6. Words & Images

“Just sitting in the sun, watching the Mississippi go by.”

Erskine Caldwell accuses readers, “you have seen their faces.” Written in the 30’s, as America was amidst her greatest recession, Caldwell brings images all too familiar to Americans to their coffee tables.

Heralded as a harbinger to the future of the publishing industry, one wonders are we capable of producing such memorable images of our times, consider the sheer breadth of the rich media we consume today? As I went through this .pdf, the age of the black ink all too apparent on my LED display, my iPad, streaming latetst photos from theGuardian databases lay across the table. Out rose ash from an Indonesian volcano. But before I could process, the software had moved to the next image: President Barack Obama addressing and meeting the victims of the horrific terrorist attacks in the seaside city of Mumbai, India.

Twenty seconds later, onto an Afghan woman south of Kabul, who jumped out of the window because she deemed living with her husband worse.

To lament a lost age, and getting nostalgic has its place. But really, we would not have it any other way. It is said that the information an average man consumed over his lifetime during the civil war is the same as an average New Yorker does in a week. And we like it.

Yet seeing those men sitting by the Mississippi, the sweat of the Great Depression dripping from their foreheads, one wonders in our need to know everything, we might loose out on remembering something. We rush too quickly to call something historic. Yet history, today, doesn’t merely move forward, it sprints. Sometimes too quickly for us to remember anything.
 

It’s no secret that members of the working class saw their wages, wealth, and status' decrease during the Great Depression. These men, women, and children, many of whom have lived in America for generations, were plum out of luck. However, there was a great difference between the northern poor and the southern: sharecropping.
 
I was immediately drawn to the Caldwell piece detailing the lives of sharecroppers – both their plight and hopelessness – but strayed a bit from Goodwin’s critique of her and Bourke. Clichés are clichés, but if there was ever a time when pictures are worth a thousand words, Caldwell’s line of photos takes the cake. I am a big proponent of hyperbole to promote a good cause and Caldwell dances perfectly across the line of genuine dismay and over-embellishment to a “T.”
 
Critiqued for being closer to the side of fiction than fact, Goodwin doesn’t hold back about his beliefs of journalistic integrity by saying the technique in which Caldwell and Burke wrote captions for their stories, “serves to compound two fictions.” Now, understandably, Goodwin has justice in saying that there are standards authors and documentarians have responsibility to enjoin picture and complete truth, but what people like Goodwin choose not to see is the importance of a writer’s vision when telling a story. Goodwin might argue that there should be no story, but it is just such dire circumstances that someone one their side, fighting for their cause.
 
As outlined by Caldwell and Bourke, sharecropping is no easy system; worse yet, it’s not even a fair one. What land each family is able to work is quickly sucked of nutrition from overuse, and soon turns into a system of indentured servitude with no end in sight. I would ask Goodwin, “what of this requires any less effort from writers and photographers to pull people up than the effort by the owners of land to push people down?” And, if you find this system to be unjust like many others and I do, why wouldn’t you fight fire with fire? Instead, Goodwin tears Caldwell and Bourke down for improving lighting and inputting strong, meaningful prose in hopes of helping to gain public support for changing the system.
 
All of this week’s pieces were strong, moving photographic depictions of what it means to be a depression-age American, and in my opinion, the more, the merrier. Photos can be doctored, photos can be misused, but when showing the firsthand experience of  Americans toAmericans leads to shocking criticism, it means somebody’s doing something right.

“An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties” by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor is a fascinating account of the various migrations that took place in the different regions of America during the Great Depression. I was interested in the fact that it brings different narratives to light that we have not yet explored in depth, such as those in the south. Dorothea Lange prefaces her photographs with an description of the climate of the country, saying, “Indeed, in the face of industrial collapse of 1929, millions of Americans sought refuge in recoil to the land from which they had sprung. Now our people are leaving soil again. They are being expelled by powerful forces of man and of Nature”. (P. 14)
 
The photographs that are presented in An American Exodus provide a visceral element to the narratives that we have been reading about already, and to ones that we have not covered such as those in the American south. She describes the nature and effect of their collaboration, stating, “We use the camera as a tool of research. Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field. We adhere to the standards of documentary photography as we have conceived them”. (P. 15) Her recognition of their adherence to standards of documentary photography “as we have conceived them” makes the reader/viewer wonder how many creative liberties she took in staging her photographs in order to convey her desired effect. However, despite the debate over the integrity of the work of the photographers working for the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (Source), the combination of photographs and quotations of the subjects provide the viewer/reader with a unique window into a period of American history, and more specifically into the lives of a marginalized group of migrants, living on the fringes of society.
 
