John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Robert Frank's "The Americans," at the Photo Book Club

The Photo Book Club is a fantastic new online venture that's been put together by Wayne Ford, a designer and art director (at the Observer, among other places), and Matt Johnston, a photographer, teacher, and social media manager.  Today, they've published a short essay that I've written, looking at the historical context within Robert Frank was working when he shot, edited, and published The Americans, one of the most influential and controversial of all photo books.

Here's some of what I have to say:  Frank's America "was a dystopia, its citizens alternately menacing, menaced, or estranged.  The photos often reveal racial hierarchies and class stratification.  In many of them, fear, anger, and suppressed rage -- sometimes masked by a boisterous bravado -- seem to linger just below the surface."

 

 

Robert Frank: Charleston, South Carolina,  1955.  (Plate 13 from The Americans.)

"No one who had read The Americans would have been surprised by what was to come a few short years later -- the assassinations (the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X), the urban rebellions of African-American youth, and the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War.

"Then as now, however, there were many Americas and many sorts of Americans.  Frank didn't capture them all and couldn't have, even if he had tried.  As a result, people had a point when they said that the book was actually about 'some Americans.'"

To read the rest, visit the Photo Book Club, here.  I'm eager to hear any comments or corrections you might have.  Please leave them on the book club's site.  There you'll find my essay and a wealth of other information about The Americans.  We're hoping to spark a conversation about Frank's masterpiece.

 

 

 

I'm impressed with the thinking behind the Photo Book Club.  Wayne and Matt aim to promote discussions around photo books, looking, in particular, at old, rare and influential photography books from the early twentieth century onwards.  Each month, this online club will look at a photography book suggested not only by Wayne and Matt, but also by anyone who would like to write blog posts, comment through Tweets, and generally add her or his two cents.  Anyone who cares about photography can have some fun.

Review: John Raeburn, "Ben Shahn's American Scene: Photographs, 1938"

In 1938, Ben Shahn traveled the back roads of central Ohio, hoping to discover the "average American."  He was on a three-month assignment for Roy Stryker's legendary photo documentary project, which was a unit of the federal government's Farm Security Administration [FSA].  He'd worked as a photographer for Stryker on and off (mostly off) since 1935, so the two men knew each other well.  On two trips through the South, Shahn had produced some of the strongest and best known photos in the FSA collection.  His photos vividly documented the ways in which the Great Depression had disrupted the lives of the poor and the vulnerable.  But he'd come to believe that he and the other FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Margaret Bourke White, and others) had captured "just one side of America, the real poverty stricken."

Now Shahn wanted to do something quite different.

Ben Shahn:  Street scene, Circleville, Ohio.  1938.  (Shahn's reflection can be seen in the window.  He's using a Leica 35 millimeter camera, equipped with a right-angle viewfinder.  All of the photos in this post appear in Ben Shahn's American Scene and are draw from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection at the Library of Congress.  Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)

Shahn was determined to capture life on "nice little middle class street[s]."  He knew that it would be hard to make compelling photos of "neat and clean and orderly" Ohio towns and of the average mid-westerners who lived in them, but he was ready for the challenge.  (In contrast, it had seemed to him that in the impoverished South "wherever you point the camera there is a picture.")  Styker, who had become deeply concerned about the rise of totalitarian dictatorships in Europe, was now asking his photographers for images that celebrated what he believed were America's small town, democratic values.  As a result, he and Shahn were in some ways seeing eye to eye.  In others they weren't, and it's that tension that gives John Raeburn something to write about in his new book, Ben Shahn's American Scene:  Photographs, 1938.

Ben Shahn:  Street scene, Marysville, Ohio.  1938.

If the photos that Shahn produced in Ohio weren't his best, it's easy to understand why.  He had a lot on his mind.  Money was tight, and his girlfriend, Bernarda Bryson, was about to give birth to the couple's second child.  (His divorce from his first wife, Tille Goldstein, wouldn't become final until 1944.)  The salary that Shahn earned working for Stryker was only about half of what he had recently brought home while employed by the FSA's Special Skills section.  In an effort to find cheap childcare and reduce living expenses, the couple had moved into the crowded home of Bernarda's parents, just outside of Columbus, Ohio.  Despite (or, more likely, because of) his worries and distractions, Shahn worked diligently throughout the summer and produced photos that were, as his most recent biographer, Howard Greenfield, says, "honest... evocations of small-town life."

