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Title: Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 by Michael Lesy ISBN: 0393049434 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $65.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: Subversive in the best sense of the word
Comment: A beautiful book of photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others culled from the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration collection (a New Deal project that covered far more than farms), Long Time Coming may strike you at first as a nostalgia trip back to the days depicted on the cover: when whole towns lined up to watch their Boy Scout troops march down the street waving American flags. But Lesy hasn't combed the archive's 150,000-plus negatives only to offer up a tribute to lost Americana. Try putting this book out on your coffee table; lean close, and you'll hear it ticking.
Many of the images in this book -- a little girl sprinting up an alley in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, beneath rows of washing and before the disinterested stares of the older girls and women; the backs of five bony men as they carry a homemade coffin up a rocky path in Jackson, Kentucky; an angry black Muslim in Chicago leading his two stricken-looking sons on an errand or into fanaticism -- are as haunting and disturbing as anything Lesy has presented in his earlier work. They are also weirdly filled with hope. Neither inspiring, exactly, nor sentimentally-portrayed, the men, women, and children in these photographs might, looked at by themselves, fade away quickly. Gathered together in all their painful glory, they seem possessed of a Faulknerian quality: They endure.
Long Time Coming is best looked at it not just once and slowly, but several times over. At least once go through quickly, flipping the pages as if to set the coal miners, preachers, nuns, farmers, carny barkers, and bankers contained therein into continuous motion. Follow the running girl from Ambride, PA to the family wrestling and splashing and staring at the camera (beneath a giant billboard for Iron City Pilsner, "Just a sip at twilight") in a "homemade swimming pool for steelworker's children" on the following right-hand page; and on to a thick column of a mother -- the girl grown up? -- marching, baby in hand, past "Factory workers' homes, Camden, New Jersey," and then back to an alley, where now a young black boy stands staring at the camera defiantly even as he keeps his distance from it.
Sequences such as these abound throughout Long Time Coming, stories of escape and capture, of growing old and being born again. But beyond those literal progressions, there are stories told by shapes: A woman in a long black coat dominates the middle of a frame of a pleasant residential street in Woodbine, Iowa, as does a bent-over drifter crossing a dry, empty road in Dubuque, and a traffic cop standing like a statue in the middle of street glistening with rain in Norwich, Connecticut. The black hole at the center of a mountain man's guitar leads to the white sphere of a black musician's maracas, which in turn foreshadow the white straw hats seen from above at a cockfight in Puerto Rico.
That these stories slowly reveal themselves as morality plays is no accident; both Lesy, and the man who originally commissioned the photographs, intended them as such. There are eight chapters of text interspersed throughout Long Time Coming, in which the mastermind of the F.S.A. documentary project, a man named Roy Stryker, is introduced, mocked, and redeemed. A bureaucrat with tyrannical tendencies, Stryker drew up lists of books for his photographers to read in order to "understand" America -- cut-and-dried sociology, experts on regional hygiene -- and "shooting scripts" the photographers were supposed to adhere to. "Husking bees. Barn dance; hay rides -- Halloween -- football games; making pies -- mince meat and pumpkin; turkey dinners; picking feathers from the ducks." In his attempt to control reality's representation, Stryker ended up composing prose poems of Americana, which in turn became the major chords of a symphony much expanded by the keen eyes of the photographers.
The whole is a requiem mass. The fact that its subject -- the United States -- continues to exist doesn't so much refute its minor chords as make them all the more relevant to the Coplandesque sweeps of optimism: elements of a portrait of what the country was, is, and -- isn't this the point of all propaganda? -- may yet be. Roy Stryker saw these photographs as facts; the ordinary citizens who viewed them understood them as testimonies. "Every new form of communication," writes Lesy, "every new kind of media, has been and will always be a blind, blunt, crippled effort to make the past into the present, the far into the near, the outside into the inside, to turn us all, for a moment, into supernal beings.... The File" -- the collection of 145,000 photographs -- "had the potential to create, over time, an experience of totality that felt boundless... It's as grand a thing, in its own way, as Yosemite or Yellowstone. It's the common property of every citizen of the United States. It belongs to us. It is us."
Rating: 5
Summary: Looking backwards.
Comment: A stunning book of 410 photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information archives now in the Library of Congress. This book takes a different approach to the many others which use FSA photos, here you will not see many of those well-known images of poverty in rural areas, the effects of land erosion, the plight of Southern sharecroppers, not even the greatest FSA photo of all, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother but instead a comprehensive and wonderful showing of the ordinary and everyday in American life from 1935 to 1943.
All these fascinating photos are divided into eight sections, City Life, Hard Work, Hometowns, Hill Towns, Coal Towns, Family Farms, Hard Times and Amusements. Most of them are from 1938 to 1943 so there are few by Walker Evans who left the FSA in !937 but plenty by Russell Lee. The photos (well printed on excellent paper) are presented one to a page with a caption, photographer's name and date centred below. Because these are FSA images they depict a very detailed picture of everyday life and in 1941 when the US joined the Second World War it was decided to expand the coverage to record the war effort and life in general. This is the main reason I like the book plus the eighty-two photos never published before.
Between the eight photo sections author Lesy writes (in a very honest way) various essays about Roy Stryker, who ran of the FSA and how he organised the photographers work through his exacting shooting scripts (these were partially inspired by Robert Lynd and his 1925 book, 'Middletown' based on Muncie, Indiana which turns out to be average small town USA, tough luck Peoria, Illinois!) how this huge file of images was distributed to the media, correspondence between Stryker and the photographers and more. I found one section (pages 230 to 235) called 'The Middletown Spirit' very intriguing, it is a list of the things that the folks of 'Middletown' (or small towns anywhere) believed in and as well as the goodness that one would expect it also reflects an alarming collection of deeply conservative beliefs, ethnic prejudice and a Horatio Alger like deference towards business. The back of the book lists all the negative numbers so you can order prints from the Library of Congress and in fact see 60,000 photos from the FSA/OWI collection on the Library's 'American Memory' website.
Because of what these photographs show, the quality of presentation and production, I think this will become the definitive reference book for the period. A glorious reminder of the American spirit.
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Title: Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century by Michael Lesy ISBN: 1565844858 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, Warren Susman ISBN: 0826321933 Publisher: University of New Mexico Press Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, 1860-1945 by Michael Lesy ISBN: 0394509676 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: December, 1982 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943 by Maren Stange ISBN: 1565846184 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs by National Gallery of Art (U.S.), Sarah Greenough, National Gallery of Art ISBN: 0810935333 Publisher: Harry N Abrams Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $150.00 |
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