I was particularly interested in the narratives described by the photos and text that chronicled the migrant farmers from the south, particularly the African Americans that had been freed from slavery, but still struggled to find a way to make a living by farming the land. The most disappointing fact brought to light by the piece concerning the migrant farmers in the south, was that as a result of the eroded plantation system that once kept them enslaved, the land was now ruined. Arthur F. Raper is quoted in An American Exodus in 1937, saying, “The collapse of the plantation system, rendered inevitable by its exploitation of land and labor, leaves in its wake depleted soil, shoddy livestock, inadequate farm equipment, crude agricultural practices, crippled institutions, a defeated and impoverished people”.  This helps to explain the mass exodus of southern African American migrant farm workers relocating to urban cities in the north. A couple, born into slavery, on an abandoned twenty-eight-family plantation was quoted commenting on their disenfranchisement after the abolition of slavery, saying, “I remember when the Yankees come through, a whole, passel of em hollerin, and told the Negroes you’re free. But they didn’t get nothing cause we had carried the best horses and mules over to the gulley”. (Greene County, Georgia/July 1937)  Lange’s photo of the couple is an arresting image, but it gets its power largely from the context that the text provides. Another interesting use of text and photography, which illustrates how the two complement each other in An American Exodus, employs a quote by the President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy that states, “The committees examination of the agricultural ladder has indicated an increasing tendency for the rungs of the ladder to become bars-forcing imprisonment in a fixed social status from which it is increasingly difficult to escape”. (P. 24) The quote is accompanied by a photo of a dilapidated staircase, with broken steps, to symbolize the broken rungs of the agricultural system.
 
The piece also details the influx of migrant farmers in California, forced westward from the Draught Bowl. It confirms the hostile climate that the migrants arrived in California to, described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. It highlights the reaction of the Police Chief of Los Angeles’ reaction to these unemployed migrants, pointing out that “His remedy, reflecting initiative but stretching legal authority, was to overawe and thus impede the human influx by stationing Los Angeles policemen at the ports of land entry to the state, even to its farthest corners.”(P. 130) 

While looking at the selected photo books and reading their accompanying text, I found myself slipping back and forth between viewing them as journalistic inquiry and creative exposition.  This is not the same debate as to whether or not The Grapes of Wrathshould be read as a fictional work with significant real-life basis, but rather an inquiry of perspective and aesthetic value.  Is it possible to evaluate a piece of journalism (whatever “journalism” really means) in terms of its aesthetic, rather than social, value?  When does “journalism” simply become “non-fiction,” “memoir,” or “self-expression?”  Do they have to be mutually exclusive?  Does viewing journalistic documentation as art reduce the real-world potential of the objects?
 
These are particularly thoughts to keep in mind since the canonization of photography as a fine art in the late twentieth century.  The photographs of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans have been integrated into any introductory art-history course that touches on photography, and it certainly cannot be denied that their images have a certain visual pull to them.  However, how can this be reconciled with the fact that these images were intended to convey truth and to show the lives of the common American?  The fact that photography represents life supposedly directly complicates its artistic value; it is no longer solely under control of the artist.  Debates over the “reality” of the photos of Lange have additionally put into question whether or not the work should be taken as true journalism.  But what about Ilya Ilf’s touristic photos taken from his handheld Leica—perhaps the 1930s equivalent of our own point-and-shoot cameras?  Are these “art” equally as much as our latest Facebook photo album?
 
Even the texts, read in conjunction with the photos, do not clarify much.  Paul Taylor and Erskine Caldwell use their text space to explicate the socio-economic situation of the downtrodden in the Western and Southern United States.  Perhaps these are the closest to “journalism,” including quotes from the people actually affected by the Depression.  James Agee’s stream-of-consciousness narrative, on the other hand, is more a reflection of the artist-as-observer.  It is enlightening in the sense that we learn about the relationship between the artist and the subject, but Agee’s text is entirely concerned with his own desires and emotions (a fact that comes under sharp criticism by Bourke-White and Caldwell).  Ilf and Petrov’s ‘American Road Trip’ pretty much ignores the fact that so many are suffering as it recounts their exploration of the country as journalists-cum-tourists.
 