Ben Shahn:  Farmer and banker, Plain City, Ohio.  1938.

Even when he's not at the top of his game, Shahn is worth paying attention to.  He was, after all, one of the finest visual artists that America has ever produced.  While he's most famous as a painter and muralist, Raeburn correctly points out that his photos "are as distinguished as his fine art, and deserve as wde an audience."  As a skilled and insightful documentary photographer, Shahn used his camera to both depict and interpret the world around him.  The "incisiveness of his cultural analysis," Raeburn says, is especially "evident when individual photographs are seen alongside the other he made that summer."  It's an important point and a convincing one.  Raeburn sustains it as he leads his readers through several different sets of photos that Shahn made during his summer in Ohio.

For instance, the three photos above are among many that, according to Raeburn, show "men congregating in democratic fellowship," capturing the egalitarian ethos of Ohio's small towns.  This is a strong argument, on several different levels.  The caption of the photo directly above (one of at least three different photos that Shahn made of the same two men at roughly the same moment in time) makes his take on small town life explicit.  Standing together on the sidewalk, passing time in a public space, the "farmer and banker" show how, as Raeburn says, how "sociability... transcends social divisions and creates an atmosphere conducive to the democratic spirit...."

Shahn was no Pollyanna, however.  He understood that democratic fellowship had its limits, and here he parted ways with Stryker and most other Americans of his day.

Ben Shahn:  Bus station, Marion, Ohio.  1938.

Raeburn writes that Shahn's long-standing "commitment to social justice" made it impossible for him to ignore "the violation of democratic ideals" that he discovered in small town Ohio.  He was particularly incensed by racism and contempt for the poor.  There's no doubt about this.  Shahn was man of the left, with strong progressive convictions.  This sometimes made life difficult for those who were closest to him.  But, as Greenfield says in his biography, "in his work and in much of his life, his anger and bitterness were aimed at injustice and bigotry...."

Had the photo above been made by someone else, it might have been simply another that showing men gathered in democratic fellowship.  But Shahn didn't want the photo to be seen isolation.  Seen as part of a set, its meaning changes -- and not just because the two men are African-American.  Another photo (below) that was made moments before or after the one above shows the same two men and same bus depot from a different angle.  In it, viewers see two racially distinct gatherings of men.  Shahn wanted his viewers to understand that small town fellowship was rea;. but rarely crossed racial boundaries.

Ben Shahn:  Bus station, Marion, Ohio.  1938.

Shahn went out of his way to photograph African-Americans.  This wasn't because they were hard to find.  The black population of the small towns that he visited in central Ohio was roughly 5,000.  To photograph the lives of African-Americans he had to go out of his way in a literal sense:  he had to cross over to "the other side of the tracks."  This was no metaphor.  Blacks lived in segregated spaces, something that Shahn emphasized in his captions.

Ben Shahn:  Saturday afternoon in London, Ohio, "the other side of the tracks".  1938.

Raeburn says that while Shahn's "African-Americans were victimized, they were not solely victims."  He points out that the building above is a storefront church.  It might be seen, on the one hand, as an indicator of the community's poverty.  But on the other, black churches have always been institutions created and sustained by the community itself and symbols of resistance to the culture of white supremacy that has surrounded it.

Ben Shahn:  Resident of Plain City, Ohio.  1938.

Similarly, the man in this photo, which Raeburn tells us is one of "just a handful of close-in, individual portraits" that Shahn made in Ohio, has the look of someone who is no mere victim  -- "[t]he man's concentrated gaze, clenched pipe, and akimbo stance give him an air of self-possession that dominates the photograph...."

Shahn was in good company, as far as his approach to photographing African-Americans is concerned.  Several other FSA photographers -- Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Jack Delano come immediately to mind -- consciously rejected the commonplace racial imagery of the day (see the posters below) and captured the inherent dignity of their black subjects.

Ben Shahn:  Sign on restaurant, Lancaster, Ohio.  1938.

Shahn also wasn't alone in photographing the signs of racial discrimination.  But few other photographers noted them in the North.  As Raeburn says, to look at his photos is to be reminded "of how utterly racism permeated... daily life," in these Ohio towns.

Ben Shahn:  Circus poster, Circleville, Ohio.  1938.

