Ben Shahn - Travelling medicine show with ventriloquist dummy in the foreground - Huntingdon, Tennessee, USA
The photographer, Ben Shahn, would have recognized the scene immediately. It's a traveling medicine show, a once popular form of entertainment and commerce that was slowly disappearing from the American scene. Medicine shows "borrowed heavily from the 19th-century minstrel show," a fact that accounts for the presence of the black man in blackface. It also explains the ventriloquist's dummy, a caricature of an African American. The pitchman, in the photo above, would have been performing a comedy routine, in "Negro" dialect. Medicine shows were popular, even with people who didn't fall for the doctor's pitch. It was cheap entertainment. For most of the people in these photos, a radio would have been a luxury that they couldn't afford, and movies would have been rare treats. In town to shop and socialize, they would have been happy to see a traveling medicine show preparing to perform. Shahn spent a good deal of time at the show, approaching it with a sense of curiosity, rather than condemnation. He's aware of the racial dynamics at work in the show and in this town in Tennessee, but he seems to know that he doesn't fully understand them. As an urban Jew, who had immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight, he often felt like a fish out of water in the South. What was the black man in blackface thinking? We don't know, and neither did Shahn, as the photo clearly suggests. Yes, blackface minstrelsy demeaned African Americans and mocked their culture. The man in the photo would have known this perfectly well. But it was the Depression, and jobs were hard to find - John Edwin Mason
Size: 3077px × 2042px
Photo credit: © photo-fox / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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