ZOE TRODD

The Calling of Two Creatures:

Depression-era collaboration and a theory of camera and pen

 

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us...

All these were honoured and were the glory of their times...

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.

And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been [King James Bible, Ecclesiasticus 44]

 

 

James Agee and Walker Evans took up the King James Bible’s call to collaboration in their experimental text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which takes it title from Ecclesiasticus 44. For Agee, as Evans later wrote, human beings were “immortal and literally sacred souls,” and he felt a heavy responsibility as observer and a writer. Throughout the book, Agee asks the reader to compare the suffering of the families to that of Christ’s suffering, describing a house “hung on its nails like an abandoned Christ,” the “bone and bone, blood and blood, life and life” of the sleeping families (17), this last phrase almost a liturgy. And, with Evans, he produced what the Ecclesiasticus passage calls a “memorial” for an invisible, vanishing people. But the pair also made Let Us Now Praise Famous Men a call to collective action against the perishing: they played out the “us” of their title through their own collaborative effort, and, in trying to give the vanishing tenant farmers of the 1930s a continued existence beyond memorial, they sought the collaboration of the reader too.

The book demands a response from that reader addressed in the early pages as “you who will read these words and study these photographs…and what will you do about it” (7). Agee explains that the collaboration is “an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (x), and adds later: “The most I can do… is to make a number of physical entities as plain and vivid as possible, and to make a few guesses, a few conjectures; and to leave to you much of the burden of realizing in each of them what I have wanted to make clear of them as a whole” (97). The reader must play a central part, he insists, telling us: “if these things seem lists and inventories merely, things dead unto themselves… then perceive in them and restore them what strength you can of yourself: for I must say to you, this is not a work of art or of entertainment, but it is a human effort which must require human cooperation” (98). Collaboration between artists and reader is key to the project: the “us” is artist and reader, as well as writer and photographer.

            But the collaborative us of writer and photographer seems initially token by comparison. Agee refers to Evans’ photographs only three times throughout the book, and when he finally writes at length about Evans taking a photograph this shot isn’t amongst those published: there’s no chance to make an explicit comparison between text and images. The book is a strange division of labor between the two men, and this division seems rooted in their different personal styles. In the summer of 1936, Agee, a reporter for Fortune magazine, persuaded his editors to send him south to report on the living conditions of cotton sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and to hire Evans as photographer-collaborator from the government’s Farm Security Administration project. The two men took a while to understand one another: they would eventually become close, but initially Evans found Agee disconcertingly excitable, with the unfathomable energy of a six year-old boy. A private man, Evans thought Agee too revealing: there are passages in Let Us Now Praise Men where Agee remembers masturbating in his grandfather’s house, or where he wishes aloud for a prostitute and imagines some of the tenants having group sex with Evans and himself. “Agee was a very embarrassing man,” Evans said in an interview later: “I love the prose, but sometimes I blush reading it.”

Many of the acknowledged difficulties of the book stem from the palpable disconnect between Agee’s effusive prose and Evans’ stark images. The men seem entirely uncollaborative, and early critics observed that the book broke from the usual collaborative tradition of shared techniques and similar personas. Agee notes in his introduction that the photographs and text are mutually independent, and this seemed more than obvious: Evans’ photographs are at eye-level, from the middle-distance, and in full flat light, and these economical, measured, factual images stand apart as Book One, preceding Agee’s 400 pages of crazed lyrical prose in Book Two with, for example, an impassioned 50,000 word description of the tenant houses. For while Agee admired Evans’ sensitive work and his willingness to let his subjects pose themselves (which was a exercise in collaboration between artist and subject), for his part of the collaboration, he chose full self-expression, countering the restraint of Evans’s work with his copious subjectivity. Evans might occasionally acknowledge his own presence, for example in one image that includes his shadow, but Agee inserts himself fully into the text, even becoming the book’s subject: “I become not my own shape and weight and self, but that of each of them” (52), he explains, in Whitmanesque terms. Agee’s foregrounding of his own conscious presence stemmed in part from his ongoing struggle with a sense that each of his subjects was absolutely unique and couldn’t be understood by camera or described in ink: the next best thing was to offer his own response to them.

