128: Tim Cresswell's On the Move

In On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, Tim Cresswell explores mobility - which he defines as "meaningful movement" - at a variety of scales and in a variety of places in the (mostly anglophone) West.  Pulling from case studies that range from Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies to British ballroom dancing to the LA Bus Riders' Union, Cresswell argues that mobility is "both center and margin - the lifeblood of modernity and the virus that threatens to hasten its downfall."  While the "mobility turn" had been taking the humanities by storm since 1996, this book is the first to interrogate what mobility is rather than defining it against what it isn't (place, boundedness, foundations, stability.)

For Cresswell, mobility is actually three mobilities that mutually constitute one another.

• Empirical mobility is the actual movement of people, things, birds, etc.; it is the closest to actual movement and thus the most abstract (because it traces displacement, not necessarily the meaning of displacement.)  
• Representations of mobility are the photos, literature, philosophy, etc., that capture mobility and try to make sense of it, usually in ways that are ideological.  They might link mobility to freedom, transgression, creativity, life and so on.  They reproduce mobility and interpret it according to a particular worldview.
• Experienced mobilities are mobilities that are practiced, embodied, ways of being in the world, as well as how we experience and feel about mobility.

Mobility is both subjective and objective, and the perspective from which we experience/ study mobility has a lot to do with how we interpret it.  Because mobility is both subjective and objective, it is also both socially constructed and universal, in the sense that everything moves, and the interplay between this universal fact of life and a particular movement within a particular context gives that movement meaning.  Mobility is thus a "necessary social production," and a way of inextricably integrating geography with the politics of social life.

Cresswell's writing style is wonderfully clear and engaging, and his many case studies, as well as his brief history of the development of mobility into an individual right in the modern capitalist state, cover mobility at a variety of scales ranging from the individual to the workplace to nation, empire, and the placeless place of the Shiphol Airport.  The only thing missing, maybe, is a study of imperial movement from the perspective of the colonized, with some attention to the relationship between labor migration and uneven development.

107: Agee & Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In July and August 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans were working on an article for a New York magazine in which they were to create a "photographic and verbal record" of "cotton tenantry in the United States."  In particular, they were to write about "the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers."  As it turned out, finding a "representative" sample of white tenant farmers proved difficult, but they found a group of three families and lived with them for less than four weeks, with Agee creating a written record and Evans taking photographs.  The article was not published, and the book went through multiple publishers before finally coming out in 1939.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, as Bill Stott argues, a beautifully-made 1930s documentary; Evans' photos have long since become iconic, and Agee's prose claims the entire beat generation as its descendants.  Agee is also careful to situate himself and Evans as characters within the story of the tenant farmers' lives, so that the reader is clear throughout that the book combines objective reality and normative interpretation.  The main argument of the book is encapsulated in the verse that serves as its title: "let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us."  The tension here is important: while the famous men lead us in creating history and are thus written down and remembered in history books, they are also responsible for the poverty in which his subjects live; while our fathers' names are never known to the world, they are arguably more important, because without fathers there would be no children, no next generation to pass history down to.  Thus he celebrates the particularity of the human life of his subjects even as he critiques the universal structures that create it.

96: Bill Stott's Documentary Expression

In Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Bill Stott looks at 1930s America through the lens of the documentary genre.  Documentary is a form of expression that purports to represent reality but in which it is difficult for viewers to separate the false from the true.  Stott argues that at its base, the 1930s documentary had a left politics, a desire to look not just at the world as it is but at the world of the poor, the downtrodden, and the ordinary, with the intention not just of rendering it vivid and lifelike but also of constructing an audience response or instigating some progressive reform.  The different ways people created and used documentaries in the 1930s indicate, to paraphrase Agee, that the world can be improved and yet must be celebrated.

Stott considers a wide range of documentary forms and uses, and shows how documentary conventions were both developed and subverted.  Radio, examined through Edward R. Murrow, soap operas, and War of the Worlds, was the "paradigmatic medium of documentary" in the 1930s because it combined the two methods of documentary, "the direct and the vicarious, the unmediated experience and the interpretative commentary" in constant juxtaposition with one another.  Photography and documentary films, as Stott shows, were also forms in which apparent reality was actually heavily mediated, particularly when they were made by the government.  By contrast, Agee and Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explodes social documentary by both critiquing the world of the tenant farmers and celebrating it in all its beauty, all well being self-conscious about the role of the narrator in the creation of a work of art that reveals the most intimate details and suffering in people's lives in order to, perhaps, instigate social reform.

While Stott's analysis is somewhat limited by his choice of documentaries - he works primarily with cultural products created by people who worked for the federal government or for private corporations - and while he could do a bit more with the conditions of production, his visual and textual analysis are strong, and his discussion of documentary as a particularly valid entry into American culture in the 1930s makes sense.  What better way to see what people might have thought about what their world was like?

87: Steve Hoelscher's Picturing Indians

Steve Hoelscher's Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H.H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells argues that Bennett's photography turned the Ho-Chunk people of the Wisconsin Dells into objects of the "camera's colonizing gaze," but that the Ho-Chunk also subverted Bennett's exploitation of them.  Bennett's photographs can thus be read as negotiations of power, where visual images both represent and shape the material world.

Photographs of Native Americans exploded at the turn of the last century due to the rise of commercial photography, mass tourism, and the final conquest and colonization of Native Americans.  While the most famous photographer of Native Americans was Edward Curtis, who wanted to record a vanishing way of life, H.H. Bennett had the far less noble goal of profiting by selling images of Ho-Chunk people to white tourists visiting the Wisconsin Dells.  Yet while Bennett worked to stage photos that communicated white nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, his Ho-Chunk models actively worked to resist becoming tourist objects: they wore certain items, posed in certain ways, and used the money Bennett gave them for their own economic and cultural survival.  And in real life, the Ho-Chunk have managed not just to survive but to retain and buy back their homelands in a very real repudiation of American cultural and political imperialism.

Throughout, Hoelscher works from a wide range of primary sources, including five years of interactions with Ho-Chunk people and close connections with Tom Jones, a contemporary Ho-Chunk photographer.  He is careful to contextualize Bennett's photography in the cultural, political, and economic milieu in which it was created, and to balance Ho-Chunk and white perspectives.  The result is a profoundly interconnected relationship between Native and white cultures that uses Bennett's tourist photos as a nodal point.