Some books stay with you long after you’ve finished the last page. Michelle Richmond’s novel The Year of Fog, which I wrote about as one of my earliest blog posts here, is one of those books for me. I read it in 2009, two years after it was first published in 2007. Today the book is still going strong and was chosen as the 2011 selection for Silicon Valley Reads.
The working title for Richmond’s novel was “Ocean Beach” and it is often the imagery of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, The Great Highway, and the Sutro Bath ruins that I connect with the characters of Abby and Emma. These were settings for important scenes in the book. They were also favorite spots of mine to explore when I lived in San Francisco, and they are places that tend to show up in my own fiction writing.
"Great Highway Parking at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, 1981" Copyright by Kevin Scanlon, used by permission
Recently Richmond made the original ending, which she’d cut in the final manuscript edits, available as a download for e-readers as “Day 49: The Missing Final Chapter of The Year of Fog.” I want to be careful not to unintentionally reveal too much for those who have not yet read the book, so I’ll just say this: For readers, this is a unique opportunity to find out additional information about what happened to the characters; for writers, it’s an object lesson in editing.
Luckily for those of us who live far beyond the Bay Area, Michelle Richmond’s appearance earlier this month at the Morgan Hill Public Library was videotaped. Click on the video below for Richmond’s talk about the writing process, about research and editing, and about memory as a narrative device.
For a list of Richmond’s appearances at upcoming Silicon Valley Reads events forThe Year of Fog, click here.
Around the Blogosphere:
Check out Kevin Scanlon’s photography and short essay “Mountain State Stories – Satori” in the most recent edition of The Photographers’ Railroad Page. This is the first feature in an occasional new series titled “Mountain State Stories.” In a recent message to RPP subscribers, Scanlon wrote, “I am pleased to announce that The Photographers’ Railroad Page will be under the direction of a new editor, Kevin N. Tomasic. Kevin will be soliciting and choosing new features for the site as well as making decisions on its general direction. The site will still be hosted by Lightsource Photo Imaging.”
At Photography in Placeearlier this month, Edd Fuller ran several interesting posts on Edwards, Mississippi and photographer Walker Evans.
I have a longtime fascination with old signs and am drawn to them as photographic subjects. Odd juxtapositions also interest me – in writing, in imagery, and in life in general.
This penchant of mine may be rooted in a scene I saw daily while growing up, the view from the front porch of my childhood home. Across the two-lane highway from our house was the neighbor’s barn. The east side of the barn was covered with two painted signs. At the top was a sign with a painted cross and scripture warning: “Christ is coming soon. Are you ready?” Below it a tobacco sign urged: “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco. Treat yourself to the best.” Drivers traveling west of Route 22 often stopped to take a photograph. It took me years to understand that it wasn’t the bucolic scene, but rather the incongruity of the signs that attracted their interest.
The old farmer who owned it wasn’t getting paid for the advertising space, but instead got his barn painted by the tobacco company for free. I don’t know who sponsored the religious sign, but over the years the Mail Pouch advertisement faded while the scripture and cross were repainted again and again. The signs on that barn may have been the topic of more than one Sunday morning sermon among the local churches.
Billboards have changed over the decades, but they still try to sell the American dream to passersby. Trademarks and logos have become part of the landscape and language. Burma Shave signs and slogans may be relics of the past, but Coca-Cola thrives on youthful rejuvenation and digitized billboards.
Liberty Theater, New Orleans, Louisiana by Walker Evans
I only recently connected my interest in signage to Walker Evans’ photographs, noticing Evans had a fondness for photographing advertisements and that Coca-Cola signs recur in his images. Evans used signs within his photographs to show the division of classes – the American dream beyond the reach of those who could barely feed their families in the dire economic times of the Great Depression. He juxtaposed advertisements for Hollywood movies and luxury travel with the poverty and struggle of people who had no hope of escape.
I cannot think of billboards and the American dream without remembering the image of the optometrist’s billboard in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Key scenes are played out under the spectacled eyes advertising the optometry services of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The Great Gatsby is about the American dream, about the pursuit of wealth, and about social strata. The reminiscent narrator, Nick Carraway, is an observer, an outsider, a distant cousin from the Midwest who is trying to make sense of the New York world and of the events that happened in the story he is relating.
It’s a timeless story, one of ruthless people living large on money that is inherited or made through get rich quick schemes. It has particular resonance today in light of Ponzi schemes and Bernie Madoff bilking his clients out of their life savings, or in simply watching our 401Ks tank along with the dream of retirement. No doubt the signs are always there for us. Unfortunately we can’t always see them until they are behind us and we’ve traveled far down the road.
Roanoke, Virginia
News and Updates:
Thanks to writer Cynthia Newberry Martin for the shout out on her blogCatching Days about my posts on abandoned things. Cynthia has been a regular reader and frequent commenter at In This Light, and I’m grateful for her ongoing support and enthusiasm for what I’m doing here.