The book feels disordered, then, in part because his form is imitating consciousness. His cataloging is also unsystematic because he believed reality, as well as consciousness, to be messy, and wanted to record it in all its messy variety, writing: “the whole job may seem messy to you. But a part of my point is that experience offers itself in richness and variety and in many more terms than one and that it may therefore be wise to record it no less variously” (216). Evans, however, saw the unruly world as a place of “filthy punctured cubes” and sought to order it as “f]ourteen thousand two hundred and seventy three tragedies, 67284 mysteries, several obscure dramas with or without poetry,” as he put it in a poem collected in the volume Unclassified. In this poem America’s obscurities are catalogued, and counted, and in his 1940s subway images Evans gives visual expression to the poem, also parodying archives like Thomas Byrnes’ Professional Criminals of America of 1886, and anticipating projects like the 1955 Family of Man exhibition. He gives free rein to this anti-Agee archival impulse in his images for Let Us Now Praise Men as well, where the composed environments are still-lifes, with nothing left to chance. He disliked the “accidental revelation,” which hid things rather than exploring them, as Lincoln Kirstein explains in his afterword to Evans’ American Photographs, and removed two candid shots when revising Let Us Now Praise Famous Men for a second edition in 1960, thus eliminating chance and disorder even further.

Agee’s decision not to write a more traditional narrative, that might have seemed to better harmonize with the photographs, also evolved out of a sense of guilt at attempting the project at all. It seemed to him, as he explains in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “obscene and terrifying to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appalling damaged group of human beings… for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings” (5), and the camera was particularly menacing in this respect. He remembers “you and your children and your husband… 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” (321). It’s a memory that evokes Byrnes’ Professional Criminals project and the numerous anthropological images of the late nineteenth century, as well as Evans’ vision of “punctured cubes” and carefully numbered “tragedies” on display.

Agee’s guilt about the camera’s “cold absorption” and the voyeurism of the collaboration with Evans, was exacerbated by his belief that every human advantage was a theft. He wrote in a chapter that he eventually cut from the final published version: “I feel intense guilt towards every such man and woman and child alive; and I suggest that you need to feel it too; and that that sense of guilt cannot possibly be intense enough.” He explains his circular, repetitive style as a response to this guilt, in the same unpublished passage: “I have been aware that like one in a snowstorm I have been going in circles; and that has pleased rather than dismayed me… it was in the hope that by the slowly wound inane and earnest brutality and boredom a little might be set upon you of the unspeakable weight, and monotonies of the work itself.” His relentless prose, with page-long sentences, suits his theme of repetitive work: the book is slow going because tenant life is dreary. Thus closing the gap between the reader’s experience and that of the farmers, Agee came to grips with his feelings of guilt, and his awareness of the camera’s voyeuristic eye; that “terrible structure of the tripod crested by the black square heavy head, dangerous as that of the hunchback of the camera,” the “witchcraft” of photography (364), the “stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil eye” (362).

But in seeking to involve the reader and so defy a passive voyeurism, Agee made language a performance by writer and reader, and the book an event in time. He notes that we should read the book aloud and includes a cast-list at the beginning, believing that literature is not static but recreated anew each time it is read or performed, and wanted “the text be read continuously” like “a film watched” (x). Here is where a clear collaboration with Evans begins to emerge from the shadows, for Evans took up the idea of performance when he photographed a tenant child with a rumpled sheet shaped to look like wings [fig.1], which begs to be read with Agee’s lines about “a furious angel nailed to the ground by its wings” (87), and “the little slit graves of angelic possibility” (96). The child is a fairy or an angel, tenant life not without myth and drama: other photographers of the era also pictured children behind the bars of windows and jail cells, but only Evans gives the imprisoned child wings.

