The Very Human Hands of Theresia Ostermeyer, 1936 to the Present

This post was written by James Swensen, a Humanities Center faculty fellow. 

 

Last year, I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As a scholar of American art from the 1930s, I was eager to see the museum’s new exhibitions. I was pleased, but not surprised, to see a photograph I knew well in a prominent location on a wall dedicated to the photography created by the US government during the Great Depression (Figure 1). I admit that it was like seeing an old friend. Hanging among other iconic images of the era was the photograph, simply titled, “The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of a homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa.” 

Figure 1: Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, February 2023. Author’s possession.

The photograph was taken by Russell Lee in 1936 on his first traveling assignment for the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration or FSA (Figure 2). Lee was one of the best photographers of the twentieth century. Today, however, his is a name that not many people know, even if they know his work. He was tall, educated, and aristocratic in bearing, yet he also had an ability to deeply connect with the people he encountered across the United States. He genuinely cared for those he photographed and believed that he could help them by showing them in their plight. This included Theresia Ostermeyer, a septuagenarian farmer living in rural Iowa. 

Figure 2: Russell Lee, The hands of Mrs. Andrew Ostermeyer, wife of a homesteader, Woodbury County, Iowa, December 1936. Library of Congress.

German immigrants from Bavaria, the Ostermeyers were homesteaders who knew loss. They had five children, the last three of which did not survive to adulthood. They lost one farm in Harrison County after World War I and were unable to maintain their second farm on the Little Sioux River nearly two decades later. The year 1936, as their granddaughter recalled, “was the year we dried out. We didn’t raise any crop at all.”[1] Unable to repay their loan, they were in the process of eviction when Lee found and photographed them. Theresia was 74 and her husband was 81.  

Early on, Lee’s photograph of Ostermeyer’s cropped hands received praise. In 1939 the critic Elizabeth McCausland called it “a human and social document of great moment and moving quality.” She continued, “in the erosion of these deformed fingers is to be seen the symbol of social distortion and deformation: waste is to be read here, as it is read in lands washed down to the sea by floods, in dust storms and in drought bowls.”[2]

Decades later, Lee’s photography of Ostermeyer’s gnarled hands continued to have a gravitational pull. I still remember when I first experienced this photograph as an undergraduate BYU student sitting in a lonely cubical on the fifth floor of the Harold B. Lee Library one evening. I was just beginning my life in the currency and traffic of images, and this photograph stood out; it pierced me in a way that few images ever have; it stung. It compelled me to action and started me on the path to being a scholar of FSA photography. I do not know if I would be where I am today without this photograph. In a very real way, it also linked my love of photography with my love for others. On my mission in Poland, I remember shaking the hands of a woman in the doorway of the Warsaw chapel who, although much younger than Ostermeyer, had the same calloused, granite-like hands that were a byproduct of a lifetime of hard toil. In that moment, I learned more about the hardscrabble lives of those I was serving than by any other encounter.   

Hands are representative of what makes us human. There is a medieval folk tradition that says that when the devil disguises himself in human form, he is unable to properly recreate hands and feet. He cannot, as read in the Doctrine and Covenants, even accept mortal hands when offered. Lacking hands of his own, he is unable to perform one of the most elemental human engagements.  

This motif of hands as a marker of humanity finds a curious parallel in modern technology. As you are undoubtedly aware, AI image generators are making tremendous strides in generating dynamic visual imagery. Even the most opportunistic of us look with hesitation, fear, and excitement to what DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, and other programs are making. Yet, there is one important way in which AI has not figured out how to replicate or recreate imagery: hands. According to Peter Bentley, a professor of computer science at University College London, AI tools “have learned that hands have elements such as fingers, nails, palms. But they have no understanding of what a hand really is.” The machine’s failure is comforting in a way,” he continued, “Hands are a symbol of humanity.”[3]

Figure 3: Dall-E and Author, A.I. Generated Hands (Old Hands, Iowa Homesteader), November 2023.

Quickly, however, these programs are catching up. With the prompts “Old hands” and “Iowa Farm Woman,” DALL-E generated this image (figure 3), which reveals that AI may have gotten better at creating realistic hands. But it also shows that there are things that it cannot understand. Despite revealing the wrinkles of age (and a good job on the dress), these hands are too pretty, too perfect, and framed by an ideal picture of plenty. As a simulation, it is good; as an image of life, it is incomplete and inconsistent at best. The computer-generated hands of a woman who never existed cannot capture or reveal what the actual flesh-and-bone hands Lee photographed in 1936 did. It cannot capture the strain of hard labor, the disjointedness of age, and the pain of dislocation. It struggles to create an image of empathy. No program is bold or creative enough to make hands that look like Ostermeyer’s. No computer can correctly simulate an actual life written through scars, knots, and wrinkles. Indeed, no computer can grasp the imaginative properties of hard-won existence. AI may be getting better at depicting hands, but it cannot understand what it means to be human.  

Now look at your hands. What do they say?  

 

Footnotes

[1] John Karras, “Theresia Ostermeyer, Woodbury County, 1936,” Des Moines Sunday Register (November 20, 1977): 14.  

[2] Elizabeth McCausland, “Documentary Photography,” Photo Notes (January 1939): n.p. 

[3] Quoted in Alex Hughes, “Why AI-generated Hands are the Stuff of Nightmares, Explained by a Scientist,” BBC Science Focus (February 4, 2023). https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/why-ai-generated-hands-are-the-stuff-of-nightmares-explained-by-a-scientist (Accessed November 21, 2024).  

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