Lost in "A Moment in Time"

Fisherman along the Ohio River outside Western Penitentiary, Pittsburgh PA (copyright 2010 by Dory Adams)

Click on image for larger view

A few weeks ago I mentioned “A Moment in Time,” a project launched by the blog Lens at the New York Times. The purpose of the project was for people around the world to take a photograph at 15:00 U.T.C. and upload it to the New York Times website as a contribution to the “global mosaic” of images representative of that moment. It sounded like an interesting project and a fun thing to do, so I wanted to participate by submitting an image from my city and to encourage others to take part as well. The project was an overwhelming success in that more than 14,000 images were submitted.

“Overwhelming” may be the key word here, as it was quickly apparent that the NYT project staff had difficulties managing the influx of photographic images and getting the interactive global mosaic up and working. The site finally went live May 11th, a week later than planned, but I’ve not yet been able to determine if the photograph I submitted of Pittsburgh is actually part of the mosaic. Because my photo is in a large category (“community”) and in one of the largest stacks of photographs (Pennsylvania is included in the northeast region which has multiple major cities), my browser freezes or crashes before I can get through that single stack. I’ve tried viewing the site on several different computers and by using both Firefox and Explorer with no luck. There are many more stacks of photographs (sorted by region and category) to view, but I’d like to see whether my image of Pittsburgh is actually included. On May 2nd, there had been problems with uploading images to the site. While I was able to upload mine on the first try late in the afternoon and received a notice that it had been uploaded successfully, I’m not sure it actually did since others have left comments on the blog saying they’d received that same message but their image was not in the stack for their region/category.

At this point I’ve simply wasted far too much time trying to view my image only to have the system crash before I can work my way down the huge stack of photographs where it should be. So, I’m uploading my photograph here – and if any of you happen to see it on the NYT site, I’d be grateful if you’d copy the URL for that particular page and e-mail it to me (my address is in the sidebar to the right of this page).

There was a lot going on in Pittsburgh at 11:00 a.m. (15:00 U.T.C. for Eastern Standard Time) on May 2nd, including the Pittsburgh marathon with 16,000 participants and a graduation ceremony for the University of Pittsburgh. It was going to be a morning of traffic jams, detours, and bridge closures. The logistics of getting around the city would be a challenge. I considered photographing the marathon, but realized that most of the runners would’ve crossed the finish line by 11:00 a.m. I also considered photographing parishioners entering or leaving mass at St. Benedict the Moor Church since the gorgeous statue of the saint atop the church is a favorite photographic subject of mine, but the mass schedule did not quite jive with the designated moment.

Pittsburgh’s urban trails are a favorite aspect of the city for me, so I decided to photograph at a stretch of the Allegheny Trail along the Ohio River near Western Penitentiary that always interests me. My husband and I walk that stretch from time to time, and I’m always fascinated by the prison there. Over the past few years it has gone from closed and vacant to fully operational again. We’ve watched as it transitioned from quiet and spooky obsolescence, a big tombstone of sorts, to an active and menacing sight with gleaming new razor wire atop the walls and fences. First opened more than a century ago in 1882, the structure looks medieval. This is the kind of place you might have nightmares about, and in fact I have a recurring dream which takes place on the side street beside the tall stone wall of the prison yard where posted signs warn “no stopping or standing.”

In serene juxtaposition to the penitentiary is the Ohio River scenery. On the rainy Sunday morning of the photo project, I came upon a fisherman wearing a yellow rain slicker who was fishing from a dock just beyond the trail and the prison walls. I photographed the fisherman on the outside enjoying his leisure time while the men inside those walls served their time. What can’t be captured in the photograph is the sound coming from the prison, an echoing din of voices talking and shouting above the background noise of movement inside. That sound bounces from wall to wall around the interior of the building to the outer yard walls and eventually beyond. I was amazed by the sound and wondered how much louder it must be inside. It had been a cold winter day the last time I’d walked this trail, and except for the Christmas Day visitors arriving in the parking lot, it had been very quiet then.

Locals refer to it as Western Pen, but the official name for the facility is The State Correctional Institution – Pittsburgh. It had operated as a maximum security prison until closing in 2005, and then in 2007 it reopened as a medium security prison due to dangerous overcrowding in the PA prison system. This image of Western Pen would fit into my category of “reclaimed things” here at In This Light where I have ongoing themes of “abandoned things” and “reclaimed things.” For the purpose of the “A Moment in Time” project, it seems to fit best in their category of “community.” The penitentiary is a community within itself, and it’s also part of the larger community of the neighborhood and city, albeit a walled-in and gated one of the unfashionable kind.