Traveling blackface minstrel shows, such as the one advertised in these posters, were slowly disappearing, in the late '30s.  But blackface performances which demeaned and lampooned African-Americans were still very much part of the American scene, North and South.  Shahn wasn't the only FSA photographer to record the phenomenon.  But unlike the others he places his photo within a particular series and, by doing so, connects minstrelsy to more overt forms of racial oppression.

Ben Shahn:  Dwellers in Circleville's "Hooverville," central Ohio.  1938.

Shahn's primary strategy in confronting injustice was to make visible people and communities that were ordinarily hidden.  Sometimes that involved crossing the tracks to photograph the lives of African-Americans.

At other times, it involved leaving behind the business districts and "nice little middle-class streets" to document "Hoovervilles," makeshift communities of poor whites that, Raeburn tells us, were "segregated at the edge of town."  Here, he writes, Shahn created images that provoked "empathy as well as pity" for those trapped in the Depression's downward slide.

Ben Shahn:  Business district of Urbana, Ohio.  1938.

As much as we'd like to believe that photos are transparent windows on the truth -- "a picture is worth a thousand words" -- they are, in fact, notoriously slippery things, open to a wide variety of often conflicting interpretations.  As Elizabeth Edwards has said it, "[b]y their very nature photographs are sites of multiple and contested" meanings, "despite their clamorous claims to th contrary."  To put it another way, to pin a single meaning on a photo is like nailing jelly to the wall.

Still, it seems to me that Raeburn is on firm ground when he argues that Shahn's photos both celebrated the democratic spirit of small Ohio towns and lamented the ways that racial and class discrimination crippled it.  I'm not so sure, however, about one of his other major claims.

Raeburn argues that photos like the ones directly above and below reflect "Shahn's perception that the American small town had entered into a period of decline...."

Ben Shahn:  Cars line streets of Plain City, Ohio.  1938.

In photo after photo, Raeburn says, recurring motifs appear:  "the torpor of the central squares and nearly deserted sidewalks."  Shahn's visual interpretation of these Ohio towns, he contends, is one of "civic stagnation."

My reading of Shahn's photos is quite different.  It's true that Shahn's sidewalks are often empty.  But his parking spaces are almost always full.  It seems to me that when viewed alongside the photos of men gathered in public spaces in democratic congress, Shahn is creating a vision of small town stability and relative prosperity.  While lacking the dynamism of the big city, the towns have nevertheless managed to incorporate the modern -- the automobile -- while holding on to tradition (for better and for worse) -- the egalitarian ethos and racial exclusion.

Ben Shahn:  Saturday afternoon in London, Ohio, "the main street".  1938.

In retrospect, it's easy to see the cars that clutter Shahn's photos as harbingers of things to come, especially the decline of the business districts, driven by the arrival of freeways, Walmarts, and other big box stores.  But that future would not be visible for at least a generation.  It's going too far to suggest that Shahn could somehow sense it was coming.  All we have are his photos, and they don't say that to me.

But photos are slippery things.  You can look at hundreds of Shahn's Ohio photos online at the FSA collection website and see what they say to you.  (Just do an "all of these words" search for "Shahn Ohio."  And don't limit the search to 100 "bibliographic results;" you'll get many more hits than that.)

Ben Shahn:  Wonder Bar, hot spot in Circleville, Ohio.  1938.

I'll close with some thoughts on two photos (above and below) that touched me in a very personal way.  They're another instance in which Raeburn's reading strikes me as being slightly off base.

Raeburn discusses the photos at the very end of the book and calls them "the most caustic that Shahn made that summer."  Shahn's rare use of the flash yields a "harsh, awkward lighting" that's fully in sync with his "indignation about the racial injustice" that the Wonder Bar embodies.

So, Raeburn argues, in the first photo we see we see a black man whose "job is to entertain [white] patrons, while he is at the piano they are indifferent to his presence, as the turned back of the one at the bar indicates."

Ben Shahn:  Wonder Bar, hot spot in Circleville, Ohio.  1938.

In the second photo, the musician "has finished his set and is timorously exiting the barroom.  His hunched posture and deferentially downcast expression do not discourage the white patrons from a glowering surveillance of his passage."

A timorous exit...  Indifference morphing into outright hostility...  This is reading far too much into the limited evidence of these two photos.

A turned back can mean many things.  Indifference is just one of them.  The expressions and postures of all of the men in the photo above strike me as extraordinarily ambiguous.  The piano player is caught in mid-stride.  The man on the left is caught rising from his seat.  I'm not sure that I'd want to read anything at all into this.  Sometimes photos mumble.