Figure 1. Walker Evans, Fields’ child, Hale County, Alabama, 1935. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

Agee writes in the opening to the book that there is no Queen of the Fairies to rescue the tenant families, and Evans puts his fairy behind bars: in acknowledging the national drama gone sour, writer and photographer collaborate to represent the fairy-tale stage-props left behind. Evans’ photographs of tattered minstrel posters and torn Hollywood advertisements further register this sense of national performance interrupted, and both men dwell throughout their collaboration on the painful beauty of the post-myth tenant lives: Agee writes a face “seamed and short as a fetus” (31), a light that “pulses like wounded honey” (49), and Evans represents the dark side of beauty in photographs that are without exception off-center. Edgy and unsettling, they echo numerous images of asymmetry in the text, where church, land, house, and life all lack – like Agee’s prose and Evans’ images – a center: the church they find has “subtle almost strangling strong asymmetries” (35), and the land “a symmetry sensitive to so many syncopations of chance, [so that] it is in fact asymmetrical” (203).

Theses details of collaboration are several of many throughout the work – for Agee remarks that images and text are not just “mutually independent,” but also “fully collaborative” (xlvii). Seeking a “fully collaborative project,” Agee did try to write like a camera: he believed that “words cannot embody, they can only describe,” (210) and that the camera was “the central instrument of our time” (9). He insists, “[i]f I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs” (4), and his imagination is often photographic: sunlight is chemical like “a flash bulb,” a child is a “photographic plate” (198). His focus throughout on the process of writing meant he wrote, then looked to see what was written: his writing comes to light like a developing photograph. And in describing, meditating and analyzing all at once, he gives us timeless sentences, saying at one point: “you musn’t be puzzled by this, I’m writing in a continuum” (62). His writing is without narrative or chronology, and he creates static word-pictures with long repetitive sentences that mingle tenses – as in the very last sentence of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where he moves from past to present to past: “each of these matters had in that time the extreme clearness which I shall now try to give you; until at length we too fell asleep” (416).

If the book explores the photographic imagination of the writer, it also examines the narrative imagination of the photographer. Though Evans’ style seems at first “straight, puritanical,” as William Carlos Williams judged, or “naked realism,” as the Saturday Review of Literature put it on August 23, 1941, it was in reality quite filmic. Eisenstein’s montage technique influenced several photographers of the time, including Evans, who modified the film-maker’s dialectic to meet the needs of a still-photographic layout, and planned with Agee “a new kind of photographic show in which the photographs are organized and juxtaposed into an organic meaning and whole… a sort of static movie,” or so Agee recalled. Evans was interested in the continuity of film, like MacLeish who calls the blue line at the top of the pages of Land of the Free, a poem with photographs, “The Sound Track.”

Equally, though Evans railed against “that fantastic figure, the art photographer, really an unsuccessful painter with a bag of mysterious tricks,” in a 1931 article for Hound and Horn, he had a highly literary sensibility, writing in a short unpublished piece: “Photography is interesting only because it can be a language…. Used with imagination, the camera is something like a writing instrument,” able to “control diction and wield wit and fashion metaphor: they can almost pun and even do achieve oxymora… Your first question of a print will be: does it ‘read’?… I conclude superlative photography to be literate.” Agee called Evans’ work “Joycean” in its “denseness, insight and complexity,” and Evans, when asked in 1971 what he taught his photography students at Yale, answered: “the relation between some great piece of writing and photography. There’s no book that’s not full of photography. James Joyce is. Henry James is. That’s a pet subject of mine, how those men are unconscious photographers,” and added “I think, in truth, I’d like to be a letterer… I’m literary.” He claimed Flaubert as his greatest influence and described himself in another interview as “almost a pathological bibliophile.”

Figure 2. Walker Evans, “Garage in S. City Outskirts,” 1935. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