So what we are left with are these artifacts.  They all tell us something about how some people viewed the country at a particular social and historical moment.  Whether these should be categorized as art or journalistic artifact perhaps doesn’t matter, in our currently expanding sense of the word “art.”  They all have form and try to convey particular observations that can be analyzed and appreciated as aesthetic and historical documents. These photos and text perhaps have to be seen less as “true” than real products of a particular culture at a particular time.  The popularization of photography has extended our realm of visual analysis to not be constricted to the fine arts, and it only makes sense that this broadening will also be applied in retrospect to romanticized ephemera of the past. 

"Their book [Dorthea Lange and her husband]  evinces a mistrust of any photograph standing alone, independent of text”

When I read this line in James Goodwin’s article it made me rethink the images I had been looking through for our assignment.  I went back to the to images I was most struck by both from You Have Seen Their Faces by Caldwell and Bourke-White.  The first is Ocelot, Georgia, and the second is Dahlonega, Georgia.  What role does the accompanying text (in this case a quotation next to each)  play?

First, I analyzed each picture without the text.  What was the feeling of each photograph, how would I usually interpret it?  In the first picture I was struck by the Mother figure who constitutes much of the photograph’s frame.  Her face is turned towards the light and she has a determined sad look on her face.  The photographer has captured her in a triangular position, her head, knees and rear are the three points and the arm is the diagonal line – a symbol of strength. I also noticed a certain calm in the image, her life doesn’t seem overwhelming.  For example, there are two children in the frame completely under control.  There is also space in the frame, the world isn’t crushing in on her.  The space she takes up in the frame makes her seem bigger than the world around her, a mistress of it just as she is mistress of the frame.  Those are some preliminary observations.   

In contrast to he other frame, the mother is surrounded on all sides by four children.

Turing to the other frame, we see another Mother surrounded by four children.  She is at the center of the frame but the children invade he space on all sides.  Here the frame is confining only incorporating the mother and her children, there is no external space.  Her face is also turned towards the sun but there is pain in it.  In this image, it does seem as if the world is closing in on her.

Adding in the text to these observations I noticed something interesting.  One quote says “I never see my married children any more, but I suppose they have children of their own now”.  The other says “I got more children now then I know what to do with, but they keep coming like watermelons in the summertime.”  Which quote goes with which picture?  You would think that the first quote goes with the first picture, the woman “in control”, and the second for the second but, it’s actually the opposite.  So what purpose does the text serve?  It seems to redirect interpretation, to give a short powerful insight, provoking a reinterpretation of the images.

The Errol article raises an interesting point about the subtle line between journalistic integrity and propaganda. Of the examples of controversial photographs chosen, I found the one of the cows in front of North Dakota's capitol the most intriguing. Why would the Fargo Forum claim that the photo was a fake when it wasn't? The fact that the explanation coupled with the picture was misleading should have been sufficient for the locals to avoid embarrassment over their frightful drought situation. Perhaps an explanation summed up in one word, "fake", could better counteract the quick effect a photograph can have. Certainly, a picture can express an array of ideas in a short time. This was surely a threatening prospect for those who felt shame over being pitied by fellow countrymen.
 
Yet at the same time, the photos in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" had the opposite effect for me. They seemed to say very little compared to the text that accompanied them. Perhaps I'm jaded from seeing so many rural Depression-era photos lately, but James Agee's attention to detail far surpassed that of my eyes. Looking at the pictures, I thought, "Yes, they look rather despondent and poor. They are barefoot. Must be rough." But Agee went so much farther, explaining the subtle signs of embarrassment and shame in the eyes and movements of his subjects. He reads the thoughts of a mother he encounters, telling her that the photographs about to be taken are "as if you and your children and your husband and these others were stood there naked in front of the cold absorption of the camera in all your shame and pitiableness to be pried into and laughed at" (363). He explains the details of the clothing they wear, how the stitching reveals the countless cheap repurposing of the material. Would anyone pick out those details just from the photographs? Lionel Trilling points out that Evan’s camera “is false in its emphases.” In this case, it seems clear that the photos benefitted greatly from a lengthy explanation.
 
It still seems weird, though, that Agee apparently uses his own voice in lieu of his subjects. The Fargo Forum raised a huge complaint when the cow photo was misinterpreted. Were these people afraid of that, as well? Were they even really aware of the power of photography? It seems that while the camera certainly put the correct face on the plight of the Midwest (well, usually), it was capable of robbing the region and its people of their own voice, taking snapshots and running wild with their captive images.

