History, Recycled
Depression-era photos get drenched in color
for a modern audience
BY G.M. MARTINEZ, OCTOBER 18, 2012
America loves to romanticize the good old days. In “Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men,” painter Lisa Ruyter’s new show at
Connersmith gallery, the artist asks viewers to consider
whether those days really were so good, let alone better than
the ones we live in now.
Ruyter’s paintings re-imagine some of the most well-known
photography to come out of the Great Depression. The Farm
Security Administration/Office of War Information, a New Deal
program, was formed in the Department of Agriculture in 1935
to help farm families in extreme rural poverty. It also had the
unintended consequence of creating one of the most prolific
archives of photography of the 20th century — including the
work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange — which artists
continue to draw inspiration from today. In fact, the title of
Ruyter’s show takes its name from a photography book by
Evans and writer James Agee that focused on sharecropper
families of that era in the American South.
Lisa Ruyter’s 2011 “Russell Lee, ‘Children on float in Fourth of July
parade, Vale, Oregon’” interprets a photo by Lee, who documented
rural America in the 1930s.
Ruyter’s paintings start with those images as a reference
point; she then invigorates them with treatments of
radioactive color, taking them out of the past and into a highresolution, oversaturated present.
Ruyter, who was born in D.C. and now lives in Vienna, Austria, says the works are expressions of anxiety; in the throes of
the Great Recession, it’s hard not to draw comparisons between that impoverished era and now. Ruyter says those
“spooky parallels” are intentional: They reflect another era of struggle and suffering, presented in bright, distinctly
modern colors often reserved for literal caution or warning signs on the street.
“The way we read images is in evolution,” Ruyter says. Images are constantly recycled, context is everything — and it’s
always changing.
Ruyter’s paintings reflect America’s past back to us with a drastic new coat of paint, “dissolving of our understanding of
representation” and upending the idea that there was ever some bygone moment when we were somehow more
“authentic” as a nation.
Connersmith, 1358 Florida Ave. NE; through Oct. 20, free; 202-588-8750.
PHOTO CREDIT: COURTESY CONNERSMITH