ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on surveying the map of 1930s American photography and the visual rhetoric of poverty developing in the country at the time of Mina Loy's return to and residence within New York. It draws upon poems written in the 1940s and 1950s that Loy grouped under the title of "Compensations of Poverty". These poems and their representations of urban poverty are brought into relation with contexts of photographic production and display familiar to Loy, including mass media publications, the introduction of the documentary photo-text, and photographic projects trained on the city, as well as more personal connections to the work of friends such as Berenice Abbott and Clarence John Laughlin. Loy's portraits of the Bowery poor, while written in the years just after the Depression's end, gain meaning within the continued dominance of this influence and the absorption of documentary practices of portraiture into war and postwar representations of American life.
