Journal of a Sabbatical

July 10, 1999

american pictures

Today's Starting Pitcher: I forget

Today's Reading: Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

When people look back on photographs of the 1990's in 60 years time what will they see? Are there photographers working now who are creating the same kind of record of American life that the great photographers of the 1930's created? Were the 1930's inherently more photogenic than the 90's? Or was it just that the government paid to send photographers around to document the poverty of the 1930's?

Those questions swirled around in my head as Mark the Hermit Potter and I went to see the Peter Sekaer exhibit, entitled American Pictures, at the Addison Gallery this afternoon. Sekaer was a Danish photographer and protégé of Walker Evans. Sekaer and Evans traveled around the US together photographing scenes of rural and urban poverty. One of the things I liked the best about this exhibit is the juxtaposition of Sekaer's images with Evans' images of the same subject. Where Evans had a very formal style, paying careful attention to form and visual elements in photos of gritty poverty, Sekaer had a more intimate style almost like he was taking snapshots of people he knew.

The thing about documentary photography is it's not exactly art nor exactly photojournalism. Well, I guess if it gets exhibited in art museums and reviewed as art, it's art. I love to look at photographs of the 1930's. They have a vitality and drama and grit that brings home the stark reality of poverty, racial segregation, and dirty urbanization. It makes a point, it's interesting to look at, but is it art? I have no idea.

One of my favorite photos in the Sekaer exhibit is of a couple of black women balancing on a pipe to cross a ditch filled with water to get to their homes. The idea of people being literally separated from the mainstream of society jumps right out of the frame at you. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words!

That is what really got me going on whether you could photograph the 90's the same way. The picture of the women crossing the ditch says "segregation" in no uncertain terms. So, you could photograph segregation. But how do you photograph the intense lack of compassion of America in the 90's? How do you show people with no health insurance?

Similarly, a lot of the photos from the 1930's are either of people doing manual labor or of unemployed people lining up for soup kitchens or the welfare office or whatever. How do you photograph knowledge work? How do you photograph the underemployed?

Too many questions, not enough answers. If I worked longer on this and gave it more thought and research, it could be a pretty good essay but I seem to have bitten off more than I can chew here. Good art makes you think, and the photographs certainly made me think.

And so to watch the soccer game of the century and the triumph of Title IX...