Walker Evans (1903-1975), Bud Fields and his family at home in Hale county, Ala., c. 1935–36. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 8c52407u).

Renzo Martens (Dutch, b. 1973), still from Enjoy Poverty, Episode III, 2008.

Sebastião Salgado, Amazonas: With the men away in the cities, the women carry their goods to the market of Chimbote. Region of Chimborazo, Ecuador, 1998. from Migrations: Humanity in Transition," published by Aperture, New York, 2000, p.276-277. © Sebastião Salgado.

David Bates, Land Fall (from The Katrina Paintings), 2007, 2007, oil on canvas, 24 x 30".

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), June 1935. 'Children of Oklahoma drought refugees on highway near Bakersfield, California. Family of six; no shelter, no food, no money and almost no gasoline. The child has bone tuberculosis,' Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration.

Bill Brandt (1904-1983), Northumberland Miner at his Evening Meal, from The English at Home, 1936, by Bill Brandt, published by Batsford, 1936).

Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914), Bandits' Roost, page 63, before 1890, from How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis), Published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890.

By STEVE SHAPIRO

A daily newspaper is an ideal form for parsing a society’s interests and contradictions. The front page is filled with facts; the back page, traditionally the Op-Ed section, is inundated with various opinions and elucubrations. The business section hints of economic ups and downs, just as the arts pages review the latest offerings with thumbs up or down. It may only be at a time like this, of economic and political turmoil, that the different sections each project a vastly differing point of view. Politicians speak of job growth under page one headlines, economists hail the latest poll on numbers and unemployment, and columnists have their say — yet the arts section, in the best of the worst of times, tells another story.

People are not numbers. A photograph of an Alabama sharecropper by Walker Evans or of a migrant worker with her two young children posed looking away from the camera — Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 portrait Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California— speak not of percentages or of forecasts, but rather of individuals. It is a matter of one to one: the artist and his subject, and then (one hopes) between the work of art and the viewer. The so-called “human interest” story (is there any other kind?) all too often sentimentalizes or compartmentalizes its subject, as either a victim or an unfortunate recipient of fate’s cruel hand — and now a word from our sponsor. In these curious times, when some pages of a newspaper cheer on the nation’s recovery, while other pages document what is still lean and mean, the paradox of disparity is baffling. More baffling still is the invisibility of attention paid, in art and in the arts pages of periodicals (as well as on TV), to this new generation of the sudden poor.

The poor will always be with us; how we view them will always say more about us. It is not as though artists have failed them in the past: from Dickens’s fictionalized autobiographical accounts to Steinbeck’s Depression Okies in The Grapes of Wrath; from Doré’s print A Couple and Two Children Sleeping Under London Bridge to Evans’s and James Agee’s sympathetic travelogue Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; from Sebastião Salgudo’s wide-ranging photographs of homeless children and downtrodden workers in Latin America to the late Milton Rogovin’s socially-conscious photographs set in New York and Appalachia, poverty as a subject has found deep roots and deeper emotions.

Considering poverty is a risky art form. The usual argument — of exploitation, as was some criticism of the Indian children in Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire — exists but no one can plead for every artist to turn into Mother Teresa. Salgado’s burnished portraits were attacked some years ago, by Ingrid Sischy, for romanticizing the subjects’ pitiable condition; that, it seems to me, is less a matter of idealism than of technique: Salgado, like other contemporary photographers documenting the poor, has more access to new photographic materials and means than Walker Evans in the 1940s or Jacob Riis, when he was tenement-hunting, in the 1890s. Lange, as much an artist as an activist, made sure her prints were to her liking, despite the poignant, roughed-over subject matter: how is that different from Salgado? As an artist, whatever one works on, the artistic model is to make the work resonate.

In a casual sweep through many museums and art-history books, photography is the leading art form to take on poverty in the modern era. Certainly it was that way in the recent past. Most of how we visualize “being poor” derives from the books that came as magazine assignments first or in textbooks afterward: Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890); Bill Brandt’s The English at Home (1936); Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); Lange’s An American Exodus (1939); Evans’s and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The divide between the classes (and the races) runs deeper than any image can present, though when so many Americans were isolated and insulated from the other side of the tracks for so many decades any art form that lent an outward reality to poverty was important. Magazines like Fortune, Life, and Time were widely subscribed to and regularly distributed photographic essays from every corner of the world; add to those weeklies professional magazines like Camera and cultural armchair traveler periodicals like Vogue, and the underclass, if not asked in for drinks, made its way into peoples’ homes routinely yet compassionately.

