The crisis in American agricultural capitalism and relations of the
1930’s and its spawning of liberal oriented photojournalism and experimental
documentaries has been explored through a number of treatments. The documentary form as a response to the
crisis of capitalism was explored by Stott, (1973) as an intellectual evolution
which integrated folkloric imagery and prevailing reformist tendencies in
producing dramatic documentary photojournalist albums: Lange, Bourke-White, in one style, and the
moderated detachment of Walker Evans’ photographs as a more reserved and
cautious form. A number of comparative
critical studies of An American Exodus have pointed out various
technical, stylistic and positional tactics and strategies of the book. William Stott (1973) argues that the book is
a result of a compilation of field notes, begun in 1935, when Paul Taylor, a
labor economist at the University of California Berkeley, and who had been
working with the State of California’s Rural Rehabilitation Division, sought to
impress upon the federal relief agencies the need to coordinate and provide
organized camps and relief for migrant workers in the state.[i] Stott uncritically accepts Taylor’s
incorporation of captioning as accurate reflections or captures of original
testimony and implied social, economic relations and material conditions.[ii] Surprisingly Stott, avoids a critical reading
of Taylor’s sociological portrayal, and instead agrees with Carey McWilliams’
1940 review, in alluding to Taylor’s overuse of statistics and academicism. Stott does acknowledge and note the folkloric
use of quotes in the captions, but he fails to analyze why the resort to folklore reflected the
strategies of state patrimony sought by the documentary genre. Expressions, such as “we’re starved, stalled
and stranded,” establish foundation for
Taylor’s position as an elite arbiter and rationalist for federal
intervention. Stott’s analysis is also
unaware of the compromise of the quote of the woman on page 101, stating, “If
you die, you’re dead, -- that’s all.”
Paula Rabinowitz, (1994), counters with her own defense of Lange and
Taylor, citing uncritically to their self-authenticating claim in the foreward
to “adhere to the standards of documentary photography as we have conceived
them.”[iii]
The critique of captioning was first noted by Maren Stange (1989), whose comparative study of
documentary photography of the New Deal, examined the original Farm Security
Administration (hereinafter “FSA”) caption cards, which disputes the claim to
authenticity and accuracy made by Taylor and Lange. The original quote attributed to the woman at
page 101, “If you’re dead, you’re dead,”
was typed as an extended paragraph of commentary attributed to this
woman as a relation of her life in a county, where she has failed to qualify
for relief, and her reliance on her sister for supplemental support.[iv] Stange also suggests Taylor’s unease with
the results of New Deal modernization of farms, of which the TVA was
representative, and the unquestioned aftermath of displacement of farmers. Stange, fails however to offer a critique of
the failings of the various
transformations of farming during this era and the government’s inconsistency
and ambiguity.[v]
Other attempts at explaining An American Exodus include Milton
Meltzer, (1978) who offers the standard biography of Lange.[vi] Others try to integrate it as a product of liberal intellectual history,
amid contemporary stylistic trends in social discourse, and among these the
regional position of labor in the West, is offered by Ann Loftis (1998).[vii] Loftis offers a chronology and comparison
of stylistic influences to the critique of Taylor’s approach, suggesting that
inferences in Taylor’s writings to climate and topography are influenced by
Wesley Powell. Taylor’s own apprehensions
about his personal experiences with the failure with mixed farming in his
native Iowa, led to a conciliatory acceptance of the need to relocate farmers,
but stopped short of a total embrace of unchecked laissez faire
agribusiness. Taylor always seemed to
prefer initially self-help societies as a mediatory position between extremist
alternatives, and other relief measures as a temporary solution toward the
eventual goal of reestablishing white migrant farmers as new property
holders. Loftis’s approach is similar
to that of Kevin Starr, the official librarian of the State of California,
whose treatment of Taylor and Lange’s work situates it as a struggle of
intellectuals to rationalize and come to terms with the crisis as a hegemonic
solution.[viii]
A useful feminist interpretation is offered by Judith Davidov
(1998), who interprets Lange as a medium
through whose lens, the anonymous and unrepresented could express themselves.[ix] Davidov thus recalls Rabinowitz’ emphasis
