MEGAN CRAIG is an artist and associate professor of philosophy and art at Stony Brook University.
In November 1938, Dorothea Lange snapped a black-and-white photograph at a gas station in Kern County, California. A couple of buildings and trees are visible in the background—vague signs of life. In the foreground we see an air machine, made of wood and resembling a bedroom wardrobe, its door swung open to reveal a tangle of black hose inside. A sign atop the machine reads, “AIR.” And on the inside of the door is a large, hand-painted message.
AIR
THIS IS YOUR
COUNTRY DONT
LET THE BIG
MEN TAKE IT
AWAY
FROM YOU
Look at the picture long enough and the word “AIR” starts to seem odd. For me, the letters drift apart, and I'm suddenly unsure how to spell or even pronounce the word. Repetition and capitalization contribute to the disorienting effect.
On this early June day, as I sit at my desk writing about Dorothea Lange, the air is in fact odd. Wildfires in Canada have sent smoke over the northeastern United States, creating an ashen sky that smells like burning. Yesterday, windows in my studio cast rectangles of amber light on the floor even though the sky remained an acrid gray. For the first time, I can imagine some of the horror of the Dust Bowl experience that Lange photographed in the 1930s, the sun blocked out for days and the air deadly and thick. It's funny in a way to have photographed an air machine at such a time, a machine intended for filling the deflated tires of cars carrying families fleeing west—a machine to keep you going. But when the
