work

Walker Evans 1936
Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse
Hale County, Alabama

The woodcutter
Works in all seasons.
Splitting wood is both
Action and inaction.

Even when it is snowy, the woodcutter must split wood. Unless he does, he and his family will not stay warm, and those who depend upon him will not survive. But the woodcutter does not work simply on a piecemeal basis. He labors in concert with the seasons. He worked hard to store wood prior to the first cold so that he would have the luxury of merely splitting kindling for now. His work seems slight in one season, because he was industrious in the previous one.
When he splits wood, he must place the log on the block and raise his axe. But he must strike the wood with the grain, and he must let the axe fall with its own weight. If he tries to chop across the grain, his effort would be wasted. If he tries to add strength to the swing of the axe, there would be no gain.
Like the woodcutter, we can all benefit from working according to seasonal circumstances. Whether it is the time or the method, true labor is half initiative and half knowing how to let things proceed on their own.

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365 Tao
Deng Ming-Dao
Daily Meditations

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Walker Evans (American, 19031975)
Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

Gelatin silver print; 19.5 x 16.1 cm (7 11/16 x 6 5/16 in.)

Description

In the summer of 1936 Walker Evans collaborated with writer James Agee on an unpublished article about cotton farmers in the American South, which eventually became the seminal book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941). For four weeks in July, Evans made photographs of three sharecropper families and their environment—intimate, respectful portraits of the farmers, as well as their homes, furniture, clothing, and rented land. This study of a clean-swept corner is the twelfth plate in the book; it recalls Agee's observations of the significance of "bareness and space" in these homes: "general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another. . . [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have."

Walker Evans (American, 19031975)
[Floyd and Lucille Burroughs on Porch, Hale County, Alabama], 1936
Gelatin silver print; 18.9 x 23.7 cm (7 7/16 x 9 5/16 in.)