The expressions on the faces of the men on the right are equally open to a variety of interpretations.  Hostility is not the first one that came into my mind.

In the 1960s, I spent several years of my youth living in a small town in central Ohio.  While racism was real, it it was by no means the sole defining factor in relations between blacks and whites.  Cordiality and friendship were just as common as animosity and anger.  Even outright bigots, who hated blacks in general, found it possible to know and like a few black individuals.

It's impossible to know exactly what's going on in the photos from the Wonder Bar.  Most likely, the bar didn't admit blacks as patrons.  Most likely, the piano player entertained regularly, making him a familiar face.  This being a small town, most likely everyone knew his name.  Most likely, he knew better than to hang around after he stopped playing.  But reading much more into the photo, especially timidity and hatred, seems implausible to me.

It's surprising that Raeburn makes such a hard and fast interpretation of these photos.  Elsewhere he praises the openmindedness that Shahn's photos reveal, saying that "receptivity to ambiguity" was "his survey's most distinguishing hallmark."  It's a receptivity that Raeburn doesn't always share.

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Despite my reservations about one or two of Raeburn's interpretations, I'd like to be able to recommend Ben Shahn't American Scene wholeheartedly.  But I can't.  The reasons have nothing to do with Raeburn and everything to do with his publisher, the University of Illinois Press.  Simply put, the reproductions of Shahn's photos are awful -- shamefully awful, in fact.

The book's reproductions are washed out, lacking clarity, contrast, and detail.  They're far below the standard of, say, Time magazine.  This might be adequate if the photos merely illustrated a text about another subject -- the way that a photo of a house illustrates an article about the real estate market.

But in this case, the book exists to serve the photos.  They're the objects of our contemplation and of Raeburn's analysis.  High quality reproductions are absolutely essential.  Without them, the book's value is considerably reduced.

(Note:  The photos accompanying this review look far better than those in the book.  I created them from high-resolution downloads that are available at the FSA collection's website.  I used the looked at those downloads when I evaluated Raeburn's arguments about particular photographs.)

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Another version of this review will appear in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Review: "Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa since 1950"

    South African photography is hot -- at least, in the United States.  This summer, not one but two New York museums have mounted major exhibitions of works by South African photographers. A monumental David Goldblatt exhibition is on view at the Jewish Museum, while a smaller Zwelethu Mthethwa show is at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In August, Darkroom: Photography and New Media in South Africa Since 1950, will open at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, in Richmond. (The exhibition’s flawed but fascinating catalog, published by the University of Virginia Press, is the book under review here.) All of this activity, has generated a buzz about photography from South Africa, something that hasn’t been heard, in this country, in nearly two decades.

Back then, our interest had as much to do with the photographers' subject -- the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s notorious system of white supremacy -- as with the photographs that they made. Given the stakes involved in the battle and its resonance with America’s own history of racism and segregation, it’s no surprise that many Americans couldn’t look away. For many of us, South African photos were dispatches from a strangely familiar land.

Darkroom cover.  Photo of Miriam Makeba by Jurgen Schadeberg.

Sixteen years after the fall of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic society, the American fascination with South Africa remains virtually undiminished, but the sense of political urgency is gone. While it’s a less exciting time, it’s also one that creates space to step back and take stock. Darkroom does just that.

According to Tosha Grantham, the exhibition’s curator and editor of the book, Darkroom aims to be "a brief survey of photography, photo-based installations, and video art made in South Africa since 1950." As far as I can tell, this is the first American attempt to take on such a daunting task. South African may be a relatively small country, but it’s nevertheless produced several distinct generations of fine photographers and visual artists, working in a variety of traditions. Deciding who to invite to the party and how to organize and interpret their photographic output presents challenges that Darkroom only partly overcomes.

There’s no complaining, however, about who’s included. The 18 artists and photographers are all well known internationally or ought to be. They represent a cross-section of practitioners -- young and old, black and white, male and female. Goldblatt and Mthethwa both make the cut, as do others who have long since established global reputations -- William Kentridge, Santu Mofokeng, Sue Williamson, Roger Ballen, and Ian Berry. (Williamson, Ballen, and Berry, while foreign-born, have lived and worked extensively in South Africa.)

David Goldblatt:  Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg.  1972.  (Plate 20.)  (Click directly on the image to see a larger version.)