The editors at Lens who undertook the project of trying to capture a single moment globally are to be commended for their efforts. It’s truly a wonderful project, and I will no doubt spend more hours browsing through the images. Perhaps the editors at Lens will improve their global mosaic so that the images on the interactive site can be searched by city instead of larger regions, so that all those who contributed photographs to the project can have their images seen.

Abandoned Things: Private Property

The photograph “Private Property” by Marc Soracco launches a new series on abandoned things, which will be a recurring topic at “In This Light” along with the continuing series on Appalachian photographers and writers. Other upcoming topics include graveyards, signs, steel mills, churches, small towns and main streets – imagery influenced by the work of Walker Evans. Evans referred to it as “the American vernacular.” Americana may be a more contemporary description. And since I’m living in the city which was the subject of one of Eugene Smith’s greatest photographic projects, there will be more posts and imagery about Pittsburgh as well.

Abandoned things have always intrigued me. In fact, anything that’s been left to ruin fascinates me. What happened? Who stopped caring and walked away? Why? When did the downward slide into ruin begin? There’s always a story behind the abandoned and discarded possession.

I may even be able to trace my fascination with abandoned things back to its root. When I was a young girl, I often spent weekends at my grandfather’s house. It had been the house where I’d lived for the first several years of my life, so there was always a sense of going back home when I visited. On the drive to Grandpap’s house, along a narrow country road winding through a valley, we’d pass an old abandoned house. I badgered Grandpap with questions, and he told me the house had once been well maintained and had been one of the prettiest houses around. What had simply been interesting to me before suddenly became spooky. What had happened to the people who’d lived in the pretty house in the woods? Why did they leave?

I loved those rides with Grandpap in his dark green Plymouth that had a big clipper ship hood ornament out front to guide us (I’m not absolutely sure of the year or model, but it may have been a 1950 Special Deluxe). It was a heavy car with rounded contours and creaky doors that closed hard with a solid thud. There were other clipper ship designs inside, including a flat chrome decoration attached to the glove compartment which had matchbooks wedged under it to keep it from rattling. There were also ship designs on the center of the steering wheel and on the big chrome disk hubcaps. Riding in that car with him felt like sailing, especially at night under starry skies with the air whistling through the tiny triangular side vent window – a safe transport through the valley past spooky old houses in the woods.

There was no radio in the car, so we’d talk. He listened to my childish imagination and I listened to his stories of being a boy. He would let me strike matches for him to light his pipe as he drove. He was absolutely my favorite person in my small world back then, and when we were out of my mother’s sight we were usually in cahoots about things like match-lighting and staying up past bedtime to watch TV. Or, walking to the filling station near his house at the edge of town after supper for soda pop, where the pop cooler was the old kind with icy water circulating around the bottles and he’d have to reach down into the cold water to pick out our favorite flavors, orange for me and birch beer for him.

I bet I asked Grandpap about that old abandoned house every time we drove past. The two-story wooden frame house was surrounded by what had once been a white picket fence. Only traces of paint remained, just enough to hint that the house and fence had once been white. There was no glass left in the window frames, yet on an old trellis at one end of the wide and sagging front porch, climbing red roses still bloomed.

Those roses haunted me. Old gardens live on, evidence of a different life, of what had once been, of a life that has moved on. I’ve come upon similar old gardens over the years. Once in the ghost town of Sewell along the New River in West Virginia, where only stone foundations remain and yet daffodils still bloom in what were once yards each spring. More recently in the town of Thurmond, West Virginia after all the residents had moved from the hillside houses when the National Park Service bought them out. And now, just a few houses up the street from where I live, the home of an elderly woman who died last winter stands vacant and tied up in probate while the heirs settle her estate, her garden still blooming with lupine and hollyhocks throughout the spring and summer.

All those years ago when I was a young girl riding in my grandfather’s car past that old abandoned house, I couldn’t understand that things age and decay, and if left untended are eventually overtaken by the natural world. Or that people move on and leave things behind. That old house along the country road was eventually covered with overgrowth and finally collapsed into itself. I suppose the roses were eventually choked out by weeds, or perhaps the tall brush blocked out the sun they needed to thrive.

Abandonment, lost homes and lost gardens, are some of our oldest stories, told and retold. I’ve been working on pulling together the ideas and imagery for a series on abandoned things for some time, but the topic of lost homes seems particularly relevant in our current economic climate. A recent post about losing a childhood home written by writer Jessica Keener at her blog, “Confessions of a Hermit Crab” is a reminder that we’ve gone through earlier difficult economic times. Be sure to check out Jessica’s blog, which I’ve added to my list of favorites on the sidebar at the right.

Photo Credit: “Private Property, Micopany, Florida” copyright 2008 by Marc Soracco. Used by permission.