In his images for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Evans uses opposites, contrasts, and ironies in his images, packing them full of metaphors and quotations, as with his famous image of shoes that echoes a series of paintings by Van Gogh. Here as elsewhere he photographs billboard and signs, the written word in the landscape and cities, as though seeing language everywhere. Reading his photographs, we wonder if tires and melons, for example, are sometimes a visual study in the letter ‘O’ [fig.2]. His interest in the narrative possibilities of photography echoed that of others during the period, in part because of the photo-essays made famous in Life magazine by 1935, where photographs told a story with a beginning, middle and end. In US Camera,1939, Steichen defined documentary as pictures that “tell a story,” and head of the information division of the FSA Roy Stryker observed that “the newspicture is a single frame; ours, a subject viewed in series. The newspicture is dramatic, all subject and action. Ours show what’s back of the action. It is a broader statement… frequently a sketch and not infrequently a story.” Stryker wrote letters like this of January 30, 1937 to Russell Lee: “Suggestions for tenant pictures – Tenant farmers on move from one farm to another. Try to get complete set – loading, on road, in new home,” and tried to get the FSA images into Life and Look magazines. From 1948 onwards Evans wrote photo-essays, supplying photographs and text and designing page layout, and others experimented with the relationship between incidentals and conditionality, seeking plot and cause-and-effect pairings.

More important to the literary-photographic collaboration in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, however, are the moments where Evans arranges his images in a halting narrative sequence. As in American Photographs, his images contain interactive relations, juxtapositions and serial progressions. In his afterword to American Photographs, Lincoln Kirstein acknowledged its narrative: “these photographs, of necessity seen singly, are not conceived as isolated pictures… In intention and effect they exist as a collection of statements deriving from and presenting a consistent attitude,” and have “logic, continuity, climax,” he wrote. But this applies to Evans’ collaboration with Agee, too. Some of the visual statements in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are humorous, such as the pairing of photographs of two old men and two white horses, and others narrate part of the family’s story: his photographs admit us gradually, so that we enter via the first image of the tenant Landlord, move past father then mother, and reach the intimacy of their marriage bed, before seeing their children, in descending ages. Agee then repeats this story some eighty pages later: “a man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children.” Other pairings move from fullness to emptiness, presence to marked absence. He was narrating things “passing out of history,” as said in an interview in 1971, and so, for example, the advertisement in the pairing towards the end of the collection is echoed in the shape of the grave, while the headstone echoes the bottle, and the plate on the mound echoes the Pan-Am sign; all part of Evans’ movement from capitalism to death [fig.3].

Figure 3. Walker Evans, Crossroads store. Sprott, Alabama 1935; Sharecropper’s grave. Hale County, Alabama. 1935. Double-page spread in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

     

 

The Fields family paired with their empty kitchen is another example. He noted in an interview: “I do like to suggest people sometimes by their absence… I like to make you feel that an interior is almost inhabited by somebody,” and in the 20^th and 21^st frames does just this [fig.4]. The woman’s head in the 20th remains as a present-absence in is the bowl on the wall in the 21st, her bent leg and bed leg in the chair leg, the girl standing with dirty dress in the V and the dark area on the wall, the father’s square posture in the stove, the child’s face and open mouth in the white inside of the pot, the older woman’s head in the plate on the shelf. It is a vanishing America, and Evans narrates its flow of moment and trace. It’s a discourse of images, with an order that skips, jumps, cross-references, challenges the reader to participate in the production process, just as Agee does explicitly throughout the book. And in producing connections, the reader collaborates to resist the vanishing, and the “perishing” of that Bible passage.

Figure 4. Walker Evans, Bud Fields and His Family,; Corner of kitchen in Bud Fields’ home. Hale County, Alabama.1936. Double-page spread in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

   

 

So while other documentary photographers of the period manipulated their photographs, moving furniture around within shacks or sheep skulls into different positions in the desert, Evans’ artifice was in his sequencing. He didn’t use props or force poses, but instead emphasized narrative selection and put his literary sensibility to work. The collaboration with Agee protests these other artifices, and also the more traditional collaborative documentary works of the time, for example that of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, in You Have Seen Their Faces of 1937. Here a full exchange between photos and text means images are interwoven with the essay, and each photo has a fictional quotation by the central figure in the image: we read the authors’ own conceptions of what such types might have said – there has been no individualization, as they explain in their introduction.