Also included are photographers and artists whose work deserves wider recognition outside of South Africa. This group includes those who began their careers in the 1950s and ‘60s, such as Alf Kumalo, Jurgen Schadeberg, a German immigrant, and Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall, as well as others who are still in their thirties, for instance, Tracey Rose, Robin Rhode, and Nontsikelelo Veleko.

The book’s weaknesses have to do with exclusion, rather than inclusion -- the photographers and photographic movements that were left out. This isn’t fatal.  There are still plenty of interesting things to look at. But it does prevent the book from being the representative survey that it aspires to be. The roots of this problem are both practical and theoretical.

First, over a third of the plates in the book (35 out of 110) are devoted to the work of just two men -- Goldblatt and Schadeberg. This is far too many, even for photographers of their undeniable stature. It gives their output undue weight and occupies space that would have been better used by opening the door to more photographers.

Second, the book misinterprets South African photography’s past and its present, constructing an implicit narrative of movement from documentary photography to fine art photography. The end of apartheid, writes Grantham, has allowed "documentary photography’s collective relevance" to be "overtaken by more individualistic and artistic aims." This storyline privileges art over documentary, a contestable perspective, to say the least. More importantly, it rests on a sharp, but unsustainable dichotomy between documentary practice, on the one hand, and art, on the other. I’ll return to these points later.

Jurgen Schadeberg:  The Three Jazzolomos (Jacob "Mzala" Lepers, bass, Ben "Gwigwi" Mrwebi, alto, Sol "Beegeepee" Klaaste, piano), Johannesburg, 1953.  (Plate 14.)

Whatever it’s weaknesses, Darkroom is full of photos that are wonderful to see. The deeply saturated full-length color portraits of urban Africans that Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall made in the 1960s and ‘70s will be a fascinating discovery, even for people who know something about South African photography. Jump forward 40 years, to Nontsikelelo Veleko’s street portraits of young Johannesburg hipsters (below), and see how both the subjects’ identities and the photographer’s style have become less local and more globalized.

Readers get a tantalizing, but far too brief glimpse of Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album series, in which he has rephotographed and reimagined nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studio portraits of the black middle class. They’ll also want to see more of Sue Williamson’s recent Better Lives project -- portraits of African immigrants to South Africa. It’s a sensitive and angry response to violent outbreaks of xenophobia within South Africa.

Goldblatt is the star of the show. The power and beauty of the images that he has created over a long career have made him the best known and most influential of all South African photographers. His images manage to be simultaneously subtle and direct, earnest and ironic. "Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1972." is an example (above). This wonderfully complex photograph was made at a time when apartheid seemed to be unshakable. The photo contains the expected -- a uniformed cop and a threatening German shepherd -- and the unexpected -- a beauty queen, an American luxury car, and, behind a chain link fence, a cheering crowd. It’s a photo about apartheid, all right, but its message isn’t obvious.

Nontsikelelo Veleko:  Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder:  Kepe I, 2003/2006.  (Plate 103.)

Curiously, given the amount of space devoted to Goldblatt’s work, Darkroom doesn’t do him justice. It ignores two of his most important projects, Some Afrikaners Photographed and Boksburg, both of which were published as books. In them, his subjects are white South Africans, mostly Afrikaners, and their relationship to the country’s black majority. The photos are critical, compassionate, and often extraordinarily beautiful. Their absence is stunning.

The book also fails a much later series, in which Goldblatt photographed some of the many hand-lettered artisans’ signs that appear on urban roadsides. He then tracked down the artisans and made portraits of them in their working environments. It’s a brilliantly realized idea, connecting faces to the otherwise anonymous ads and exploring a vital niche in the post-apartheid economy. Darkroom includes a photo of one of signs, but not, inexplicably, the portrait of the man behind it. (His name is Corrie Jacobs. He and his sign appear in the book Rhizomes of Memory.)

This is an odd argument to make -- that there are too many Goldblatt photos, but too few of the right ones -- but so be it. Anyone interested in a tighter, yet more representative edit of his long and varied career should look at the chapter devoted to him in Paul Weinberg’s Then & Now: Eight South African Photographers (the link takes you to a slideshow of images from the book). In it, he was his own curator.