Photograph credits:
“Painted Signs, Grafton, West Virginia” copyright 2008 by Dory Adams
“Movie Theater on Saint Charles Street. Liberty Theater, New Orleans, Louisiana” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF342-T01-001285-A.
“Mixed Signs, Roanoke, Virginia” copyright 2008 by Dory Adams
The idea for this blog began with a certain synchronicity of life events last spring and began to jell as I read several novels which used photographs as story details and photographers as characters. One of those novels was Dani Shapiro’sBlack & White. Shapiro crafts a story about the relationship between a mother and her daughter – the mother, Ruth Dunne, a photographer whose fame is based on a series of photographs she’d done of her then prepubescent daughter, Clara. It’s a story about identity, where the boundaries between the roles of being a mother and an artist are blurred, and about the effects of those photographs on the daughter who struggles to maintain her own identity separate from her role as a model for her mother’s fine art photographs. The novel opens as Clara, now an adult living in Maine with her husband and their young teenage daughter, learns that her mother, who she has not seen in fourteen years, is gravely ill. Clara reluctantly goes back to her childhood home in New York City to see Ruth Dunne.
The narrative explores the function of memory in a very engaging way, the voice lending a current of authority just below the surface of the story. I’m fascinated by how photographs, particularly those frozen glances back through time which end up preserved between the pages of family photo albums, become incorporated into memory – when the facts of those images can be as unreliable as memory itself. For instance, do we remember the event or do we remember the photographs of the event that we grew up looking at in the family album? Those images begin to take on a history and story of their own. In Black & White, Shapiro writes: “Impossible to isolate a memory: to carve it out and separate it from what has come before or after, from what has been told and retold. Stories turn what we remember into a series of polished little gems.”
It was impossible for me to read Black & White without thinking of the photographs of real life photographer Sally Mann, who did a series of images of her three children in the 1980s. The photographs were exhibited and then published in 1992 as Immediate Family. Mann’s work was controversial and drew harsh criticism from those who believed she was exploiting her children. Her work made people uncomfortable, particularly the sexuality of the nudes.
I contacted Shapiro to ask her if the photographs in Mann’s Immediate Family had an influence on her in writing Black and White. She responded: “I was very much influenced, when thinking about the novel, by the work of Sally Mann and by my different responses to her work over the years, especially after I became a mother.”
This response intrigued me since my own reaction to Mann’s photographs is very mixed. The images are technically gorgeous, the subject matter often provocative, and her photographic eye bold. But many of the images of the children are disturbing: surreal yet earthy, feral, intimate, suggestive but not pornographic – although some of the images come uncomfortably close to that edge.
I asked Dani about what ways her own responses to Mann’s work changed and how being a mother affected the way she viewed Mann’s photographs. She responded: “I first encountered Sally Mann’s photographs when I was in my twenties. I was very taken with her work 'Immediate Family.' I found it evocative, provocative, quite stirring. In fact, I very much wanted to own a photograph of hers, but couldn’t afford one. The images stayed with me, and though I saw other work of Mann’s over the years, I found 'Immediate family' to be her strongest. Then I encountered the photographs again, in my late thirties, as the mother of a young child. And though the images had the same impact on me as they always had, there was an additional, somewhat uncomfortable layer to my response. I realized I was asking the question: how were these pictures taken? It occurred to me, as it never had before, that the photographs were posed, staged, lit. I wanted to know how it had happened. How the mother, Mann, had asked her children to pose. So I answered those questions the only way I could – by writing a novel and imagining those scenes myself.”
In Mann’s work, there seems to be an undertone of defiance not only in the subjects, but also in the photographer. In the later photographs of the “Immediate Family” series which was done over several years, the children are at the edge of innocence, at the edge of childhood, seeming to play at the role of pretending – pretending to play dress-up, playing at innocence. These are not spontaneous or candid shots, but are set up and posed in exactly the right light. The images were shot with a large format camera, an 8 x 10 view camera, which involves a slow and tedious shooting process that requires a lot of set-up time to arrange and compose the subject in the frame. This is the type of camera which must be set up on a tripod and where the photographer looks at the image in the ground glass on the back of the camera under a dark cloth. Because exposure times can be long, subjects must remain very still to hold a pose for the camera, which means the children were full participants in making the photographs.
Dani Shapiro had been a child model herself, and she has written about this experience in her own nonfiction books and in articles such as the essay “Frame by Frame” for Vogue (June 2007). I asked Dani if that had an effect on how she viewed Mann’s work. She answered: “I’m not sure that being a child model affected the way I viewed Mann’s work, because really my modeling career – such as it was – was incredibly tame. I was the baby in the Beechnut Baby Food commercials, which of course I don’t remember. When I was three, I was the little girl on the Kodak Christmas poster, and I do remember the feeling that it was somehow important. I had some awareness that my picture was being taken and it was a big deal. Honestly, I never once consciously thought of that time while I was writing Black & White, though that doesn’t mean it didn’t have an impact.”