Figure 5. Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936; View of railroad station. Edwards, Mississippi. 1936. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

              

 

You Have Seen Their Faces fills in all the gaps for the reader, but Let Us Now Praise Famous Men leave work to be done. Evans’ echoes across images build a syntax, but one that appeals to active memory rather than passive spectatorship. Like Agee’s prose, his photographs proceed in spurts, and both men construct sequences of images but no master-narratives. Evans echoes these spurts in broken lines on faces, mirrored by lines in wood and tracks [fig.5]. He was fascinated by the train-track and its relation to photographic sequence, and 12 of the 89 images in his subway collection, Many Are Called, include glimpses of the subway map in the background: again, partial lines and segments of journeys. In his foreword to the 2004 edition Luc Sante refers to the “parade” of faces, a “long hotel corridor of partly open doors,” the work that “reveals itself by degrees,” so emphasizing Evans’ tentative narrative journey.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7. Margaret Bourke-White, Marshall, Arkansas, 1937. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

            Giving his images a syntax and narrative, and making his arrangement a journey that often seemed one from absence to presence, Evans gave visual expression to the migrant exodus from the Dustbowl. In several other photo-text collaborations of the period, the combination of word and image also addresses the question of absence. Sometimes photographs suggest absence where their texts assert presence. In 12 Million Black Voices (1941) for example, Richard Wright’s text describes lush green land, huge trees and budding honeysuckle, while on the facing page an image of dry, dusty land marks the absence of these fertile features. On the next page Wright hints at the reason for this disjunction: “To paint a picture of how we live… is to compete with the might artists, the movies… the newspapers, the magazines… They have painted one picture: charming, idyllic, romantic; but we live another” (35). The real absence is that of truthful representation, not honeysuckle. Or, in You Have Seen Their Faces one caption reads, “It never felt much like Sunday to me until I plucked the guitar some,” but in the image all the Sundays on the wall-calendar are faded, absent [fig.7]. As far as the image is concerned, it simply “never felt like Sunday.” Part of the week, or time itself, is gone. It is present in its absence as a faded trace on the wall.

Again interested in absence, and also in Evans’ theme of the journey, other photographers focused on a tension generated by words within the image, as in Lange’s “Southern Pacific Billboard,” where two migrants pass a sign instructing them to “Next Time Try the Train… Relax” [fig.8]. The disjunction is in the situational irony of their movement past this advertisement, and in the way the sign forms a stark east-west right-angle with the north-south road: car tracks at its center, telephone poles on the left, and deep shadows on the right, all mark the endlessness of this journey ahead and so contrast the unreality of the sign’s “next time.” Similarly Bourke-White’s “Louisville flood victims” has a line of people stretched vertically across, while the characters in the advertisement head toward the camera: again the angles of direction, so that the car bears down upon the line of people, emphasizes the disjunction between word (“There’s no way like the American way”) and image (the line of homeless people scattered along the American way, for whom it actually is “no way”) [fig.9]. These are thwarted journeys – and for Lange’s migrants and Bourke-White’s queue, the “way” (journey) is as hopeless as the perished American “way” of life.

Figure 8. Dorothea Lange, Southern Pacific Billboard, Toward Los Angeles, California. 1937. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

      

Figure 9. Margaret Bourke-White, Louisville Flood Victims, 1937. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

 

Like Evans, other photographers collaborated with writers to offer visual connections across frames that resonate with the prose, so building a pattern of echoes and traces. In 1940 Edwin Rosskam spent three weeks with Wright, who was a national figure, after the publication of Native Son earlier that year. Rosskam was a FSA photographer and writer, editing a book series called Faces of America, and he had proposed a collaboration with Wright to Viking Press, hoping Wright would agree. 12 Million Black Voices was to be the last in this series of image-texts on major American cities. The two men met, and in a 1965 interview Rosskam recalled: “I got him excited” – “photographs were then still something kind of startling and new.” The book became illustrated folk history, collective autobiography, and sociological study of black migration: Rosskam noted of 1930s documentary that “finally the urban scene began to come in,” for one couldn’t “do migration without showing, finally where migration went to. Migration went to the city.” Wright contributed text, and Rosskam selected 71 images, observing later that “Dick Wright really knew that stuff cold… I don’t know if many white men had the opportunity to see it the way we saw it.”

