East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana 1936

Margaret Bourke-White made this photograph, East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, likely in the 1930s, using her camera as a tool for witnessing. It's a study in contrasts, really. The interior is covered floor to ceiling in newspaper clippings that act like a textured skin, while the subjects—a young boy and a dog—stand in a stark, bare room. The boy and dog look out with a seriousness that is at once direct, yet full of ambiguity. The newspapers act as a kind of wallpaper of the world, offering a noisy, confusing and complicated backdrop to the stillness of the subjects in the room. Bourke-White’s picture reminds me of Walker Evans. Both artists were interested in the poetics of the everyday. But Bourke-White’s image has a raw, unpolished edge that gives it a voice all of its own. It’s a testament to the power of photography to capture the multiple realities of life with nuance.