Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White that appeared in
Life magazine above the headline “The Flood Leaves its Victims on the Bread Line,” February 15, 1937. Photo: Getty Images.
Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response Between the State and Community, by Peer Illner. London: Pluto Press, 2020. 208 pages.
Mutual Aid:
Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next), by Dean Spade. New York and London: Verso, 2020. 128 pages.
IN ONE OF photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White’s most iconic Depression-era images, a seamless, whitewashed vision of the good life is undercut by a segregated breadline. Tightly composed, the picture almost stages a return of the repressed, as material casualties of “the American Way” buttress—but also contravene—the billboard’s sanguine promise. Bourke-White’s irony is acerbic, condensed, and at the same time capacious; as art historian John Tagg points out, the absurdity of the background graphic’s “cynical corporate jingoism” rises to the level of kitsch, taking on the role of “fall guy, of comic stooge” when faced with the living effects of endemic racism and poverty. Divorced from its original context (the pages of