Looking around at contemporary art, the new class of poor—the unemployed, the downsized, the laid-off, the families who have had to move back in together — are not highly visible. Magazines and newspapers and NPR still produce articles, rife with personal stories and the usual accompanying photograph of the subject showcased in a mournful portrait; yet with so much splintered media the effect feels neutered. Too often, it seems, the effect is not to affect change.

Part of it has to be personal. Dorothea Lange is quoted by Christopher Cox, in an Aperture monograph on her from 1981, as saying of her work at a 1933 May Day protest, “What am I doing up here? I should be down there.” She found a balance in her art that is hard to find in so much of today’s art, especially the work done in painting, video, and alternative art forms by younger artists. It is as if these artists—fresh from school, hip to the Zeitgeist, and dreaming of visions of Andy Warhol or Cindy Sherman or David Lynch in their heads — are immune to the world outside the Internet. They may have their technique, their styles, and their uniform individuality: but their art is theirs only. There is little sense of it communicating to others.

It should be the opposite case: poverty should be integrated into art — even the Abstract Expressionists thought they were commenting on life at it was being lived in the 1940s. How, of course, is the artist’s goal. The George Clooney movie Up in the Air in which the economic downturn occurred as the filmmakers were in production allowed for the reality of the film — real people were interviewed about their feelings upon losing their jobs. So un-Clooneyesque were these bleary-eyed, angry, sad men and women that the film’s texture was increased tenfold. When news magazines like Life are absent from the public discourse, the immediacy of a Hollywood movie, of all things, proves more open-minded and alert than a thousand gallery openings featuring lame and tame self-absorbed offerings. “Identity” may be the art world’s current self-obsessed theme: what about considering someone else’s occasionally?

The attempt to picture real life has been both art’s grail and its cross for centuries. In the Renaissance, when the patron was often the King, the underclass was invisible; so, too, throughout Europe through the 16th and 17th centuries. Rembrandt’s commissions (like John Singer Sargent’s in the 19th century and Warhol’s in the 20th) turned on the aristocracy. Yet eventually pockets of reform-minded artists made minor dents in the high-minded and myth-oriented academy: Hogarth’s moralistic engravings, Courbet’s painting The Stone Breakers (1850), and other miserablists sought to portray the unseen and unheard ever-present in Victor Hugo’s novels and Dickens’s London tales.

To make an impact now is harder, evidently. One method is to stretch the idea to its most absurd. In the Dutch artist Renzo Martens’s triptych movie, Enjoy Poverty, set in the Congo, Episode III (2008) focuses on him telling the native photographers they should focus on the country’s poor as their best “export,” and he shows them how best to photograph the many underfed, underclothed children. While aping Salgado and other socially conscious photographers, Martens mimics Annie Leibovitz on a Vanity Fair shoot. He even assembles a huge neon sign that flashes “ENJOY POVERTY” (with the branding authority of "ENJOY COCA COLA"). A tiny “please” is inserted between "ENJOY" and "POVERTY"). Martens’s approach is contemporary enough; but the impact of Texas artist David Bates’s The Katrina Paintings, oversize portraits done in a folk-art style, with the subjects — mostly African-Americans, many older and economically lower-class who have lost homes and hopes — facing back at the viewer, are direct, artistic, plaintive, and fully expressive of the drama at hand. No non-photographer artist’s work I have seen or read about in the past three years has lived up to Bates’s desire and drive to evoke our new American reality, which is as old as art itself. Within such art, the lyrical phrase, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven rings true.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). The Stone Breakers. 1849 (desroyed during World War II).  Oil on canvas, 5 feet, 5 inches x 7 feet, 10 inches.

Still from Slumdog Millionaire, 2008, Directed by Danny Boyle.

Paul Gustave Doré (1832-1883), A Couple and Two Children Sleeping on a London Bridge. Prints. Gu. Dore 1871-Londres. 19 x 24.75 cm., Berger Collection: 13 #167, Denver, Colorado.