Schadeberg, Goldblatt’s contemporary (they began shooting professionally in the ‘50s and are still going strong), has 11 photos in the book, all but one from his early days as the photo editor at the now legendary Drum magazine. After a false start, Drum found its groove in the early ‘50s, catering to the tastes of urban and urbanizing Africans, covering politics, sports, and entertainment. Schadeberg and the photographers that he trained, including Kumalo, captured the energy and created the iconography of the era’s self-consciously cosmopolitan New Africans, from dapper political activists, such as the young Nelson Mandela, to jazz musicians in smoke-filled shebeens (above).

 

An interview with Zwelethu Mthethwa.

The photographs of Goldblatt, Schadeberg, and Kumalo call in to question the sharp dichotomy that the book draws between documentary and art. All have a documentary component, and some were first published and exhibited that way. After the fact, however, hanging on gallery walls or surrounded by thick white borders in elegant books, they’ve become art. The same photos, in different contexts, acquire new meanings.

Darkroom doesn’t see things this way. It relegates the older photographers (Goldblatt excepted) to a documentary past, in which even the best photos simply illustrated an unjust world. In contrast, the photos of younger generations of artists are seen to allow "complexity and contradictions to coexist," as Tumelo Mosaka writes in one of the accompanying essays. Yet complexity and contradiction were deeply embedded in many of the photographs that Schadeberg and Kumalo’s generation produced. The same can be said of most of the other photographs in the book. Mofokeng’s photographs of church ceremonies, Andrew Tshabangu’s street scenes, Mthethwa’s environmental portraits of workers and shanty dwellers, and Veleko’s urban hipsters -- all simultaneously describe and interpret. They don’t choose sides because they don’t have to; they are both documentary and art.

Darkroom’s condescending view of documentary work allows the book to exclude a number of significant photographers who worked in that mode and shaped the South African photographic tradition -- Bob Gosani, Ernest Cole, and Eli Weinberg. Well known documentary photographers who are still working, such as George Hallett and Jodi Bieber, are also missing. (Grantham hoped to include the work of Peter Magubane, a photojournalist who was probably South Africa’s best known photographer, in the 1970s, but his photos were not available.) Equally damaging is the absence of struggle photographers, who produced some of the most important work of the 1980s and ‘90s.

"Struggle photography" is something of a misnomer. Photographers associated with the movement produced a wide variety of work; it wasn’t the Bang Bang Club. For over a decade, struggle photography virtually defined documentary photography and photojournalism for many in South Africa and overseas. In the United States, their explicitly anti-apartheid and often elegantly crafted photographs were widely seen in newspapers and magazines, as well as in commercially successful books published by Norton and Aperture -- The Cordoned Heart (which included a documentary project by Goldblatt) and Beyond the Barricades. Many thousands of people also saw them in inexpensive, highly portable exhibitions that toured countless college campuses, church halls, and museums all over the country, generating support for the American anti-apartheid movement.

Who were the struggle photographers? Mofokeng was one, although the book is silent about that phase of his career. Graeme Williams, who is also in Darkroom, was another, a fact that you again won’t learn from the book. Those left out completely constitute a roster of important photographers who continue to influence photography in South Africa and beyond -- Omar Bashada, Paul Weinberg, Guy Tillim, Lesley Lawson, Gideon Mendel, and Chris Ledochowski to name a few of the most prominent.

In these conservative times, the struggle photographers’ highly politicized stance is embarrassing to some, and they find it easy to dismiss the entire movement. But there is no necessary contradiction between political commitment and good, even great photography. In fact, political engagement released an extraordinary creative energy. The evidence is in the photos that the struggle photographers produced -- alternately angry and lyrical, contemplative and direct. As Darren Newbury argues in his superb new book, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa, the struggle photographers were far from naive. Their photos constituted "a powerful indictment of apartheid. But it was not one that sacrificed complexity to broaden its appeal." Their impact on photography -- by no means just documentary photography -- was and is immense. No survey that aspires to be representative, let alone complete, can ignore this movement and the men and women who created it.

Should Darkroom have found space for all of the photographers that I’ve counted among the missing? Ideally, yes. In our less-than-perfect world, including everybody that I’ve mentioned was probably out of the question. But to include none of them and to ignore struggle photography altogether means that the book’s vision of South African photography is partial and distorted.

Although Darkroom fails as a survey of South African photography, it does present work that is almost always brilliant, challenging, and unknown to most Americans. In that sense, you can call it a success.

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Note: Another version of this review will appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies.