Two equally fascinating yet very different collections of Depression-era photo-texts: You Have Seen Their Faces, by Caldwell and Bourke-White, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by Agee and Evans. Supporters of each of these works criticized the respective “opposing” piece; meanwhile Alan Trachtenburg suggests (in the foreword of You Have Seen…) we should “see these two imaginative works less as antagonists than as coinhabitants of the same historical and cultural space,” (viii).

Both pieces certainly have an individual beauty to them, distinctive styles that are sometimes very human, sometimes rather haunting. In You Have Seen Their Faces, the photography of Bourke-White is something far beyond an art form to accompany the written text; in fact, most of the time it seems to lead the piece itself through its intense visual representations of themes. Before reading about the children and teenagers who are unable to attend school because of the demands of the farm, we are presented with a photograph of a boy in overalls tending to the land, wearing a mixed expression of fatigue and concentration. Following the collection of pictures whose subjects are both white and black – subjects who, regardless of color, show their discipline and their struggles through the same squinted eyes or forehead lines – we read Caldwell’s discourse on “race relations in the South,” (vi).

Of course, these photographs could, as Trachtenburg points out, be viewed as “excessively theatrical and manipulative” when compared to the almost impossibly natural and nonintrusive work of Walker Evans (vii). Lionel Trilling praises Evans’ photographs in his review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, entitled Greatness With One Fault in It:
“The superiority of Evans to all this (the impreciseness of photography) could no doubt be described in technical and aesthetic terms, but what always immediately strikes me about his work is its perfect taste, taking that word in its largest possible sense to mean tact, delicacy, justness of feeling, complete awareness and perfect respect. It is a tremendously impressive moral quality,” (100).
Evans seems to have avoided putting his photographic subjects on the museum-like display so typical of the art form; it would be especially hard to avoid rendering the subject as object when dealing with an atmosphere already heavy with a gritty despair so intense it sometimes feels naturally “theatrical.”

The almost inevitably condescending relationship between the documented and the documenter, while having seemingly been dodged by Evans, catches hold of Agee – the “one fault” to which Trilling’s title alludes. In class we have been discussing this troublesome tightrope on which all of these Depression-era documenters must balance: how does one approach such a situation? The artist or writer, who is (obviously) better off than his subjects in that he is capturing them by camera or pen and not out there working on the fields with them (for the most part), stands in a very interesting position when doing this recording. Furthermore, with this awkward class tension looming in the background, the documenter must properly represent these people – he must be their faces, their voices, and their stories. How do you emulate the speaking style of a farmer through writing without making him sound uneducated? How do you photograph a thinning mother with her dusty children without presenting them as pitiable stereotypes?

It isn’t easy work, and can often lead to results something along the lines of Agee’s writing, as criticized by Trilling. It seems Agee, because of his guilt and through his attempts to respectfully depict his subjects, has taken it too far and has put them on this kind of moral pedestal – as hard working, disciplined people made of rock who, wiping their brows after another day of struggle, can at least find solace in that they “can do no wrong.” As Trilling explains, Agee writes, “of his people as if there were…no flicker of malice or meanness, no darkness or wildness of feeling, only a sure and simple virtue, the growth, we must suppose, of their hard, unlovely poverty,” (102). Through failing to “see these people as anything but good,” Agee unfortunately defeats his original purpose and really is in fact showing less respect in that his guilt and pity for them ring strong.

Yet as I said before, avoiding such a tendency certainly is difficult; I wonder, when it comes to written documentation, if such a thing is even possible?

In You Have Seen Their Faces, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-white present a world that is spinning out of control.  Their depiction of sharecropping in the depression era South is nothing short of, well depressing. Through their revolutionary use of image, complemented by, not complementing, the general narrative of the piece, they are able to give special credence to their fictional depictions of southern life.
 
Throughout the piece, a call to organization and some could argue revelation is painfully evident. The South is depicted as “sick,” having moved from a situation in which the goal is to improve to one in which the goal has become simply to hold on and keep from slipping into near animalistic circumstances. The South for the authors has become a sort of ailing man on the verge of claps that can only be saved through a dramatic shift away from the present system. In this way, the South is shown as no longer “something to improve” but rather simply something that need not be left to die. This idea is presented most potently through Bourke-whites’ Clinton Louisiana photo, in which a women and her child are captured sitting on the steps of a once great plantation house, that is now in ruin and occupied by many suffering families who rent out what can be inferred as dilapidated rooms. The whole piece seems to center around this idea, that the South is only rolling further and further into decline and that its greatest days are far behind. The book also seems to lament the lose of Southern culture, which it seems to indicate has been replaced with nothing more than backwardness and shame.   
 