In 12 Million Black Voices, Rosskam pairs a Vachon image with an A.P. lynching image to pass brutal comment on the ‘justice’ apparently featured in the courtrooms of the first [figs. 10 and 11]. The caption to both is “the law is white,” and this draws attention to the white book of law on the table in the first image and the similarly shaped white square of cloth around the neck of the dead man in the second. The bright white cloth around the neck of the black man in the first also seems ominous next to this white cloth in the second. The white man who judges the blacks in the first image holds his fingertips together in a way that approximates the shape of the triangular rope knot in the second. Fingers and rope both echo Wright’s “uneasily tied knot of pain whose snarled strands converge from many points of time and space” (11). The leader’s arm and body forms a frame in the first that echoes the picture frames on the wall in the second; and the distorted missing head in the second echoes the severed head of the right-hand portrait in the first.           

Figure 10, John Vachon, Court day. Rustburg, Virginia. 1941. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

 

Figure 11. AP Photograph, lynching of Lint Shaw in Royston, Georgia 1936. Associated Press.

Rosskam makes his images resonate as pairs at other moments in the text, always emphasizing these parallels with careful cropping. In a pairing of one of his own images with a Lee photograph he crops the images so that a man and a woman frame the extremeties of both, and a opening (door or window) forms part of the center backdrop in both [figs. 12 and 13]. Two empty chairs in the second substitute the presence of the two standing figures in the first. Just as the Vachon/AP pairing was a protest message (court law as lynch law), so too is this: the toddler in white in the first image is the white cross in the second – its posture against the door forms a cross of door-frame and arm, and it’s the black strip on the cross echoes the child’s black forearm. The Jesus figure in loin-cloth behind the cross has legs in the same pose as the child, too; right foot over left. Poised on the door-step, the child is the man “struggling to be born” and about to feel the “heavy toll [of] death,” in Wright’s text that immediately precedes this pair of images (93). On the brink of birth through the door into the outside world, he is to be sacrificed to the white world and so is doomed even at the moment of birth, like Christ.

Figure 12. Edwin Rosskam, Negro family and their home in one of the alley dwelling sections. Washington, D.C..1941. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

    

Figure 13. Russell Lee, During the services at storefront Baptist church on Easter Sunday. Chicago, Illinois. 1941. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

 

Wright explains the aesthetic of the collaboration: “Look at us, and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives” (146). It’s a call to response similar to Agee and Evans’ in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and that of other Depression-era collaborators who sought, similarly, to bring the reader into the circle. In Sherwood Anderson and Edwin Rosskam’s Home Town (1940), Anderson also addresses the reader directly, asking for identification: “Do you remember when you… were a small town boy…? Did you dream of some day being a railroad engineer?”; “you may yourself be one of the ‘characters of your town.’” Home Town tries to find continuity and stability through repetition and equivalence. Echoes across frames assert the representative and expected against the unpredictable. After all, “the big world outside was just more and more Springfields to [Lincoln],” and this is to be admired (6). Rosskam’s images emphasize patterns across American culture. On pages 12 and 13, he crops two images by Shahn so that there are three faces on the left of both images, four backs on the right of both. Kentucky might as well be Ohio [fig.14]. He does this again on pages 14 and 15, where two couples of different ages are made equivalents: both women staring directly at the camera, both men staring to the right. On pages 74 and 75 paintings frame both images on the left, the legs of otherwise invisible women frame both on the right, and a naked bent forearm and elbow sit at the very center of both. Net curtains form the backdrop for both images, and in both three women sit on the left and a dark-haired women with a child on the right. On pages 94 and 95 the women at the center of both images hold black books on their laps.

