Here we have a typical photo-homage to the painting. I find this particular image interesting for a couple of reasons.
It comes from the blog of a professional photographer, and was taken during a family photo shoot “in front of an abandoned, run down shack” (see the primary photo in the link above). It’s an interesting setting, and perhaps speaks to a cultural disconnect. Here the dilapidated shack serves only a surface function, as a rustic backdrop for a comfortable middle-class family’s portrait. It adds a kind of rural “character,” perhaps an abstract sense of a back-to-basics good life and truer living. Obscured are its possible other meanings, which might include signifiers of poverty, regressive social/government policies, Depression-era privation, lack of education and medicine, and so on. Whoever lived here (and how they lived, exactly) is unimportant; the house has been turned into a sanitized symbol for use as a middle-class touchstone and tourist object. Any tools or crafts still remaining might likewise become displayed souvenirs or quaint ornaments in modern homes, totems and curiosities whose prior “everyday use” for subsistence is key to their current attraction. These symbols of working class yesteryear are common in American households (including my own).
Back to the image above. There are many online examples of this kind of homage–average people reproducing the painting for a photograph–and in them we see what perhaps fascinates people. The artificial stance is a common feature; facing the viewer so directly, so frankly, there’s a sense of exposure (of truth?) going on. We’re accustomed to seeing people posed somehow in photos, rather than in stances that seem devoid of gesture (beyond the iconic gripped fork, of course). This effect is emphasized here by the wider framing to nearly full frontal dimensions.
I’m particularly interested in this image because of the non-smiling facial expressions. Yes, this imitates the original, but this couple seems to be even more purposefully communicating a blank expression. I’m reminded of early photograph portraits which, so different from contemporary pictures, rarely if ever featured smiling subjects. This is why costumed recreations of Old West portraits common as souvenirs often strike an off-note: we’re used to the convention of smiling for a posed picture, but it doesn’t fit the historical context. The sepia tone also adds to the retro effect, and again there is the incongruity of the modern casual dress against the rundown ruin of a home. I think it adds up to a fairly interesting homage.
Gothic Thoughts 
