saw a presentation today on Susan Sontag's view of photography and history. the recent (since mid 1800s) rise of photos as a dominant, determinant way of telling us what our history is. we don't question photos the way we question written words. even though we all know how subjective it is to decide when and what to photograph, and we all know how easy it is (especially in our photoshopped era) to manipulate an image.-
Sontag starts with Plato's Cave metaphor. but i'm more interested in the idea that photos, like all history, are editorials. and to take a photo is not only to capture an event, but an event itself.
some of this is coded into the vocabulary. frame, lens, crop - these are ways of saying how we limit what is included in the photo. science and journalism want to be objective forms of knowledge: they pretend to have no perspective (sometimes they claim to have all perspectives at once, a perfect form of knowledge). a photograph always has perspective, by definition. we are even prompted to wonder what we would see from a different perspective within this same scene.-
Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange worked for the government during the depression. their job was, technically, to document displaced workers, but what they were expected to do was this: create popular support for costly New Deal/WPA/FSA programs. they each traveled the nation, getting photos of hollow-cheeked family of white sharecroppers, far-flung black men hopping a
freight, well-dressed chicana/os in a chowline. is this what america looked like in 1933? well, this is what roosevelt wanted people to see - especially northeasterners who survived the economic collapse. unless they felt empathy, they weren't going to politically support anything resembling social justice.-
evans and lange showed a nation on its knees. these photos were reproduced in newspapers and magazines nationwide. and for the first time ever, america looked like a land of equality: everyone was equally poor and hungry. relief centers were "desegregated," i guess, but only because no rich white people had thought to segregate them in the first place. after all, a rich - or even middle class - white person never expected to need such help, and i guess they didn't care much if poor white trash got "contaminated" by black or latino skin. then, once all the white kids were having hunger pangs, anti-race-mixing laws no longer seemed like a priority, did they? (not that the government believed in equal treatment: millions of immigrants and citizens were "deported" to mexico during "operation wetback" - how can you be deported to place you've never lived?)
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there's a poster, the communist party's candidate for president. this was not some lunatic fringe, not in the 1930s. to the minds of many, the great depression had revealed capitalism as a failure. blacks, especially, supported
socialist ideas, since all other political parties had abused and exploited them. anyway, communism seemed to be working in russia - at least according to news reports, which turned out to be heavily censored. no matter. the point is america was in a crisis, desperate. and i feel it was a point in time when any number of things could've happened. extremes ruled. we could've become communist, socialist, feudal... even Nazis had substantial support (from white people, of course).-
th first half of the 20th century was full of possibility. freedom of expression was maybe even more free, because government lacked the means to restrict it. there was no corporate control of media. farming and even most manufacturing arose from small groups of independent operators. racist whites ruled and oppressed in the south and the north.
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but that wasn't the full story: community wealth allowed many to resist and even speak out. america's first full generation of black intellectuals built the harlem renaissance while wall street collapsed. california's chinatowns came through the crash unscathed. latina/o and black musicians created great american musical genres - jazz, blues, rock & roll, conjunto, tejano, cha cha. independent communities had effective, bilingual schools - spanish in new mexico and south texas, cajun in
south louisiana, cherokee in oklahoma, navajo in arizona, swedish in minnesota, yiddish in new york, german in pennsylvania, japanese and chinese in california. robber barons, politicians, and white citizens' council (klan-affiliated organization which harrassed jews and anyone else who wasn't white enough) had much power, but there was a kind of de-centralization and self-suffient community which no longer exists.-
the poor were in a position to either be completely destroyed or completely empowered. but neither of those happened in 1938. corporations, with their costs subsidized, recovered before the unions grew enough. with huge profits, corporations increased wages, since workers needed incentives beyond subsistence, now that the WPA was in full swing. once the government injected hundreds of millions more for World War 2, the economy was well on its way to the post-war boom, and the return of the white middle class. the black towns of oklahoma, mississippi, and florida were burned down. strict segregation, fell behind during the "united" war effort, but came back in the late 1940s, stronger than ever. the war-era concentration camps for japanese-americans, and the zoot suit riots (in which military recruits killed and assaulted chicanos) - these became the norm after white americans celebrated v-day, confident in their superiority over "foreigners."
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and independent schools, with their "unamerican" practices, were taken over and homogenized by WASPs. systematically, entire communities were labeled "retarded" because the kids spoke a different language, making them prime candidates for assimilation
and/or menial labor, depending on skin color.-
(this persists even in the 21st century. from the time they are 5 years old, spanish speakers are way overrepresented in special ed, and rarely allowed into gifted programs, thanks to your local standardized test. why would anyone test students in a language they don't speak? what can this possibly prove? give a child bilingual ed, she or he will learn english completely in 5 years. give a child english-only, she or he will drop out within 2. sorry, i'll step off my soapbox)
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i'm not saying america would be a better place if we had become communist at that point. but i'm wondering about these possibilities. because who would've expected what we have now, with corporations writing legislation to govern themselves? we have workplace and pollution regulations, but no enforcement. we have "patriotic" executives who outsource every chance they get. and finally, the least predictable: we have clueless labor unions: no clue how to get their message to workers, no idea how to be heard over mainstream media, no clue how to stop the corruption in their own bureaucracies. unions today, they're weaker than they were in the 1910s, the during the robber baron era. health benefits, retirement programs, and wages (adjusted for inflation) are all diminishing fast. the gap between rich and poor is as wide as before the 1929 crash. and that's not even considering the millions of undocumented workers who will be "legalized" as second-class z-visa citizens, legally exploited and stuck below the poverty line.
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is this the story these photos tell? is this the proper context to give them? maybe i got half these ideas from watching cradle will rock. i do not live in FDRs era. and the poverty today is not like it was then. it's true many americans have little hope of escaping poverty, but relatively few (less than 10 million?) actually live a life of perpetual hunger. now, if the government succeeds in cutting the successful food stamps program, and then things like WIC, medicare, environmental standards, and education... -
that's a different story. we could have a new depression without a crash. highly profitable corporations, operating overseas; wealthy enclaves (beverly hills, hilton head, grosse point, fairfax) surrounded by legions of underemployed. through global warming, another hurricane, or whatever. imagine roving masses a la the dust bowl.
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our society, in 2007, is not at a turning point. we are, to borrow Thomas Kuhn's concepts, operating as a "normal" society. there are slight disturbances of our capitalism, immigrant protests, war protests. nothing like a new paradigm - but a paradigm shift is possible. not corrupt soviet communism, nobody sane is going to beat that dead horse. maybe democracy, in a way it never happened here. a democracy without a ruling class? a communicating world that doesn't need the media to mediate? schools that are equally funded and serve every student? corporate profit that is shared with employees? there are some models. a few schools here and there, a few corporations and internet content created by and for people. TV replaced photography as the dominant form of seeing the world. what will be the dominant way in 50 years? will the internet (an abstract concept) even be recognizable?
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either way. when or if a paradigm shift happens, there will be some sort of record of what happened. and whoever looks at those records, they will not understand it in the same way as those who lived it (see Richard Rorty). they will have their own context. i'm not saying my own perspective on Lange and Evans' photos is "correct." no view, and no viewer, is objective. it doesn't matter how real the photo looks. history is all about building a narrative that concludes with us, right now, as the culmination of everything (see Hayden White). a historian or anyone else who claims objectivity is pushing a biased doctrine. whether to glorify, nostalgize, denigrate, mourn, or hope, the past will always be put to the use of the present. so if you question those in power, you better question their version of the past.
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