New Deal agencies hired some of the country's most talented photographers of the twentieth century to document the lives of rural Americans during the Great Depression and its aftermath. This moving record bears witness to the struggling people in northern New Mexico determined to succeed.
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New Deal agencies hired some of the country’s most talented photographers to document the lives of rural Americans during the Great Depression and its aftermath. This moving record bears witness to the struggling people in northern New Mexico determined to succeed.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Quiet strength and dignity,
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This review is from: Far from Main Street: Three Photographers in Depression-Era New Mexico (Paperback)
The older I get, the more I appreciate what a superb medium photography is for documenting life. There are quite a few qualifications, of course. Documentation, as opposed to "art" or emotional or dramatic effect, needs to be the principal driver. To be sure, it helps if the photograph is aesthetically pleasing and/or if it stirs the viewer's emotions, but documentary integrity needs to be foremost. (Yes, ever since Matthew Brady and the Civil War, purportedly documentary photographs have been contrived or altered, but my guess is that much more written "documentary" journalism has been fudged than photographic.) Also, at least for me, black-and-white photographs somehow are more sober, more objective, more realistic or true than color photographs.All that is as a preface for explaining why I appreciate this book, as well as many others of its ilk. FAR FROM MAIN STREET contains about 140 black-and-white photographs of life in New Mexico from the early 1940s. They are the work of three photographers sent to New Mexico by either the Farm Security Administration or the Office of War Information. The photographers were Russell Lee, John Collier, Jr., and Jack Delano. All three were professionals, as is reflected in their photographs. As with the one other reviewer of this book, I was particularly impressed with the work of John Collier, Jr., with whom I previously was not familiar. By and large these pictures are of the prosaic. There is little abject poverty, but neither is there any wealth and glamour. There is, however, plenty of quiet strength and dignity in the people. The subjects of the pictures include an all-day community sing in Pie Town, the railroad locomotive maintenance facilities in Albuquerque, one-room schools, country stores, church services, wash draped on a barbed-wire fence to dry, and the great cover photograph of a Norteno and his son seated at a table sorting beans for the morning meal. FAR FROM MAIN STREET is above the norm for collections of this sort, both with regard to the quality of the photographs themselves, from the standpoint of such things as composition and lighting, and the quality of the reproductions and paper stock used for the book -- which, I guess, is as it should be given the $27.50 price tag. If you are drawn to these sorts of collections of documentary photographs (and can afford it), I recommend FAR FROM MAIN STREET. That recommendation is a tad stronger for those who live in or are from New Mexico.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-have book of the Depression Era, 1930s and 40s,
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This review is from: Far from Main Street: Three Photographers in Depression-Era New Mexico (Paperback)
I purchased this book looking for photographs by John Collier, Jr., and found Russell Lee and Jack Delano, too. I absolutely must have more of their work and will continue to look. Looking back, it seems that in the 1960s, journalism photography was defined by action-packed scenes from the Vietnam War, but these photos of the 1930s and '40s are more a document of how people lived in these adobe villages of New Mexico, particularly around Taos, (but also the trainyards of Albuquerque, and Anglo villages like Pie Town). I had sought out Collier's photos because of their still-life art quality--and found more. All these photos are quiet; they are haunted, somber, and play in the imagination long after the book is placed back on the shelf. These photos are like objects of contemplation, meditations on a vanished way of life preserved forever on film, the faces of women and men, boys and girls captured for posterity.Truly, I believe that the people in these photos were not poor--as we think of the Depression; they were rich in culture and family connection, rootedness to their villages. My favorite Collier photo is "Congregation leaving the church after mass, Trampas, New Mexico, 1943." The women are in their Sunday best clothing ("American" style), vulnerable to the wind and snow, but faithful to their customs and way of life, while the buildings all around are "quaint" adobe. The haunted quality of these b & w photos is similar to that of Ansel Adams's, "Moonrise, Hernandez, 1941"--depicting a Hispano village about to change forever because of World War II and the out-migration of villagers. Thank you forever to everyone involved with preserving these photos; soulful gratitude to the long-gone photographers.
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