As Alan Trachtenberg states in his forward to the work, it represents “an artistic protest against economic injustice and suffering.” It does this in a way perhaps never before attempted, by fusing image and word in such a way as to create one cohesive and convincing picture of what is in fact a fictional depiction. For this I believe the work deserves much credit, for pioneering a stylistic idea that could be seen as the precursor to much of today’s modern media. However, as is pointed out in the forward, it all can seem a bit contrived and overly dramatic at times, with the language coming across as crude and the pictures as staged. Despite this, the work still in my view does a tremendous job of shedding light on the often overlooked South, as well as in pioneering a revolutionary form of media.     

The readings of this entire course, specifically The Grapes of Wrath and all the other works which have focused on the dustbowl migration (in particular the selection from American Exodus), seem to present us with a picture of the death of a particular class of people, a particular way of life, which has existed not only in America but in the whole (well I say the whole, but I’m sure I could be proved wrong) of the world since time immemorial: the lifestyle farmer, the subsistence farmer, the farming “class.” Those who work the land “with their hands” as Steinbeck put it.

 

And now, in the future, we can see what it has wrought. Most of the world eats the fruits of industrialized agriculture. Grown by a man in a tractor rather than one who walked the fields and felt the dirt etc. etc. Subsistence farming exists as either a relic of the lucky or tenacious few who have held on to their ancient rights or an affectation of those seeking a nostalgic return to a past to which they are otherwise unconnected. Its produce sold at farmers’ markets and expensive country hotels. As a quantifiable mass, as a class of people as presented by these works, they are negligible in modern America.

 

Where did they go? Well, the final chapter of American Exodus seeks to tell us. They went, it says, to the cities. In droves, apparently, they clogged the freeways into Los Angeles, and once they were urban, they were of the urban poor, and so were their children (this may account for the preponderance of fair-haired, strong-backed beauties that appeared in that city in the fifties). They went either to the cities or they became nomads, following the seasons and the crops to wherever they could get wage work doing the only thing they had ever done. And so they became part of the “agriculture workforce,” similar to factory workers or office workers, a quantifiable part of the modern economy, and susceptible to the vagaries of the market like any of those groups. 

 

This is in line with an almost Victorian view of progress, a nineteenth-century view of America, where old-world conventions like subsistence farming fall away before the bold efficiency of mechanization.

 

However, at the actual time the technology comes to be that makes that vision possible, the country is steeped in pastoral/communist mythology and views this as the destruction of something ancient and beautiful by the small-minded and greedy.

 

Which, in some ways it was, I suppose. But the Victorian view is more optimistic, don’t you find?

I chose to read/view ”Have You Seen Their Faces” before reading any critiques of the work.  Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White organize their ‘photo-text’ starting with a selection of photographs by Margaret Bourke-White which are also accompanied by captions written by both authors.  After the photographs comes an essay on the social, economic, and political climate in the ‘struggling South’.

The presentation of the photographs and text lead the viewer and reader to assume that what they view on paper in photographic evidence and in the captions is the truth.  The captions are phrased in ways that make it seem as though Bourke-White and Caldwell have taken quotes from these individuals who are captured on film.  In fact, the authors pulled these captions from thin air, essentially taking all credibility that they had and throwing it away.  Instead of giving a voice to these ‘pitiful’ and ‘suffering’ people, they took their voices away and dramatized their plight, often in stereotypical and embarrassing ways – “They keep coming along like watermelons in the summertime.”

Not only were the captions falsified, but Margaret Bourke-White additionally dramatized the photographs, adding false lighting and staging her pictures.  While she “operated the equipment with a remote shutter release and flash control” and felt that this method “imprisoned [people] on a sheet of film before they knew what had happened”, there is nothing honest about her portrayal.  Perhaps people would argue that the subjects of the photos already knew that there was a camera focused on them, but there is so much intrusion and production when one comes into another’s house, sets up cameras and expects people to act as though all was normal.  It is unrealistic.

Erskine Caldwell’s narration as well is over the top and dramatized, portraying the plight of these people in a way that seems like a “living newspaper”.  It “provides a picturesque impression of living conditions in the deep south” according to James Goodwin.  I absolutely agree.  Even if I didn’t know of the fictitious quality of the photographs and captions or the authors’ lack of consideration that documentation rather than fiction was ideal in making a point, I wouldn’t have been able to respect Caldwell’s flowery writing.  His writing makes people living in the South seem pitiful and pathetic and is entirely patronizing.