on liberal intellectual intervention as an uncritical stance. Davidov for instance, alludes to her
associative treatment of Damaged Child, a photo of the abused child, as an
allusion to President Roosevelt’s polio, a disease Lange had been exposed to
as a child.[x] Despite these forays into a reinterpretation
of body politics and imagery, Davidov, falls back on a biographical sketch to
personalize the psychohistory of Lange’s personal formation. Her discussion of the image of Mrs. Florence Thompson, as the
Migrant Mother, suggests this image is a product of a typology, of an echoed
metaphor, necessary to create a responsive spectator who may recognize the
coding in the image.[xi] Davidov, in her discussion of An American
Exodus, fails however to dwell evenly on the three regions division of the
book. By focusing on feminism and the
body as essential component of analysis, Davidov ignores the substantive
materialist beginnings of the Old South, and instead curiously begins her
analysis with the discussion of the Midwest, and the Dust Bowl, a region Taylor’s familiarity seemingly
authenticates his ‘expertise.’[xii] Unequipped with an understanding of the
relative political economy and materialism of the regional basis of the book,
Davidov must herself resort to a metaphor of national migrancy, and is only
able to cursorily mention race as an implication of the book’s treatment. On the other hand Davidov, correctly points
out the tripartite invention of transformative narrative from Lange’s photos of
“tractored-out” landscapes, treeless plains, and enforced mobility.[xiii] Despite Davidov’s avoidance of discussing the
relation between capitalist disenfranchisement, race and class or caste, her
discussion of the representation of the “Woman of the High Plains,” is insightful and useful, as with her
suggestion of relating the beginning shot of the stuffed cotton bags, with this
woman as a symbol of confederacy, and the concluding photo of Ma Burnham as a
confederate grandmother (p. 258), all tied together by the implication of
cotton.
While offering the image of Filipino stooped laborers in the fields as
an art historical reference to Millet’s
gleaners, Davidov fails however, to note the racial ascendancy implied
in the caption of the photo of Filipino “gang workers” in the fields, which suggests
that to “perform its stoop labor, California agriculture has drawn upon a long
succession of races: Chinese,
Hindustani, Mexicans, Filipinos, Negroes, and now American whites.” (1939:
133). This is the book’s only reference to Mexicans in the entire book,
which notably does not include any image, the invisibility of their presence is
maintained. This image is also relevant to keep in mind with the trend of
pitting minority farm workers against whites as apparent in the following
testimony from the La Follette Committee in December 1939:[xiv]
Senator La Follette: You testified previously, if I understood
you, that it was the policy of the Earl Fruit Co. to hire local persons first?
Mr. Fuquay.: It was.
….it was changed just before the
pear-picking season of 1938.
Senator La Follette: And what was the occasion of that
change?
Mr. Fuquay: I had orders to hire Filipinos and Japs and
Hindus, six crews of them ahead of the white people.
The double page layout of pages 132 – 133, are also revealing to
examine for their technical and rhetorical devices, comparing and contrasting,
repeating and reiterating. Contrast
these photos form the Salinas valley with the Midcontinent. The tractor laying furrows in the Salinas
Valley, near King City, recalls to us the tractored landscapes of the
Midcontinent, repeatedly shown on pages 73 and 74. In the tractored furrows of Texas Panel, we are met with captions,
“Tractors replace not only mules, but people,”
followed by the subcaption of the second photo, “Abandoned house.” A third photo in sequence is captioned, “the
treeless landscape is strewn with empty houses.” In the Midcontinent. The furrows are diagonal or curving away from
the viewer, as if to put the viewer at crosses with the fields. We are not invited to proceed down these abondoned
furrows. The quality of the furrows are
distinct from the King City furrows. All
of the shots are taken in either early morning or late afternoon, accentuating
with shadowing the height of the furrows, shot from a low angle, the camera
close to the ground to emphasize the rows of soil. In the Texas furrows, the angular masses of
furrows present themselves as walls, as massed trenches, perhaps faintly
recalling the terror of Paul Taylor’s experience in the trenches of World War
I, where he was gassed. These furrows
are desolate, devoid of life, a windswept barren land, vulnerable as a
harbinger of the dustbowl. The houses
recede, uninhabited, devoid of life.