Review: "Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression"

In the 1930s and '40s, photographers employed by the federal government's now-legendary Farm Security Administration [FSA] created the most significant and, perhaps, most beautiful of all American photo archives.  The FSA's Historical Unit, which was established to document and promote the Roosevelt administration's New Deal policies, far transcended its narrow political purpose.  The unit employed some of the most important photographers of the twentieth century -- Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee, among others -- and, as recent research has shown, their boss, Roy Stryker, gave them the latitude to pursue their own visions.  Not surprisingly, more has been written about the FSA than any other episode in the history of photography.

 

Cover photo, Marion Post Wolcott:  Beggers on main street corner.  Montgomery, Alabama.  1939.

I can't actually prove that last assertion, but I'll be willing to buy a drink for the person who shows that I'm wrong.  There are at least 29 books in my university's library about FSA photography, and that's not counting biographies and monographs about individual FSA photographers.  Any final tally would be at least twice than number.  Seemingly, no aspect of the FSA photo project has been left unexamined.  The books look at the structure of FSA photo essays, the ideology of the FSA and the New Deal, FSA photography and religion, FSA photography and race, FSA photography and the American Dream, plus FSA photography in states from Virginia to Colorado.  (I own five books on Dorothea Lange alone.)

Can the world possibly need yet another book on the FSA?  Yes.  That book would be Rich Remsberg's Hard Luck Blues:  Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression.  And I wish that I'd written it.  It's that good.

Russell Lee: Negro musicians playing accordion and washboard in automobile. Near New Iberia, Louisiana.  1938.  (All but one of the photographs in this review appear in Hard Luck Blues.  They're from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection at the Library of Congress.  Having been made by photographers employed by the United States government, they are not eligible for copyright protection.  Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)

Hard Luck Blues justifies its existence in a couple of ways.  First, most of the more than 200 photos are beautiful, a real joy to see.  Lange, Shahn, and Lee are well represented, as are the Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein, wonderful photographers all.  Many of the photos have rarely, if ever, been published and will be new to anyone who hasn't spent hours rummaging through the FSA archives.

Second, the collection is, as Remsberg says, "almost certainly the best visual documentation of vernacular musical performance," during the Depression years.  It was a critical time in American music history.  An older world of street musicians, barn dances, and community concert bands was vanishing, as was the last generation of musicians "to learn [their art] without sound recording."

 

Jack Delano:  Fiddler (Mr. Ed. Lorkin [sic]) for the square dances at the World's Fair at Tunbridge, Vermont.  1941.

Remsberg's introductions to the various chapters (the book is divided geographically) are brief and to the point.  He's a master of knowing how to give enough information to allow the viewer to see the photos in their historical context, but not so much that the pictures are buried by words.

For instance, Remsberg tells us that Ed Larkin (above) was a Vermont farmer who had been fiddling since the 1880s.  At the time that Jack Delano photographed him, he was a leading figure in the revival of "the New England contra dance tradition," making him something of a forerunner of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s.  To this day, the Ed Larkin Contra Dancers are "still active in Vermont."

Ben Shahn:  Doped singer, "Love oh, love, oh keerless love," Scott's Run, West Virginia.  Relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scott's Run.  1935.

Street musicians are a well known phenomenon of the era.  But had it not been for the FSA photographers, there would be little visual documentation of the people who were actively creating the nation's musical culture.  Some preserved distinctive regional styles, while others, the itinerants, brought new musical ideas to once isolated areas.

Ben Shahn:  Scott's Run, West Virginia.  1935.

The photos not only show us the musicians themselves; they also tell us something about the social context within which they lived and worked.  (The full set of Shahn's photos from Scott's Run, West Virginia, two of which can be seen above, reinforces what musicologists already know -- that black and white musicians learned a great deal from each other.)

John Collier:  Local band leader leads with "An Old Southern Melody" and everybody cheered.  Home guard passes through Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.  1941.

Remsberg's definition of "roots" is broad enough to encompass concert bands, which is a good thing, since they show up in the FSA archive with great regularity.  In 2010, it's difficult to imagine a time when "commercial, military, and community bands" were popular, "prestigious and commercially successful."  That popularity was fading, in the '30s, but had by no means disappeared, especially in small towns, where many Americans still lived.

Russell Lee:  Acrobat and audience at Spanish-American traveling show.  Penasco, New Mexico.  1940.