This all being said, I think the photographs were aesthetically beautiful and the writing poetic.  If someone was to take it all as fact and ignore how insulting it is to people in the South, they would surely be persuaded to sign up to fight along-side Caldwell and Bourke-White.

Flannery O’Connor wrote in her book Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, “"anything that comes out of the South s going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."  I thought immediately of the style of Southern Gothic writing as I read Alan Trachtenberg’s partly defensive introduction to Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces.  

Trachtenberg admits the liberties that Caldwell took with the narration (such as instances where quotations accompanying portraits were fabricated, never spoken by the subject) but deems a characterization of the book as being a “wicked distortion” to be unfair.  They miss the “southern inflection”-- some Southern cultural quality that enabled the writer and photographer to manipulate to a somewhat dramatic end.  

In the Southern Gothic genre, characters are made grotesque to call attention to the peculiar social ills of the South.  In my experience, there is the sensation of being drawn into the charm of an individual, as indicia of their strange darkness slowly creeps into the narrative.  There is an unreal, sometimes outright supernatural, quality to these stories, steeped in a difficult history riddled with contradiction.  

“Mark against the south its failure to preserve its own culture and its refusal to accept the culture of the east and west.  Mark against it the refusal to assimilate the blood of an alien race of another color or to tolerate its presence. Mark against it most of, if not all, the ills of a retarded and thwarted civilization.”

Even in this description, Caldwell’s meaning is obscured.  He is inviting the reader to blame the South for all of these problems, but he is also indicating that problems are more complicated, run very deep, and are not attributable to a single blameworthy party.   He exaggerates in that last sentence: the reader realizes that not all of civilization’s ills are attributable to “the South”, and this irony forces the reader to notice how much they arbitrarily disdain the South.

On page 44, there are several short paragraphs outlining the responses of various authorities (politicians, sociologists, and the like) to the plight of the tenant farmers.  Each of their views of the situation is simplistic, ill-informed, completely and near-comically twisted.   When you are forced to laugh dryly at the grossness of sociologists suggesting sterilization of particular farmers, you know it is to keep from crying frustrated tears: that is the territory of the Southern Gothic writer.  

So if some of the captions on Bourke-White’s photos seem dramatic and exploitive, perhaps we can keep O’Connor in mind.  For the inhabitants of the South, who had seen the worst of everything, lurid, vivid, dramatic and twisted is all that registers anymore.  Those people have a narrative style and a relationship with reality that is all their own.

Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov edited by Erika Wolf provides an outsiders’ perspective of traveling across the United States in the 1930’s. For the writers, America “has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person.” Ilf and Petrov’s objective is to “change that image” with a realistic portrait of the United States. Thus, in their new Ford automobile, the two writers travel from New York to California and back in search of discovering the “real America.”
 
Ilf and Petrov’s journey is described in minute detail.Ilf and Petrov’s attention to minutiae is demonstrated as they note the different signs they pass and the different roads that they travel.  Through their travels, Ilf and Petrov notice a common theme of identical towns, exemplified by the fact that most street names are identical in different cities, “These streets are either Main Street, State Street, or Broadway.” Thus, the writers fail to see America’s originality.
 
However, as the journalists begin their journey in their quest of finding the “real America,” they are at first astonished by the American towns. The first city they visit is New York City. The tall skyscrapers and abundance of people amaze Ilf and Petrov. They then go to Washington DC, but neither New York City or Washington are considered “real America” because New York is just “a bridge between Europe and America,” and Washington “is a city of government clerks.” So their travel continues, and the first town they explore evokes a sentiment that they describe “with a feeling of excited anticipation.” Ilf and Petrov feel immense eagerness for what they will find and what will they learn. However, what they discover is “the same pavement, the same automobiles, and the same billboards.” According to the writers, each town has identical characteristics. By the time they visit the fourth town, Ilf and Petrov can only muster an “ironic smile.” Additionally, each town greets each traveler with a supposed “touching sign” like “’Welcome to Avon.’’’ However, Ilf and Petrov do not find the sign touching “No! The city of Avon doesn’t excite the traveler. It isn’t exciting and it isn’t touching. He has already seen something similar.” Each town features a church, a cinema and a drugstore. The similarities extend beyond the visual sense, as “even the smell of all American cities is the same It’s the smell of exhaust.”  The smell of exhaust is unappealing and even nauseating.  Thus, their journey through the United States yields disappointing results but fosters a new image of uniformity, one that differs from the previous grandiose representation of the “real America.”

