, this experience to those politics. And these
links are themselves articulated into larger structures" (We Gotta Get Out 54). If
we apply his broad understanding of the term to social documentary photography,
we might begin with the obvious by saying that the visual text is linked to a pos-
sible meaning, or interpretation of the social reality that is depicted, and the po-
litical conditions that shape this reality. In light of the specific parameters of social
documentary photography, the visual text also registers the relation between the
photographer and the human subject. Although this linkage is invisible, it shapes
the photographic articulation of poverty.
Articulations of poverty are grounded in a relation in which the artist is not
an absolute stranger who remains detached from the subject. Although this bond
is constructed, there are nevertheless numerous examples, also outside of social
documentary photography, in which the artist or scientist tries to engage more
closely with people living in poverty.45 In contrast to representations, which pre-
suppose a metaphoric relation, articulations are mostly based on a métonymie
relation because they are based on contiguity aspiring for an intimate relation, as
Holdt and Bourdieu have pointed out. Does this make articulations more demo-
cratic? Of course not; articulations are inevitably grounded in relations of power
and dominance.
In "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall
describes the dynamics of social dominance explicitly as articulatory practice
Conceding that articulation is a vague term lacking a clear conceptional defini-
tion, Hall chooses to use it nevertheless in an effort to transcend economic reduc
tionism and essentialism:
[The theory of articulation] has still to find its way, by a difficult effort of theoretical
clarification, through the Scylla of reductionism which must deny almost everything in
order to explain something, and the Charybdis of a pluralism which is so mesmerized by
the concept of hegemony. The theoretical construction of this category requires us to take two
steps: to establish the possibility of specifying the elements which enter into the articulatory rela-
tion; and to determine the specificity of the relational moment comprising this articulation" (96).
45 Pierre Bourdieu's The Weight of the World is one example because his study is based on
hundreds of interviews with working poor and impoverished people in France and the United
States. Another example is Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's non-fictional novel Random Family (2004).
The sociologist and English major LeBlanc stayed with a female-headed household in the Bronx
for about a year. Reporting on the lives of these women, who raised their children against all
odds while their husbands were in and out of prison, LeBlanc's novel is an articulation of pov-
erty in contemporary American literature. As such it is one of the exceptions to the above stated
invisibility.

60.254.0.139 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:18:03 UTC
Facing Poverty 117
"everything" that it cannot explain anything. To those willing to labour on, the vocation
remains an open one. (343)
His plea notwithstanding, Hall himself has not succeeded in clarifying the term.
Rather, he has advocated the concept to determine the intricate relation between
race and class while keeping an eye on the overall social dynamics. "Articulation,"
insists Hall, "has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how spe-
cific practices articulated around contradictions [. . .] can nevertheless be thought
together." And he champions the concept because it calls for a structuralist ap-
proach to cultural studies at a time when structuralism is out of fashion. Hall
finds merits in the structuralist approach because it allows him "to conceptual-
ize the specificity of different practices without losing its grip on the ensemble
which they constitute" ("Cultural Studies" 69; emphasis in the original).46 In other
words, it allows him to bridge the structuralist and the culturalist paradigm of cul-
tural studies. Hall aligns "articulation" with "ensemble," implying that scholars
should investigate cultural, ideological, and social trends in relation to the mate-
rial world outside of "discourse." This structuralist perspective then privileges
socioeconomic factors and class conflicts. When Hebdige writes that "groups and
classes differentiated by conflicting interests" try to change the established power
structures, he reveals the hidden agenda that drives Hall's interest in the concept
of articulation.47
In other words, Hall wants to have his cake- a structuralist analysis of class
conflicts- and eat it, too- determining the intersectionality of race, class, and
gender.48 No one expressed this more succinctly than Lawrence Grossberg in his
assessment of Hall's theory of articulation:
Hall argues that these systems of power are organized upon contradictions, not only
of class and capital, but of gender and race as well; these various equally fundamental
contradictions may or may not be made to correspond- this is yet another site of articu-
46 It is worth to cite his definition because it shows how cryptic Hall is when defining the
term: "Articulation has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific prac-
tices articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point,
in the same moment, can nevertheless be thought together. The structuralist paradigm thus
does- if properly developed- enable us to begin really to conceptualize the specificity of differ-
ent practices (analytically distinguished, abstracted out), without losing its grip on the ensemble
which they constitute" (69).
47 To Hebdige, Hall uses the term articulation as "a key bridging concept" between the
"structuralist" and the "culturalist" paradigms, which Hall himself identified as the two major
paradigms in cultural studies. Articulation in Hall's understanding has it both ways because it
"acknowledges the constitutive role played by (ideological!) discourses in the shaping of (his-
torical) subjectivities and at the same time it insists that there is somewhere outside 'discourse'
(a world where groups and classes differentiated by conflicting interests, cultures, goals, aspi-
rations; by the positions they occupy in various hierarchies are working in and on [dynamic]
changing power structures)- a world which has in turn to be linked with, shaped, acted upon,
struggled over, intervened in: changed" (Hebdige 196; emphasis in the original).
48 In the 1980s, Hall concentrated on analyzing the dynamics of race and class. In the 1990s,
he became increasingly interested in gender issues. The fact that his volume Representation in-
cludes a chapter on constructions of masculinity as well as a chapter on soap operas and gender
is indicative.