A set of Russell Lee photographs, showing the musicians, acrobats, and clowns who were members of at Macia Brothers "traveling show" is one of the book's unexpected pleasures.  Like many of the book's photos, they will be extremely valuable for anyone trying to understand the popular culture of particular communities during the Depression.

Jack Delano:  A prisoner dancing while another plays the guitar at a prison camp.  Greene County, Georgia.  1941.

Remsberg's texts are short, as I've mentioned.  But the research is deep, and he knows when to use it to greatest effect.  The story behind the photo above, for instance, is a troubling mix of institutional racism and personal ambition.   Delano tells the tale in his memoirs, and Remsberg quotes it at some length.   A guard had ordered the prisoners to "dance for the photographer."  Delano remembered that

I was so nervous and excited by the opportunity to get these pictures that I blocked out my personal feelings.  I had only one thought in mind:  I must not fail to get these pictures!  ...It was only afterward, relaxing back in my hotel room, that the realization of what I had witnessed came upon me.  ...How humiliating it must have been for those men to be obliged to perform for me, as if they were trained animals!

 

Not incidentally, Remsberg is able to identify the guitar player as "the great Piedmont-style musician Buddy Moss, nearing the end of his six-year prison term...."

 

Russell Lee:  Entertainers at Negro tavern.  Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

Chicago gets a chapter unto itself.  And why not?  Lee, Delano, and Edwin Rosskam, another FSA photographer, spent a considerable amount of time in the city, largely to document African American community.  Despite the segregation and high unemployment that blacks endured, they had created a flourishing cultural life for themselves and sustained an influential cluster of professional musicians.

Singer and guitarist Lonnie Johnson (above, on the right) was "an enormously popular" entertainer and "an innovative guitarist."  Singing with him is either Dan Dixon or Andrew Harris, both of whom were members of his trio.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi.  1939.

Many of the best -- and best known -- photos in the book were made in the South.  That's no surprise, really.  As Remsberg says, the South has long been "high-yield territory" for folklorists, musicologists, and photographers.

Marion Post Wolcott's photo of dancers in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, juke joint is probably the most famous of all the FSA photos that involve music and musicians.  It's not in the book, perhaps because of its popularity.  It's been endlessly reproduced and is one of the photos that the public most often asks to have reprinted.  None of that detracts from its considerable charms.  Not only is it visually stunning, but it's also a powerful reminder that the Depression was not just about suffering.  It was also about people determined to keep their communities and their cultures alive and to live with joy and dignity.  The FSA photographers were aware of their era's complexity, and, as artists, they captured it in the photos that they made.

There's little in Hard Luck Blues to complain about.  Some of the photos are poorly reproduced -- flat and lacking any visual punch.  The book's publishers, the University of Illinois Press and the Library of Congress, haven't done these important photos justice.

Occasionally I wanted more context than Remsberg was willing to provide. 

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

I was especially disappointed with his failure to discuss "blackface" entertainment, which shows up several times in the book's photos.  In this hangover from nineteenth-century minstrelsy, white performers darkened their faces with makeup and mimicked what they imagined were African American performance styles.  The result was either crude or sophisticated racial satire, depending on the skill and temperament of the performer.  Blackface was still acceptable in polite white society, in the '30s and '40s, but faded rapidly after World War II, under pressure from the growing civil rights movement.  The book's photos of grinning white adults (above) and slightly bewildered white children (below) in blackface makeup demand some discussion.

Marion Post Wolcott: Second and third grade children being made up for their Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day festivities.  Ashwood Plantations, South Carolina.  1939.

Quibbles aside, Hard Luck Blues is an important book.  Anyone who is interested in photography or music will want a copy.  Anyone seriously engaged in the study of the history of photography or the history of popular music will need a copy.

And, thanks to those fabulous photographers, it's a delight to behold.

Review: "Racing While Black": How an African American Stock Car Team Tried (and Failed) to Make Its Mark On Nascar

Leonard T. Miller dreamed of making it big in Nascar.  His goal was to find a talented and ambitious black driver and build the racing team that would rocket him to stardom.  Nascar [National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing] would be transformed; Miller would be a hero.  Racing While Black:  How an African-American Stock Car Team Made Its Mark on Nascar, is the story of that quest.  The tale ends in failure.  The question is, Why?  His explanation -- that it had to do with the color of his skin -- is plausible.  But it's far from the only possibility.

You can read my full review, here, on my racing blog.