Triangulation

As I move into my study of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I return to Walker Evans.  Consider two photographs:

Walker Evans. Alabama. 1936. Bud Fields and His Family at Home. from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Shelby Lee Adams.  East Kentucky. (Image title and date as yet unknown). from Salt and Truth. 

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Taken more than 70 years apart, these two pictures are remarkably similar.  What do we see? Family.  Poverty, yes.  Dirt.  (Neither subject has chosen to / been welcomed to wash for the occasion).  Moderate contrast b&w.  A kind of  compressed triangle composition that offers both the lure of depth and its betrayed promise.

What else? Do we sense that one family works and one doesn’t? And what in the image tells us so: Body weight. The torn and worn clothes of the Fields family. The featured accoutrement of leisure– bar bells, a yard billiards table, snake as jewelry (or yoke). The pleasured countenance. The tired one.

And the photographers?

Both understand themselves to be documentary portraitists. Both photographers use/d large format cameras (a device that provides a high level of detail). Both are known for posing their subjects. Both, for setting the environment (move these boots here, wear this.)

Both are of the middle artist class (which often interacts with the upper class as audience). Both chose subjects of the lowest class.

Two more preliminary notes:

Walker Evans is held up as a paragon of clear, compassionate seeing; the founding modernist of American documentary.

Shelby Lee Adams is criticized as an exploitative local color imagist; the worst kind, one of our Kentucky own.

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Although in Evans’ generation the myth of documentary as “truth” still prevailed, Shelby Lee Adams’ work follows Charles Kuralt’s War on Poverty, Diane Arbus’s freak show, Richard Avedon’s In the American West. Image as truth is, at this point, a fluid concept. As Edward Weston once insisted, and photographers now widely accept, the image is made in the eye, not the camera.  But does the typical contemporary reader of images equally understand?

If Evans fooled everyone, does Adams fool anyone?

These days, on his blog, Shelby Adams is exhibiting new color images. Here is his most recent artist statement in full (emphasis mine):

A Narrative Of A Different Kind
2013

Academics, our government, and the media in general have produced stories and photojournalistic essays for over a century depicting our poor in a variety of ways. Narrative stories generally produce pity and arouse compassion to bring about involvement and promote social change. If you talk with the subjects of such stories, they tell you they do not want pity but need support and acceptance with worthiness. Pity and shame are often two byproducts of such storytelling. The image or photograph itself is a great teacher, affirming the unseen for many, psychologically opening both viewer and subject together, informatively and abstractly communicating, connecting beyond language itself and culturally rendering experiences timeless. The context of presentation is important, to be placed in environments for study and examination. For years we in Appalachia have been explaining ourselves through an unjust and imbalanced economic and sociological history, rarely seeing the uniqueness of some of our own, and often hiding them. It is time for another perspective. We need images defining ourselves from the inside, demonstrating more feelings and validating the acceptance of all of us, if we really wish to stop stereotyping. If you talk to any of my subjects, they ask, “Please, don’t write about us as poor and backwards.” I honor those requests.

 Memorable art and photography penetrate deeply into the core and nerves of our being without artifice or triviality, disarming us, disturbing, opening and calming us, depending upon what is portrayed. An open self-giving portrait speaks to us about ourselves, offering more long-term. Why degrade one’s subject by writing about their difficulties, when the “essence” is already communicated in the photograph by the subject’s sincerity? We need to study the pictures themselves. The viewer, sometimes just does not want to see something is happening the way it is for another. They may wish to domesticate or render invisible. So they criticize the image-maker and degrade the subjects themselves. It is important to be aware of the history depicting the less fortunate and the mistakes society has made. I am working against any stereotyping by collaborating and bonding with my people, working toward a larger more inclusive recognition. The photograph, itself, when mutually created speaks for the subject, reflecting their lives and more, touching our inner selves. Making visible the connecting character we share, our humanity, confronting all with a life we can accept or deny.  I see my work acknowledging both good and bad simultaneously within the same images oftentimes, because this is how people actually are.

