Fan Culture and the Spaces of Sport
six Fan Culture and the Spaces of Sport In the summer of 1935, the American artist Ben Shahn received a commission from the photography department of the Resettlement Administration (ra), a federal agency set up as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme. His brief was to document the lives of the suffering community at Scotts Run, a small mining community in Star City, West Virginia.1 During the Great Depression, the name Scotts Run had become virtually synonymous with poverty and unemployment, one writer for the Atlantic Monthly famously describing the region as ‘the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America’. 2 Among Shahn’s photographs is one representing two men peering through cracks in a wooden fence (illus. 86). As the image is taken from behind, the viewer can see neither the faces of the men, nor what is happening beyond. However, their upright stance and forward lean, with hands thrust deep into pockets, suggest that whatever they are watching from this unprepossessing scrubland is of great interest and that they intend to remain at their posts for some duration, despite the fact that their view is no more than partial. The photograph, held in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, dc, is simply captioned Untitled, thus giving the viewer no immediate clue as to what precisely is happening. However, other photographs, taken at the same spot on the same day, and more helpfully titled Watching a Football Game, Star City, West Virginia, reveal the mystery of what is taking place beyond this impenetrable barrier.
[Show full text]