The temporal power of Hine is worrisome. In March 1911, he took a picture of eleven-year-old Sadie Kelly, a shrimp picker, while she was traveling to work in Port St. Louis, Mississippi. With a controlled face and a shaved head, she moves along the road with her legs bowed and her coat wrapped over her right forearm, balanced on the brink. This transience gives the background the ghostly woods and the elevated shack of vertical planks behind her a transient aspect.
As our gaze travels up the slope, the little plants, sticks, and scrub grass behind her begin to blend. The log that lies behind Sadie Kelly’s right shoulder is little more than an elongated form that resembles pulp after being submerged in water for an extended period of time. With the exception of the small girl’s face, which anchors the image as her habitat, the horizon line, the trees, and the stained wash of the hut give the image the appearance of a Photo-Secessionist masterpiece, a triumphal clouding of filth into attractive effects. That setting is more of a journey than a physical location, much like her own.
Urgent routines and transient structures blend together to create everyday and enduring rhythms. This picture appears to combine slow decay and speed so seamlessly that it is difficult to tell how the two may be distinguished from one another. The world the girl travels through appears to have fallen into a near-comatose state of neglect, but she still has places to go. The image begs us with a more enigmatic feeling of inevitability rather than the bracing rapid snap of communist propaganda, where the roads may curve or they may be straight but the end of the line always looms. Sadie Kelly appears to be weightlessly perched on the earth, a part of a universe where generation and biological decay are the only things moving, as though Hine’s only job were to observe the grass grow.
Sadie Kelly is the mistress of a time so twisted that we do not so much see her destiny in that ubiquitous cloud as we witness an existential nomadism the end of time in the apocalyptic bleakness through which she travels, akin to a Bruegel peasant on some mysterious allegorical round. The little child is the protagonist of a future Armageddon in which no one else has survived, according to Hine’s perceptive temporal vision.
A meteor approaches the earth in Wells’s 1906 novel creating a broad green-white haze that turns night into a spooky day. It looks like destruction is coming. Nevertheless, the Change proves to be utopian; the blast unleashes chemicals that disseminate an opiate compassion and copious love among the people, producing an immeasurable influence of boundless benignity and tolerance upon their new brains, causing the lion to lie down with the lamb everywhere. Hine’s post-apocalyptic scene is not a utopia, though.
Sadie Kelly gives the impression of a stranded survivor who is startled, like some exotic derelict, as she scavenges among the pots and baskets every day. She is savage in her hairless manner. Nevertheless, Hine’s imagined moment of the photograph rather than any actual, sociologically anticipated future is the apocalyptic future. The instant this image is created is the future. Sadie Kelly traverses the terrain of her own demise.
The funeral arranging begs the question of whether a picture may have the similar effect given its general association with death. The core of this picture is hollowly tapping to the complex heartbeat of deterioration. As Diane Arbus put it, “a disaster in slow motion” is what makes this photo so powerful. Wells refers to the hours following the comet’s impact as “The Awakening” in accordance with socialist ideology. However, Hine’s waking is not the same.