Figure 14. Ben Shahn, Middlesboro, Kentucky, 1935; and Along main street, Lancaster, Ohio. 1938. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

    

 

On pages 60 and 61, the line of the car’s frame in one image continues diagonally across the page into the telephone wire of the other, connecting the two landscapes. The chimney in the second echoes the scaffolding in the first, the square carts set on a diagonal from bottom left to top right in the second echo the square houses that follow the same angle in the first. Fall in West Virginia might as well be Fall in Mississippi, Rosskam implies through this pairing of John Vachon and Marion Post-Wolcott. Lest we miss the device, he repeats it on the following double spread, with images by Rothstein and Lee cropped to make parallel Iowa and Vermont [fig.15]. Three boys in the second echo three benches in the first; two thin trees on the left in the second echo the two lampposts on the left in the first; the dark figure at the center in the second echoes the fire-hydrant at the center in the first; the four windows visible on the front of the house in the second echo the four cars clustered together in the first. Both images are framed on the right and left by trees, and the line of the sidewalk in the first continues visually across the double-page spread to the telephone wire that crosses the second at the same angle.

Figure 15. Arthur Rothstein, View from the square. Marengo, Iowa. 1939; Russell Lee, Dark fall day in Bradford, Vermont. Boys are raking up the leaves. 1939. FSA-OWI, Library of Congress.   

   

 

Rosskam continues this standardizing device throughout: on pages 100 and 101 four figures dominate the foreground and two hover in the background in both, and though the first images is of white townsfolk and the second of black, the figure on the furthest left in both is the only person to hold an object on their lap (hat and briefcase), and a noticeably white leg, of woman’s stocking and man’s light-colored trousers, echoes across frames. The two oval shadows cast by outdoor lamps on page 111 echo the two oval windows in the image on page 110 opposite, connecting Russell Lee in Texas to Ben Shahn in Ohio. The photograph on page 122 is also by Ben Shahn in Ohio, in fact of the same church front, as the sign (“Linworth Methodist Episcopal Church”) reveals, and combines an oval window reminiscent of that in Lee’s image on page 110 with another oval shaped shadow from an outdoor lamp, in effect melding moments in Texas and Ohio. The handshake at the center of both images on pages 122 and 123 throws a parallel Arkansas moment into the parade of equivalents.

Rosskam’s photo editing is an attempt to establish a visual equivalent of Sherwood’s phrases like “In every American small town there is…” (82), “And there is always that other women…” (83), “She is always lying about…” (86), “He is forever boasting of…” (87), “she is always well-dressed…” (97). Both writer and photographer/editor develop the theme of repetition, cycles, representative stories and types, of there being “in every town” a set of identifiable characters (34), “the ‘characters of your town’” (95), as Anderson puts it in self-aware quotation marks; the “town bully” (87), the “lonely man… usually…a bachelor” (82), the “practical joker” (83), the “born nurse…always Aunt Molly, or Kate, or Sarah… everyone’s aunt” (83). “There is a Carrie Nation in almost every American town… always telephoning to the sheriff” (94). The book puts pattern where chance would otherwise be, in an attempt to keeps “the old town life going” (34), and objects repeat in photos on pages 23, 24, 25, 27, 29.

Home Town is a memorial to the perishing of this small-town life, and, like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the collaboration also tries to resist the perishing. The call-and-response between images and text, in Home Town, 12 Million Black Voices, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, between word and subject within photographs in Lange and Bourke-White billboard images and Evans’ own photographs of signs, filled the growing vacuum of absence and exodus during the Depression, and replaced it with an aesthetic of echoes and an onward narrative of repetition with variation. It built an echo-chamber into which the reader was invited, and asked to make protest connections. Readers saw the 1930s faces, but also recognized its stories, and felt an insistence that they identify with subjects and add the reality of their own life narratives to the mix. They are became they have always been – and then you are them.

Susan Sontag comments in On Photography that the camera is a “defense against anxiety,” and photography an attempt to grapple with “imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness.” This seemed particularly true in the 1930s when photographers reached for what Sontag calls “ghostly traces” of continuity. She posits that “people robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad,” and that, while “everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past,” in some countries, like the United States and Japan, “the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.” Never more so than during the Depression, we might add, when photographers acknowledged the break with the past, and found ghostly or dusty traces of its continuity. They used narrative as a visual device to explore, as Rosskam put it in 1940 with reference to the subject matter of the FSA archive, how photography might represent “the most permanent and the most fleeting.” They struggled with facing reality while reality’s faces were passing, and photography, medium of chance and fragment, tool of archive and document, became a medium of narrative and trace, plot and myth. With their medium of traces, they traced the trace and restored time to photography.