Cold Comfort: Maggie Anderson's poems on the photography of Walker Evans

I keep coming back to the photographs of Walker Evans: Appalachia and the South, farms and farmers, steel mills, graveyards, signs, churches, small towns and main streets, living rooms and porches, New York City street scenes and subway riders. These are the same iconic subjects recurrent in my own writing. Well, not the New York City subway and street scenes. Except for a long ago train trip from Chicago to Boston that involved changing trains there, New York City is outside my experience. All I really know of it is what I’ve seen in photographs and movies and books.

In last week’s post, I mentioned Philip Gefter’s essay “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” which explores the truthfulness of photographs. I’ve never questioned the truthfulness of Evans’ photographs or that they are purely documentary. In fact, a common criticism of Evans’ work is that it’s too clinical. However, in reading James R. Mellow’s biography Walker Evans, I came across some information about Evans’ approach to his subjects that made me uncomfortable. Walker Evans sometimes went to elaborate lengths to conceal his photographic intent.

For his New York City subway series, Evans used a concealed camera strapped on under his overcoat with the lens poking out between the front buttons and a cable release threaded down the sleeve to trip the shutter. He was also fond of using an angled viewfinder which enabled him to photograph someone who was standing on the periphery. While it appeared to onlookers that Evans was photographing something in front of him, he was actually shooting in a different direction off to the side. To further his ruse, he often had a companion pretend to pose in front of the camera for the picture he wasn’t taking. I’m not quite sure why this bothers me since it ostensibly allowed him to document what was happening without altering or interfering with the scene – which is the key element of true documentary photography. As Gefter wrote, “As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed.”

I’m beginning to question whether Evans’ camera actually did alter the scene. It’s the eyes of his subjects that unsettle me – their curiosity, the questioning stares. Were these people standing on the sidelines? Were they caught up in watching him at work, not realizing they were his subjects? Did the presence of the camera attract their attention, creating an odd twist to the observer vs. the observed?

In the summer of 1935, Evans spent several months photographing in West Virginia and Pennsylvania when he was one of the photographers working on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project under Roy Stryker. Poet Maggie Anderson’s family was from Rowlesburg, WV, which is one of the towns Evans photographed. Anderson wrote a series of poems about Walker Evans and his West Virginia photographs, included in her 1986 poetry collection, Cold Comfort, which was published fifty years after Evans’ photographs.

Maggie Anderson was born in New York City where her parents worked as teachers, and every summer they traveled to West Virginia – home. In a wonderful interview with Kate Long for the radio series “In Their Own Country,” Anderson described these trips to West Virginia and how she felt freer in Rowlesburg where there were more outdoor places for a child to play than in New York City, and where she was surrounded by cousins and extended family. In response to a question in Kate Long’s interview about whether she “has it in for Walker Evans,” Anderson said, “I guess I sort of do have it in for him” but later goes on to say “he’s a wonderful photographer.” Maggie explained that there was something about Evans’ stance that made her feel protective of the people he photographed, and that Evans “couldn’t know them the way I did.” She emphasized that she wasn’t saying he didn’t have a right to make the photographs – just that he couldn’t possibly see or know those people as she does.

When asked if she’d like to look at and discuss some photographs for this blog article, Maggie respectfully declined, saying she preferred to let the poems speak for themselves and that she feels she’s said all she has to say about Evans’ photographs. I can certainly understand wanting to let the work speak for itself. They are strong and beautiful poems, the language as visual as any photograph, so that readers form their own idea of how the photograph looks.

My own feelings are somewhat mixed since I’ve stood on both sides of the camera, and for all I know I’ve been captured standing off to the side unaware as well. I understand a photographer wanting to document what he or she sees, and there could be an argument made that the angled viewfinder allowed Evans to make a purely documentary image. I see nothing wrong with shooting from the hip in a public place. It’s the elaborate subterfuge Evans employed that bothers me, and I’m not sure that the resulting images weren’t influenced by the presence of the camera in a different way. In some cases it may be that the intent and curious expressions on the faces of his subjects are because they are watching the photographer with interest, thinking they are watching him take a photograph of someone or something else.

If the people and places Evans had photographed were of my own family and home, I would feel protective of them too. But, there’s just enough distance for me to appreciate Evans’ photographs because they are of another place, of other people – even though those people are very much like the people and place where I come from. Distance equals comfort. And Evans pierced the comfort zone of the people in the West Virginia towns of Rowlesburg, Terra Alta, Morgantown, and Reedsville.

For me, it’s an interesting juxtaposition of work by two artists I admire. Walker Evans’ photographs show the outer experience, a limitation of the photographic art form by its nature. Maggie Anderson’s poetry peels back the exterior to reveal the emotional interior of personal territory in a way that language does best. While I still regard Evans’ photographs with great admiration, Anderson’s poetry alters the distance with which I now view them.