Dried weeds or stubbles of old grain crops sprout up here, there. In the final shot of the sequence, the camera
moves in toward the cluster of abondoned houses, but we are kept out by the
frail wire fence, with its posts of bent dried tree limbs, reiterating the
sense of death, decay, and even suggesting the very caption of ‘treeless
landscape.” There is another difference
to the quality of these furrows. The
Midcontinent furrows are topped off with triangular points, to shed water,
reinforcing however subtly the drought effects.
In the California furrows, (p. 130) with its elevated shot of double
rowed furrows set diagonally to the viewer, we are met with a caption,
“industrialized agriculture has its fullest development in California.” These furrows recede in a suggestion of
vastness, even into infinity, unenclosed by private farm ownership or limited
acreage. Shadowing is not
emphasized. Along with the shot of the
tractor laying out the double rows of furrows, flat topped with a small
depression between the rows, ideal for lettuce or for double rows of berries,
crops requiring hand labor, the limited shadowing suggests a high noon shot, of
even lighting across the fields, deemphasizing the enclosures of the
furrows. The tractor comes straight
toward us (132) laying the foundation of progress to set the material
conditions of rebonding specialized labor, (133) to be furnished in legions of
races, as in Taylor’s recitation of the “long succession of races.” No effort is made to suggest the laborers
(133) are skilled, that their clothing, a hat, a scarf, long sleeves, gloves,
are fabrics of skilled knowledgeable workers,
or that their stooped backs test their physical limits to meet
productivity forced by piece work rates of pay. Nor are we informed how this cluster of four
may be working in a cooperative fashion, each on separate furrows, according to
each an individualized share of that furrow’s output, but keeping an order and
relational cooperation between them.[xv] Instead, Lange’s photo keeps their faces
masked by their protective hats, their names anonymous, their position replaceable
by the next wave of ethnically convenient labor.
Davidov also offers a discussion of Paul Taylor’s later recounting of
how he and Lange laid out the photos, in which they planned the pairing of
photos, “as an information of the current condition,” and Davidov suggests as not a story like The
Grapes of Wrath.[xvi] I suggest on the contrary, that The Grapes of
Wrath as earlier works of Steinbeck were very much in the minds of Taylor and
Lange who shared Steinbeck’s racial interpretation of Mexicans, as in his
derogatory treatment and the use of illustrations of drunken Mexicans in Tortilla
Flats (1935), their invisibility along with the hiding of Filipinos behind
the book of In Dubious Battle (1936) and their invisibility in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The
collaborative text of Steinbeck accompanying the photos of The Harvest
Gypsies, (1936) similarly is a work focusing on white migrants. While Taylor and Lange did not apparently
have direct personal contact with Steinbeck until they approached him in late
1939 to write a forward for An American Exodus, they certainly shared a number of contacts
and friendships of the bourgeois intellectual milieu that was engaged in
agricultural social problems of the 1930’s.
Davidov, following in the critical genre of Stott, Rabinow, and Stange,
fails to critique the suggestive political economy of the book’s conclusions or afterward in the
chapter, “Directions.” This omission is
especially curious as it was noticed by several contemporary reviewers. [xvii]
By the
time Taylor wrote An American Exodus, he had been involved in studying
rural farm labor problems for over a decade.
It is revealing to compare the strategy of An American Exodus, in
1938 – 1940, with Roosevelt’s aims in 1931, wherein the strategy has reversed
in its advocacy of an inevitable, almost evolutionary resettlement in the
promised land of American agriculture, California, the promised land of An
American Exodus.[xviii]
Beginning
in 1935, when Lange’s photographs of the San Francisco general strike of 1934,
were seen at an exhibition in Berkeley by Paul Taylor, the two authors engaged
in a sporadic series of effort to combine pictorial representation and short
narrative and captioning of the position of farm workers with the aim of
providing a rationale for their controlled resettlement by combinations of
state and voluntarist community agencies and associations. It is instructive to note the purpose of
their first work together, when Taylor persuaded Lange to accompany him and
compile photographs of farm laborers for the California state relief agencies
and self-help societies, projects Taylor had been at work on for several years
along with his former student Clark Kerr.
