The Photo I'm discussing by John Vachon, which was taken in 1942, depicts a soot covered man at a mining site. This photo has a context that makes you wonder about this man’s life and what he is feeling. It has a historical and emotional context that appeals to me, the life of a miner would be drastically different than that of today’s miner. The thoughts that I get when I look at this photo are that this man is worn down and tired, he feels as if his life is not what he wanted it to be. My argument is that the man is not content with his life and what he has, but that he keeps on going everyday because he feels there is no other way of life. I draw this argument from the man's eyes, his posture, and his overall appearance. I think the photographer adds to this saddened appeal by the way the photo is taken. The lighting around the man’s face, the cropping and the positioning of the man with respects to the camera. The photographer had to think and do all of this to create the photo in which I am talking about. The man clearly lives a dangerous life that alot of people wouldn't ever want to live. This because miners have to do hard manual labor everyday, they work underground without sunlight. A miner hardly gets to see the light of day being underground by day they arriving above ground after work at night. I do wonder what exactly is going through this man’s head and how he ended up with the life that he has. The town in which this man lives, Sunray a small town that’s sole purpose is to produce Carbon Black. This man probably came to the town in search of money and a job, but possibly did not know what he was getting himself into. Him living and working in this town has made him look like the depressed, scary looking man that is potrayed in the photo. This is what I will be discussing in my writing. 
The man in this photo is staring directly into the camera drawing the vectors of attention to his face, "Arrangements in photographs indicate lines of direction for our eyes to follow" (350). So in this photo we are directed to his face and he is looking directly at you. While looking at his face I notice his eyes, they are shaded and dark. You cannot fully see the man’s actual eye's but what almost seem to be two holes that look to lead to nothing but darkness. This heightens the photo's feeling of depression and sadness. The soot which covers his face enhances his facial features like the lines and wrinkles around his eyes. These wrinkles by his eyes make you think that he is worn down and saddened. The man’s eyes are also squinted and drooped; it looks like he could cry at any moment. This look of sadness adds to my argument that he does not like the life that he has to deal with everyday. I know that this man is a carbon black miner; this job is no walk in the park. This job takes a toll on the physical and mental state of the normal human. I think this is all told through the eyes, they say the eyes can speak everything the mouth does just by looking into them. With this man I think the saying is true, his emotions are portrayed through his eyes. I think this is why the photographer decided to capture the man in this type of pose. With this straight forward camera shot you can directly see the man’s eyes, giving you full rein to judge which emotion you see in his eyes. In this case his eyes give of an emotion of deep depression and hardship. In CDA it talks about photographs and "drawing on what you know", in this photo it happens to be that being a miner is a tedious job that takes a lot out of a person in every aspect of life (349). Again with the lighting on the man’s face, which seems to have a different hue than anything else in the photo, but then begins to fade toward his eyes. This "isolates" everything else in the photo again drawing you in to make observations and inferences about this man (361).
The next thing that grabs my attention in this photo is the man’s posture, he is standing stern and upright with his head cocked to one side slightly. I feel this man is standing so stern because of his persona that he is trying to uphold. I'm guessing this man has a family and is married with children as most people in his day would be, especially in a small town like his. This man probably has a simplistic mindset of what the common man should be in his day. In this case the provider and the protector, he probably tries to carry himself to uphold this title. I would say the man most likely tries to always carry himself in this way to create this sense of a male hierarchy, but does not do so in his worn facial expressions. In this photo I would say his facial posture does not match that of his bodies posture, this because one is saddened and one is stern. By his facial posture I mean mostly the way he is holding his cigarette and his saggy aged looking face. What I am saying when I talk about the way he is holding his cigarette is that it is loosely sitting on his lips carelessly as if he doesn't know it’s there. This to me shows the man’s feelings of tiredness and depression. Then there is his cringed saggy face, it looks like a person’s face right before the point of tears. This facial expression creates the sense of pathos, for the photo. Most all the emotion in this photo is created through the man’s face (209). The photo is cropped in a way to center and focus in on the man, so the audience’s attention is solely on the man. "Cropping is a very important choice that a photographer makes" the photo is cropped with respects to the man so the audience can analyze this man (355).
Now talking about and pointing out the man's overall appearance as a whole, which in retrospect is a very scary looking man. This man looks so frightening because of his almost inhuman looking characteristics. This man looks inhuman because of his soot covered face; this I think symbolizes what being a miner in 1942 can do to a person. The mining job today is a little different there are many more precautions like hard hats and flame retardent suits as seen in the photo to the right. Being a miner can transform a person totally, this is why the photographer chose to take this picture while the man was on site. Taking this picture in this context changes the whole feeling of the photograph, rather than taking a picture of this man cleaned up and in the confines of his home. Doing this creates ethos or "the face you put on" (192). So in the confines of how this picture was taken and where it was taken changes my argument along with my emotion towards the photo. That is why the man's overall appearance gives me the sense that the job takes alot out of the man.
To conclude this paper and my argument I would like to say again this photo is a sad and dark photo. This photo makes me think about the man’s life and his feelings toward it. I wonder and discuss all of this because of the way the photo is taken, from its context to the pathos it creates. The argument I create is all based on the man's eyes, his posture, and his overall appearance. The reason I create this argument from these things in the photo is because this is what the photographer wanted his audience to look at and draw conclusions upon.Works Cited
Wysocki, Anne, and Lynch Dennis. Compose Design Advocate, a rhetoric for integrating written, visual and oral communication. New York: Pearson Education, Inc. , 2007.
Wysocki, Anne, and Lynch Dennis. Compose Design Advocate, a rhetoric for integrating written, visual and oral communication. New York: Pearson Education, Inc. , 2007.