People tend to trust their eyes. Despite the capabilities of modern technology to manipulate images to the whim of the editor, there persists a notion that seeing is believing. However, photography is a manipulation from the ground up.
 
Long before Photoshop existed, pictures were painstakingly developed by hand. Photographers would have to spend hours in darkrooms, carefully dodging and burning and agitating their film in order to produce an image to their liking. In fact, there was a period in the early 1800s—the very beginning of photography—where the practice had almost metaphysical associations. Having to real frame of reference for the technology, some writers explained it as “nature drawing itself.” Of course the idea of nature drawing itself is a bit misleading, but the process is much more like drawing than many people are willing to admit.
 
In the photo-book You Have Seen Their Faces, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White take this notion to something of an extreme. Whenever a picture is taken, the choice of subject matter alone conveys a certain meaning. Photographing the downtrodden masses makes a sort of point unto itself. Beyond this, composition of a shot conveys information to the viewer without specifically stating it.

Pyramidal compositions, for instance, convey a sense of solidity; having a subject’s head above geographical center of a composition indicates calm or importance, below center creates disquiet, and dead center suggests aggression. With these visual queues in mind, one can see that Bourke-White’s images are stylized and set out to make a point. In addition, Caldwell invented dialogues to serve as captions for the photographs, furthering the fiction contained in the publication. Though Caldwell had his background in the fiction world, he wanted to use photographs as a way to verify the authenticity of his stories. It should be apparent, however, that photographs can't verify the authenticity of prose. A great degree of imagination goes into their fabrication as well.
 
In the foreword, Alan Trachtenberg addresses this, claiming the work’s “detractors are simply mistaken. They miss the fictionality of the work and see its deviations from objective fact…as wicked distortions” (vii). To his mind, the authors’ artistic flares served to explore a greater truth about the state of the Depression era South, and I am inclined to agree. After all, it is the role of the artist to hold up a mirror to society so that society might see itself in a new light. The public is far too trusting of the images presented to them, but objectivity is the realm of journalists, not activist artists.

I didn’t find Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip at all “light and satirical” (ix) despite what Erika Wolf says in the book’s introduction. Well, satirical maybe. But absolutely not light.

The story read as sort of a jeer at the U.S. The trip reminded me of the pettiness of the Cold War conflict itself. It was like was like boy peeking into his brother's trick-or-treating bag because he knew that his brother had less candy. He would smile and then remark, “You don’t have very many snickers bars do you? All I see are laffy taffy.”

Except that this story did give Americans dimension. We are not entirely flat; those typified greedy capitalists with cigars, or the emaciated and poor rummaging through garbage cans. No, we are depicted as, …”excellent workers, jacks-of-all-trades... They are precise, but not so much as to be pedantic. They are neat and punctual, without being so fussy that other people would start to make fun of them for it. They know how to keep their word, and they trust other people’s words. They are always ready to help. They are good comrades and easy to get along with. At the same time, there are a lot of annoyingly childish and primitive traits in the people’s character. But the most interesting childlike quality, curiosity, is almost absent among Americans” (26). In their eyes we are great for our skyscrapers and efficient roads, but dull. Our cities are lifeless, lusterless.

When I first read this piece, I was torn between dismissing it as pure propaganda, and thinking that they had actually touched upon something real and sore in American culture. Although I disagree that all of our towns are as colorless as they seem to think, you have only to stop in town’s shopping mall to know exactly what they are talking about. There is an empty, soulless feeling about them. Each one with the same stores, the same clothing, the same advertisements, and the same preteens with their braces, ogling jeans and half naked bodies in Abercrombie and Fitch.

In the United States there is such a thirst for culture, for otherness. Abroad we are known for McDonalds, shirts with popped collars, and rap music, but inside we scoff at pop culture and become obsessed with foreign cultural identity. I once had a discussion with a French professor about how renouncing American culture and trying to become “French” was the most American thing to do of all.

Still, despite the story’s possible relevance, it does read an awful lot like propaganda. Ilf and Petrov write, “The word ‘America’ has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person…We want to change that image”(15). Not that I believe that they had any choice in the matter. But it does seem in a little bit odd that the two comrades so are eager and curious to tour the US when it is so obviously failing.

...Look who has more candy.


Note: the video linked below is the beginning of a really fascinating documentary about Soviet propaganda cartoons from the 1930's-1970's. It really gave me some background into what kind of comments the Soviet government would have wanted Ilf and Petrov to make about the USA. The comment about the American Dream seems like an especially common criticism to have made in that time. My picture comes from a dark, haunting cartoon in which a jobless boy finds work in a shooting gallery. The patron- a cigar smoking capitalist, of course- pays the boy more if he agrees to be used as a human target. The documentary is worth seeing, even if you're just curious about the art or the music used. 

