Letter: Deane Tucker on article caption error

Dear Editor:

A few years ago a colleague showed me in disbelief the following sentence from a student’s paper on Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: “During the Civil War, most families were so poor that they couldn’t afford a TV and had to get their news from newspapers.”

I was reminded of this anecdote when I read Kyle Tarbutton’s article “Sandoz Center exhibit explores Depression-era photographs” in the October 23, 2014 edition of The Eagle (pg. 17).

The article was accompanied by a picture taken by Eagle photographer Teri Robinson of one of the photographs in the exhibit. The photo depicts a man on the side of a highway half-stooped in front of a late 1960s model Plymouth opening a mailbox. The article picture caption reads: “A man checking his mail during winter after the Dust Bowl is on display for the Dust Bowl art exhibit in the Mari Sandoz Center.”

Ignoring the confusing syntax of the caption, the picture is a very poor choice to represent the exhibit. The exhibit caption for the photo says it was taken in March 1979, close to forty years after the end of the dust bowl period nicknamed the dirty thirties.

Yet the article caption makes it look as if the poor man is seen struggling with a harsh winter merely months after a devastatingly dry, dust-riddled, and crop-less summer during the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, the image of the future model Plymouth betrays the text (and this confusing reading).

This picture might have made sense to your readers had the author mentioned an important fact in the article. The Sandoz display features photographs of persons living on the plains during the Great Depression interspersed with snapshots of the same individuals posing in the identical landscapes in 1979. More careful writing, copyediting, and picture caption editing of the piece could have avoided any confusion.

Forgive me if it seems like I am criticizing you for a small speck of dust in your editorial eye; but to me as your reader, your lack of editorial clarity in this article sticks out like a splinter in my own. The exhibit, by the way, is fascinating and worth a visit.

Sincerely,
Deane Tucker
Professor of Humanities, CSC