Photo Credits:

Top: “Main Street, Morgantown, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34376.

Bottom: “Independence Day, Terra Alta, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF3301-009002-M1.

Appalachian Images: Tim Barnwell (part 2), “In the Garden”

(click on photos to enlarge)

I’ve been thinking lately about how Appalachia is shown and perceived. The Appalachian Mountains cover a large geographic area, but typically people tend to think of southern Appalachia when hearing that word. One of the things I’ve been grappling with is the limits and boundaries that define documentary photography. I expected to be able to see a distinctly drawn line, but instead I detect smudges and gaps. Sometimes the problem seems to be rooted in how a particular photographer self-labels his or her work, claiming it is documentary when in fact they have altered or manipulated the scene to some extent. A wonderful essay, “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” by Philip Gefter, on the New York Times blog “Lens” a few weeks ago explored this difference and used some very famous photographs as examples.

There was never any doubt for me that Tim Barnwell’s fine art photographs in his book On Earth’s Furrowed Brow are the work of a documentarian. In the introduction Barnwell writes, “As I have traveled back roads in search of photographs, I have tried to avoid romanticizing this older way of life.” He states that his intent was to show traditional farm life “and its intersection with modern life.”

In my last post I wrote of how Barnwell’s series of “Sunday” photographs resonated with me. Another of the visual threads in his book that I strongly connected with was that of gardens. His photographs cued up memory images of the gardens I grew up with – the garden in the backyard at my grandparents’ home, and the one in the backyard of my childhood home which my dad planted.

My grandfather’s entire backyard garden was filled with zinnias, except for a narrow strip along the edge of the yard where he grew a few peppers and squash. After he no longer had my grandmother there to garden with, big harvests of sweet corn and beans and potatoes seemed not to interest him. He was more content with growing the long-blooming and colorful zinnias, which he placed on her grave every Sunday after church in summer.

My dad planted a vegetable garden each year right up until he died. He had grown up on a farm and although he’d spent forty years working in a factory, he was always a farmer at heart. He planted sweet corn, pumpkins, beans, potatoes, and tomatoes in his garden, which was located at the back edge of our property adjacent to a wooded ridge on Jacks Mountain. Each year he tried a few new things, such as watermelon and cantaloupe.

My younger brothers and I had chores associated with the garden. We helped with the cultivating and the watering, but our real job was the picking. Mom spent every August canning, the kitchen steamy and sweltering for weeks at a time. Canning jars filled the kitchen table and countertops during that process. My brothers and I spent hours and hours snapping green beans to help her prepare them for canning, and my youngest brother still complains about having to pick all those green beans.

My dad’s garden tools looked much like the ones in Barnwell’s photograph of Gladson Cutschall preparing his garden. Dad took meticulous care of his tools, and I have as many memory images of him carefully cleaning his tools after use before putting them away as I do of him toiling in his garden. Some of those tools had been handed down to him by his father, and now they belong to my brothers.

Saturdays were Dad’s gardening days, and he started in the early morning before the heat. In the evening he’d return to the garden to water it, and we all helped carry water, toting it in buckets and five-gallon watering cans. I can still feel how the soft lawn felt under my feet, hear the crunch of driveway gravel as I crossed it after filling pails at the outside spigot, feel the rise of the earth on the gentle slope up to the garden as the weight of those watering cans made my arms ache, and hear the dogs barking with excitement at the activity. The reward for all that work was the harvest, measured by jars of canned vegetables in rows on the shelves in the basement and the bin filled with potatoes to see us through the winter.

Tim Barnwell turns a compassionate eye on Appalachia. It’s his home. He’s artfully documenting what he sees, and it’s clear that he loves and respects the land and people there. His images of the farms and people of the mountains of North Carolina capture the same activities I witnessed in my own rural upbringing on Jacks Mountain in central Pennsylvania. Even though I’ve lived in the city for decades now, I still miss the rhythm of the planting and harvest seasons, and each time I visit back home I pay particular attention to the crops in the fields and what’s growing in people’s gardens. I don’t have any photographs of my own father working in his garden, but Tim Barnwell’s photograph of Gladson Cutshall preparing his garden for planting is almost close enough.

Photo credits:

All photographs copyright © by Tim Barnwell, used by permission.

Top: Bertha Marler shelling beans, 1983. Marshall, Madison County, NC. Copyright © Tim Barnwell, used by permission

Bottom: Gladson Cutshall, preparing garden, 1983. Shelton Laurel, Madison County, NC. Copyright © Tim Barnwell, used by permission.