Trilling’s piece “Greatness with one fault in it” provided a perspective on the documenting of struggle in the 1930’s that turned the focus back on the viewer and asked important questions about the place of art in society. These photo-books, designed to inspire action and create awareness, often instigate pure pity. This issue, of the subject and the viewer, has always been present in art and brings up endless debate about what is art (is it only art when it is presented in an institution? Does the viewer decide it is art? The creator?) however Trilling frames the conflict in a social sense:
 
Christian pity is not enough. Liberal concern and good will are hopeless; lack of passion is here an insult. The "social consciousness” of the Thirties which flowered in Hemingway and Steinbeck, in Odets and Irwin Shaw, which millions found so right, proper and noble, did indeed have a kind of passion, and perhaps it had the virtue of being better than nothing. But how abstract and without fibre of resistance and contradiction it was, how much too apt it was for the drawing-room, how essentially it was a pity which won- derfully served the needs of the pitier.
 
Here, Trilling discusses the need of the viewer. This same need still exists today. When natural disasters hit, the first thing we do is take pictures and blast them all over the news. It poses the question, how much can “awareness” help? At what point does the documentarian need to put down the camera and help?
 
The image at the top of this blog post exemplifies that question. The photographer who took this (Kelvin Carter) left the girl who was crawling to a UN food camp in Sudan during the famine of 1994 to die. He later committed suicide. While this is a drastic example, we still have so many examples of this type of behavior today. Hurricane Katrina was just one more example of photographers staying a safe distance behind their lens to “spread the message” and “promote awareness”. I think it is appalling that they could use this defensive barrier of “ART” as armor against participating in the evils of the world.
 
In regards to travel, this same issue is present. As people move across the country either out of despair and last resort, or to “Discover America”, the same sort of disaster tourism occurred in the 1930s.  Agee said, “Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another”. Travel in the 1930’s was either as a direct result of the fury of the Depression, or an exploitation of it.
 
It also poses the question of what is real? How many of these images we saw are posed and how many are off the cuff “true” renderings of what was going on at the time. An even more complex question is does it matter? The artists (both photographers and writers) that were trying to convey a certain image were doing so because they thought it was necessary so does it matter if they have posed their subjects in a particular manner? At the end of the day, the picture exists as it is, and a photograph (even though it is perceived as a true rendering is just as subjective as a painting or a drawing. The artists’ eyes and hands are responsible for what you see. If anything, photography is even more malleable and therefore more influential over the viewer when it comes to perspective. By using a medium that so closely replicates reality, the manipulation of that is not as obvious as it is with a rending that is very obviously human creates. Maybe it is the presence of a machine that makes the viewer think the image is more reliable than that of human rending, yet we forget that photography is still a human creation and that it can be manipulated to convey a message just as with any other art form. It is more dangerous because we attribute reality to the camera and therefore we refuse to acknowledge the human interaction with the subject. In a sense, this creates an even more profound message by artists who documented this travel in the 1930s because we ignore the manipulation that may be present. Photography is so powerful as a way to capture not only the subject, but also the viewer as well in the way that they react, perceive and think about the image they are viewing.
 
In American Exodus, the discussion of statements made about statistics regarding the 1930s and the agriculture and metropolitan changes occurring were reflective of the artists’ mind versus the anthropologist mind.  Anthropology is an institutionalized way to track the changes that were occurring at the time – the information is often delayed and of very little use to the people it quantifies. Art, instead, is the more free form way to make a statement, a declaration, a documentation of a personal story that may or may not represent a whole, and in some cases it can inform and inspire change in the moment  - the second the shutter clicks, the data is collected.
 
In one of the Nonstatistical Notes from the Field, art is compares to statistics, “I think no curator would choose his specimens that way”. That Way, being the way a statistician gathers numbers and data and passes judgment based upon this basic information that has been stripped of all humanity.
 
To me, the most fascinating part is what we do now. In a world saturated with words and images and media, how do we make change? Is it up to the statisticians or the artists? Do either one of these influences really have any power any more?
 
Whether or not you believe that history repeats itself, we are in a similar economic situation as were in the 1930s (obviously there are many differences and this is a generalization) however can we look to the past to see how to form the future? Are these photographs and words the story that we are reliving now? In 80 years, what will students say about this period of time and what will they look at to tell them the story?