60.254.0.139 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:18:03 UTC
118 Sieglinde Lemke
lation and power. Hall's theory offers, as well, a non-essentialist theory of agency: social
identities are themselves complex fields of multiple and even contradictory struggles;
they are the product of the articulations of particular social positions into chains of
equivalences, between experiences, interests, political struggles and cultural forms, and
between different social positions. ("History" 156-57)
'Articulation' attempts to bridge the gap between a deterministic view of identity

that presupposes that experiences, cultural forms, and social positions determine
one's identity, and a view of identity that stresses agency. In this view, people shape
their lives in meaningful ways and are capable of resisting adverse social forces.
"The theory of articulation," Grossberg infers, "is the assertion of struggle
over necessity, struggles both to produce structures of domination and to resist
them. (It is perhaps also meant to remind the left of an important lesson: 'pessi-
mism of the intellect, optimism of the will.')" ("History" 156). From this optimis-
tic outlook, as Grossberg surmises, the theory of articulation amounts to a wish-
fulfilling prophecy that aspires to change power structures by means of scholarly
interventions.49
Implicitly disagreeing with Grossberg, Jennifer Slack believes that Hall's in-
vestment in this concept involves more than mere optimism around social change
via academic interventions. Slack was perhaps the most poignant in discussing
the ramifications of Hall's unfinished project. "The Theory and Method of Ar-
ticulation in Cultural Studies," she maintains, gravitates around epistemological,
political, and strategic aspects. Epistemologically, articulation is a way of thinking
the structures of correspondence, non-correspondence, and contradiction. In her
view, articulation has a political agenda in that it concentrates on power struc-
tures; articulation provides a strategic means for interventions and transforma-
tions. Slack and Hall are perhaps more optimistic about the analytical value of the
concept in its rejection of an "extreme, theoretically- driven logic" (Slack 122) and
its affirmation of a dynamic and open logic.50 Slack insists that articulation is "not
just a thing (not just a connection) but a process of creating connections. [. . .] It has
never been, nor should it be, delineated or used as a completely 'sewn-up' theory
or method. Rather it is a complex, unfinished phenomenon that has emerged and
continues to emerge genealogically" (114). It sounds like Slack also wants to have
her (theoretical) cake and continue to eat it, too.
Given these contradictory and vague assessments, one might be prone to
discard the concept altogether. Yet I suggest that the notion of articulation pro-
vides a helpful critical tool for investigating class issues from a cultural studies
49 There is a very explicit statement by Hall that Grossberg did not cite but that confirms
his point: "The aim of a theoretically-informed political practice must surely be to bring about
or construct the articulation between social or economic forces and those forms of politics and
ideology which might lead them in practice to intervene in history in a progressive way- an ar-
ticulation which has to be constructed through practice precisely because it is not guaranteed by
those forces are constituted in the first place (Hall, "Signification" 95; emphasis in the original).
50 Slack claims that "Hall pulls articulation back from the extreme, theoretically-driven
logic of 'necessary non-correspondence' (what he called 'excesses' of theory) to insist on think-
ing and theorizing practices within which unities- often relatively stable unities- are also con-
stituted" (122).