In so doing they not only answered the needs and spoke the language of the time, but also took photography back to its origins. Henry Fox Talbot’s first image in The Pencil of Nature (1844), the earliest image-text, is of a building which “presents on its surface the most evident marks of the injuries of time and weather.” He has outlined the process of light tracing itself, and now turns to this, the trace of traces. The caption to plate VI then discusses “a shadow… a time-withered oak… a moss-covered stone.” Soon afterwards, in “The Salon of 1859,” Baudelaire lauded photography’s ability to “rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins… which time is devouring, precious things whose form is dissolving,” and in “The Decisive Moment” Cartier-Bresson acknowledges that “photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing.” Walter Benjamin reiterated the importance of absence and the trace to photography, in “A Short History of Photography”: “reality has so to speak seared the subject” and he seeks “the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.” But he also considered history generally as disappearance, developing the idea that “[w]hatever we know will soon cease to exist, becomes an image,” but that something remains, for “[l]iving means leaving traces.” Reality sears photography, life leaves traces, and 1930s collaborations made a history of traces, with Benjamin.

The trace meant narrative: something had occurred, time had passed, and between cause and effect lay a clue. Ginzburg, who quotes Jasper Johns on the “object which speaks of the loss, of the destruction, of the disappearance of objects,” the object that “does not speak of itself” but only “of others,” speculates that “the actual idea of narration… may have originated in a hunting society, relating the experience of deciphering tracks.” Like the hunter or narrative historian, the 1930s writers and photographers could tell stories because they had learnt to read tracks – and lay them.

At the heart of Alan Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs is the insistence that photographic sequences have a literary narrative, that meaning might “arise from… the dialogue among [the images]”. He writes: “the historian’s task resembles the photographer’s: how to make the random, fragmentary, and accidental details of everyday existence meaningful without loss of the details themselves.” Encountering the especially “random, fragmentary, and accidental details of everyday existence” in 1930s America, photographers made existence meaningful through foreshadowing, historical precedent, coherence through sequence – where the details themselves were not lost but rather echoed as variation and theme. They confronted the new open zone, the chance outcome, with the narrative threads of past, present and future. Their image-text collaborations function like the two foxes calling to one another at the end of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where the pair of invisible creatures have “two series of calls [that] enhanced each other quite richly” (411), though their “quality was very different” (410). They are “two masked characters, unforetold and perfectly irrelevant to the action, [who] had with catlike aplomb and noiselessness… sung” (415). While they sing the action persists, and while the reader reads the song persists: only when the series of calls are “withdrawn” does the book abruptly end.

 

Bibliography

Anderson, Sherwood, Home Town, ed. Edwin Rosskam, with FSA photographs.  NewYork: Alliance, 1940.

Barnwell, Mildred Gwin, Faces We See, Gastonia: Southern Combed Yarn Spinners Assoc, 1939.

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Caldwell, Erskine and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces. New York: Viking, 1937.

Conrad, David E., The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965.

Evans, Walker, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology, ed. Jeff L. Rosenheim. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000.Many Are Called, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004 (1966) American Photographs. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938. With James Agee, Let us Now Praise Famous Men, New York, 1941

Finnegan, Cara A., Picturing Poverty. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2003.

Fleischhauer, Carl, and Beverly W. Brannan, eds, Documenting America, 1935-1943. Berkeley : University of California Press in association with the Library of Congress, 1988.

Ginzberg, Carlo. Clues, Myths and the Historical Method. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1989.

Hurley, F. Jack, Portrait of a Decade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Taylor. An American Exodus. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939

MacLeish, Archibald, Land of the Free. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938.

Raper, Arthur, and Jack Delano, Tenants of the Almighty. New York: Macmillan, 1943.

Scott, Clive, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language, London : Reaktion, 1999.

Sontag, Susan, On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1977.

Stott, William, Documentary Expression and 1930s America, New York: OUP, 1973.

Talbot, William Henry Fox, The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, 1844.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs, New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.

Wright, Richard, and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Viking, 1941.

 

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