[The Guardian] The big picture: Pierre Fatumbi Verger shows another side of 1930s black America

The big picture: Pierre Fatumbi Verger shows another side of 1930s black America

This portrait has a conspiratorial intimacy that typifies the French photographer’s nuanced images

The French photographer born Pierre Verger made two tours of the US in the 1930s, crossing the country by train for the magazine Paris-soir, documenting predominantly black communities in Harlem and the south in a time of segregation. The pictures the magazine chose illustrated a series of articles on the hardships of life in the depression-era US, but new studies of Verger’s archive show a greater range of interest in his pictures, many of which celebrated jazz age nightlife and an emergent professional class. The rediscovered images are collected in a new book that offers a nuanced portrait of black America before the war.

This picture was taken in the French market in New Orleans in 1934. Its conspiratorial intimacy is typical of much of Verger’s work. From the years when the Farm Security Administration was commissioning and carefully curating Dorothea Lange’s and Walker Evans’s indelible images of rural poverty – concentrating on white families – Verger’s pictures offer a different perspective: thoughtful, often hopeful images of arresting individuals in black communities, full of aspirational intent and not shy of beauty.

Pierre Fatumbi Verger: United States of America 1934 & 1937 by Javier Escudero Rodríguez is published by Damiani (€55)

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