60.254.0.139 on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:18:03 UTC
Facing Poverty 119
perspective. Following the sociologists and neo-Marxists who have used the
concept to refute a determinisi or reductionist account of the relation between
base and superstructure, a cultural theory of articulation would aim at describ-
ing cultural relations and representations while acknowledging these contradic-
tory and open processes. For scholars examining literary and visual representa-
tions of class like poverty portraiture, the vague and non-mechanic thrust of
this theory opens up a space to reflect on the ways in which class is articulated
in works of art.
For scholars analyzing portraits of poverty, the notion of articulation provides
a critical tool to come to terms with its quintessential inarticulation. It is not just
about the practice of looking, rather it examines the ways in which the experience
of poverty is being articulated. What is the relation or linkage between the artist
and the object of articulation? By definition, it is métonymie as it presupposes a
contact that is not fleeting. What is the role of intentionality? How can we avoid
falling into the trap of the intentional fallacy while acknowledging the blatantly
interventionist agenda behind articulations of poverty?
Another important facet of a theory of articulation addresses questions of pow-
er and dominance, which are inevitably part and parcel of picturing class hierar-
chies. Apart from the imbalance between the photographer and the subject, there
is imbalance in the reception. Holdt's depiction of Ida and Joe, for example, takes
us beyond Hall's theory of representation. Holdt's image is not unconcerned with
the "oscillating process of looking," nor does it suggest that "meaning is always
in the process of emerging, [or that] any final meaning is constantly deferred," as
Hall argues with regard to Las Meninas ("Work of Representation" 59). It invites
us to acknowledge the intersectionality of race, class, and gender while asking us
to be highly self-critical about our critical (liberal) perspective. Approaching im-
ages like this one through the critical framework of articulation encourages us to
go beyond examining 'the discourse' of this visual text. It might yield new critical
vistas that link sociological concepts such as the notion of capability (Sen) or con-
cerns about security and vulnerability (Castel) to critical examinations of literary
and visual texts, performance art, and social practices. To move beyond the stage
of in-articulation demands sensitive ways of analyzing those cultural and artistic
expressions that dare to face poverty.
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Facing Poverty: Towards a Theory of Articulation

Author(s): Sleglinde Lemke

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41158483

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The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth.

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departments? Perhaps the question we should be asking is why Americanists con-

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Poverty in American Social Documentary Photography

Susan Sontag's claim that, "to take a photograph is to participate in another

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that he is homeless.12 In this case, the vulnerability, exposure, and embarrass-

12 For a representation, see Tillmans.

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"culture of poverty theory," developed by Oscar Lewis and widely accepted in

16 On this dynamic, see Lemke 86-88 and 144-46.

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studio-like quality, whereas Lange embodies documentary compassion. The pio-

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Recent approaches to poverty portraiture try to avoid the pitfalls of poverty-

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26 In a matter-of-fact tone of voice, he writes: "Many of these relationships were sexual in

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American Pictures: A Close Reading

Fig. 1: Jacob Holdt, Untitled, American Pictures.

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31 He considers himself a "traveling person- a white, male, foreign, outsider, heterosexual,

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the established understanding of representation. It provides the starting point for

Stuart Hall's interest in representation congeals in his work on racial stereo-

40 To my knowledge, there is no sustained theory of cultural representation that focuses

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In accordance with Foucault, Hall emphasizes the open process of signification.

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conventions, he [the clochard] is humanity in its purest form," writes Hamilton

In revising Karl Marx's deterministic conception of the relation between base

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'Articulation' attempts to bridge the gap between a deterministic view of identity

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