Taylor had been interested in integrating photography into his own works
since the late 1920’s.[xix]
[i] See,
William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
(1973) p. 225.
[ii] For
instance, Stott, Ibid. p. 226, claims Taylor, “let the camera and the
words of those photographed take care of the concrete while he generalised,
often in ways tangential to the theme.”
[iii] See
Paula Rabinowitz. They Must Be
Represented. Verso: London.
(1996) p. 86.
[iv] On the
problematic of Taylor and Lange’s captioning see, Maren Stange, Symbols of
Ideal Life: Social Documentary
Photography in America: 1890-1950. Cambridge University Press: New York
(1992) pp. 120-121. The caption
card is photostatically reproduced as figure 3.11. For a textual reproduction of the FSA
archived collection of Taylor and Lange’s
caption cards, see, Howard M. Levin
and Katherine Northrup, eds. Dorothea Lange:
Farm Secuirty Administration Photographs, 1935 – 1939. 2 Vols.
The Text-Fiche Press: Glencoe
Ill. (1980).
[v] See
Stange Ibid. p. 123 and ff. 77, which lists a number of useful critical
histories of New Deal farm policies.
[vi] Milton
Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A
Photographer’s Life. Farrar Strauss
Giroux: New York. 1978.
[vii] Ann
Loftis, Witnesses to the Struggle:
Imaging the 1930’s California Labor Movement. University of Nevada Press: 1998.
[viii] See
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The
Great Depression in California. New
York: Oxford University Press,
1996. Another liberal historian who
follows Starr’s project on a national level, is T.H. Watkins, whose works
include Righteous Pilgrim, and The
Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the
Great Depression in America, Henry
Holt. (1999).
[ix] See
Judith Fryer, Women’s Camera Work:
Self/Body/Other in American Visual Culture. Duke University Press: (1998) p. 216.
[x] See
Davidov, Ibid. p. 55.
[xi] Davidov
attributes this explanation of iconographic coding to John Tagg, Burden of
Representation.
[xii] See
Davidov, Ibid. pp. 252-271.
[xiii] See, Davidov, Ibid. p. 255.
[xiv] See,
pp. 177556-17558 of Part 48, Marysville, Calif. Incident, May-July 1939 of the
La Follette Committee Hearings, dated December 14, and December 15, 1939. The testimony reveals the witness’ own personal reluctance
to keep this preferential hiring, and his own personal preference for hiring
whites. He states he was directed to
hire ‘locals’ by the San Francisco office.
[xv] For a
discussion of how Latino field workers
develop techniques of cooperation and spatial orientation and sharing in
picking fruit crops, see Miriam J. Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class and Work in California
Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, (1996), p. 142-152.
[xvi] See Davidov, p. 270. Approaches to the study
of Paul Taylor’s career and work, have also failed to adequately explore the
psychoanalytic possiblities of the contradictions in his life and in his
marriage to his wife, Dorothea Lange.
How may a marriage between a writer-politico and a photographer alter and
manipulate the production of a photo-serial documentary on migrant labor.
[xvii] See
the reviews by Margaret Marshall in The Nation, January 20, 1940, and by
William S. Hopkins, in The American Economic Review, June 1940, Vol.
XXX, No. 2, pp. 384-386.
[xviii] See
Loftis, Ibid. p. 113.
Loftis’s commentary on the presentation of a ‘deluge’ image of the
arrival of farm workers as a strategy of the 1930’s is usfeully compared with
the 1920’ migrations, in which Taylor was cognizant of migrations of farm
workers to the West and California cotton farms from the Midwest. The sense of crisis of the 1930’s altered the
focus and emphasis of Taylor’s work.
[xix] For a discussion of Paul Taylor’s evolving use of photography,
see Richard Steven Street, “Paul S. Taylor and the Origins of Documentary
Photography in California in California, 1927-1934,” History
of Photography, 7, no. 4 (1983).
Taylor’s 1927 photograph of the cotton farm billboard is reproduced in
Loftis, Ibid.
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