Photographs represented occasions once upon a time. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money; they recorded important moments; you faced front; you seldom smiled, since levity was not he mark you wanted put across your face forever; yet the result of this resolute Egyptian solemnity was to separate people as they sat or stood together, man and wife or members of a band, to emphasize the withdrawn, inward look they all had, because there was nothing in front of them but a lens as cold and darkly caped as God’s eye. Event eh dogs were docile, cow jawed, stiff as porcelain. There were, of course, no cats.

The people were often strangely posed: if not before a painted drop, then in the middle of a chicken scratch or vast infertile field, chair and occupant put down there as if by a terrible wind; now and then a storefront or a string of fish was taken, people and fish alike overlapping, and an entire family snapped stoically sitting in a yard of weeds; or the film was exposed at that hour of the day when even a city’s wooden sidewalks and dirt streets seem as empty and endless as a wilderness; or a woman in her best black would be stood against a white clapboard wall, the lines behind her already folding into one another at infinity, to make so negative a space you’d think she was the entrance of a cave; and though the younger men’s faces seem beautifully stupid and naive sometimes, the sunken mouths and eyes of the older women wear their suffering the way clothes and furniture show theirs, the skull behind the skin burning like a dim bulb.

The loneliness trapped in these figures is overwhelming, and one thinks of the country, and how in the country, space counts for something, and how the individual is thrown upon his own resources, how he consequently comes to sense his essential self; and then you notice with a guilty twinge three generations posed in front of a small unpainted shack, and you realize that these families are as closely thrown together as potatoes in a sack; that, like men on a raft, space is what confines them; and that the tyranny of the group can here be claustrophobic, crushing, total.