In the introduction to Immediate Family, Sally Mann writes: “These are photographs of my children. . . Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or angry. They dress up and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river.”
Hearing Mann talk about her photographs and seeing her at work, as shown in the documentary film “What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann,” is more interesting to me than viewing the actual photographs. What she says about her work adds a layer of understanding that allows me to look at them in a different way. Watching the film, I finally understood that she uses her camera to find answers to her questions (particularly her later work which explores death), in the same way that writers use words and narrative to find answers by crafting stories around their questions.
In Black & White, Shapiro explores questions about the impact of an artist’s work on family members, creates fictional characters that are believable and behave in compelling ways, and describes photographic images that read as real. The novel’s epigraph, which also serves as a fitting close for this post, quotes photographer Walker Evans: “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
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.
I just finished reading Walker Evans, a biography of the photographer by James R. Mellow. I’ve always admired Evans’ photographs, but hadn’t known that he’d first wanted to become a writer and had tried writing short stories before turning his passion to photography. Evans believed in the photograph as story, and Mellow quotes him as saying, “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”
Evans had a way of selecting and including details that told the viewer much within a single image. Some of his most famous images did not include people, but rather the objects they possessed. At first glance those images appear to be only of vacant rooms, but as your eye scans the frame much is revealed about the people who live there. Mellow observes that, “his photographs appear to be taken with a novelist’s eye” and the objects Evans chose to show us “define character and circumstances, time and place.”
While Evans supported himself with commercial work, most notably on staff at Fortune magazine, most of his work was documentary in style. He spent several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s photographing around the United States, particularly in Appalachia and the South, as one of the photographers working on a project supervised by Roy Stryker for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He also worked with writer James Agee on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study of sharecropper families in the South.
I cannot look at Evans’ photographs of the tenant farmer families without thinking of my own paternal grandfather who lost his farm during the Great Depression. My grandfather was able to move his family to a farm in central Pennsylvania, where he worked the rest of his life as a tenant farmer for a landowner who operated several farms. My dad and his siblings spent most of their youth working on that farm, but in circumstances far better than that of the sharecropper families in Evans and Agee’s book. What strikes me about the portraits of the tenant farmers in Evans’ photographs is their stoic dignity in the face of tremendous hardship. Agee described Evans’ photographs as “the cruel radiance of what is.”
Evans and Agee considered their work to be an equal collaboration, with neither the words nor the images holding importance over the other. Mellow described this collaboration as a “dialogue” between the words and images. In the preface to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee wrote: “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.”
Evans described his work as an attempt to capture “the American vernacular.” Recurring themes in his photographs include small towns and main streets, farms and farming families, steel mills, graveyards, and signs. In New York City, where he resided, he photographed urban street scenes and did a series on subway riders. “The American vernacular” seems to best describe this body of work, the phrase implying a melding of image and words. Evans photographs speak to us, and they tell us about ourselves.
Photograph credit: “Washstand in the dog run and kitchen of Floyd Burroughs’ cabin. Hale County, Alabama” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF342-008133.
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Updates and News
A big thank you to Diana Nelson Jones of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for showcasing last week’s “Hillside Houses” as a guest post titled “Unexpected Beauty” on her City Walkabout blog at the Post-Gazette online. I’ve added City Walkabout to my list of favorite blogs and websites on the sidebar at the right of the screen. Check it out.
Readers have been asking that I open the comments section, so I’m going to give that a try to see how it goes (since comments will be moderated, there will most likely be a delay before your comment can be posted). For those who want to contact me privately, there is an e-mail address on the sidebar where I can be reached.
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NOTE: There have been some technical difficulties with opening up the comments feature today. Hopefully this feature will be in operation soon.
"Arrange what pieces come your way." ~ Virginia Woolf
About This Blog:
In This Light is a blog about the influence of images on writers and writing. Think of it as a place where imagery joins narrative, to see how things look through the light of words.
I live and write in Pittsburgh, PA and have a diverse background with degrees in photography and psychology, as well as an MFA in writing from Vermont College. I prefer to think of this as the winding path toward writing -- a journey where interests in image and human behavior converged as story.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Connotation Press, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, The Avery Anthology, Hamilton Stone Review, Blue Earth Review, Hobart, Slipstream, Forge, Word Riot, The Oklahoma Review, Common Ground Magazine, Shalla Magazine, and Paper Street. My story "Tests and Measurements" which appeared in Workers Write! Tales from the Clinic was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009.
“The Great Highway at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, 1980”
"Great Highway Parking at Ocean Beach, San Francisco, 1981"
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