Choice is not always an option for some. One’s ideal does not always occur. Where others might not see another salvageable or redeemable, I see grace, tolerance, and a patient endurance, full of significance. Let us not forget, we all see the same photographs differently. I photograph no one who does not wish to participate. Subjects, involved over the years with making multiple portraits, reveal a narrative of a different kind. Within any one photograph of a family or individual, many stories and behaviors exist. Each can be dissimilar and forever changing over time, examined and explained differently for generations to come. Stories change often, depending upon the narrator, time and circumstances of the story, yet the pictures remain the same and forever.

Shelby Lee Adams

July 4^th, 2013

The photographer understands he and his legacy are under fire for repeating hillbilly stereotypes of the culture of poverty. He writes that he is one with his subjects, that he refuses to either hide or “domesticate” what he sees, that it is the viewer who condescends, not the lens. (Yes, I could write an entirely other post on the unfolding meaning of Adams’ use of the verb “domesticate”, but for now I will move forward.)

In the film, The True Meaning of Pictures, we learn this evaluation of Adams’ work comes not only from critics, but also from many of his subjects. They are brought gifts, electronics and whole hogs, as introductions to their new friend. After the visit, they are given flattering work prints, for only some to discover the more profane representations in published books, well after releases have been signed.

All of this adds up to knowing, at the very least, the photographer’s relationship with his collaborating subjects is more complex than he would readily admit.

But what of the viewer? How does s/he contribute to the image’s making? Is Adams right, that only the criticizing reader is to blame for seeing his subjects as cheapened? Consider instead this brief and flattering salon review from the Chicago based New City Art, featuring the above Adams image and its 2008 exhibition at the Catherine Edelman Gallery.

A list of my favorite stereotypes being issued here as cosmopolitan thought:

1. the Third World is alive and maybe not so well in deep in the heart of the U.S.A. (read: here is the inevitable culture of poverty)

2. seem to be no different than we might have seen their forebears a century ago (read: they are our contemporary ancestors)

3. they don’t vogue for the camera (read: we can assume this is their natural state in the wild)

In Evans’ portrait, we see people who might be posed but who, indeed, do not vogue. Their faces, their composition emerge very much from the typical frontier portraiture of the previous generation.  If the Evans’ image transgresses, it is the decision of the image maker to ask them for an environmental portrait set in the most intimate interior: the bed—an invasion of privacy and the era’s perceived right to formality, probably.  Likewise, centering the half-dressed toddler’s genitals is not Evans’ most respectable choice. Here is a portrait of America’s once forgotten workers, seemingly consenting but impatient with the time it takes to release the shutter, the photographer very much in charge.

In Adams’ portrait we do see a similar composition line, but we also see definite voguing, either by photographer’s direction or by exhibitionist pleasure (I do not know and so, at the moment, can only assume some version of both).  Here is a portrait of animal masculinity, seemingly proud and on the dole, with all the time in the world.

In his introduction to Richard Avedon’s seminal Portraits (1976), art critic Harold Rosenberg writes, “The moral principal of photographic portraiture is respect for the identity of the subject. Such respect does not come naturally in a medium that can without effort produce countless unrelated likenesses of the same object. Light, of which photographs are made, can endow people and scenes with emotional associations that are completely irrelevant to them—a half-lighted face transforms every girl reading into a pensive madonna. To achieve truth, the photographer needs to curtail his resources, which means he must make photography more difficult.”

To triangulate someone is the dysfunctional habit of having conflict with one family member, with whom you maintain a polite and protective silence, while exhibiting that conflict brazenly to another family member, thereby drawing another into your culpability. In the family of man, seer and seen, my question remains:  How do we / do we not triangulate one class against another in documentary practice? And to what gain?  If the picture–indeed–is made “in the eye?”, what other, more psychological elements must be investigated and curtailed to make a moral portrait?