147: Terry Smith's Making the Modern

Terry Smith is an art historian, and Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America is a study of the relationship between the visual imagery of the 1920s and 1930s and the era's cultural, economic, and industrial configurations.  Far from focusing on high modern art and design, Smith studies modern architecture, painting, photography, design, advertising as gleaned from sources as varied as Ford Motor Company photos of plants and work processes, architectural plans for office buildings, and documentation of the 1939 World's Fair in New York.  Methodologically, Smith deconstructs each work or artifact via a rigorous investigation of its historical setting for signs that the work documents conflict or social change.  Working across disciplinary boundaries, the book draws together a "visual regime" or "ensemble of processes of visualization and representation" of modernity, where visual representation and sociocultural processes work together to create a uniquely modern worldview called the "iconology of modernity."

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

After days of pounding through historians, sociologists, and geographers, poring over the iconic images and arresting prose of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men makes me feel alive again.  (Hey, I was an English major for a reason!) 

Nominally, James Agee and Walker Evans' book is a study of three (white) sharecropping families in rural Alabama in summer 1936, the Ricketts, the Gudgers, and the Woods.  But as James Agee argues in the book's opening pages, it is much, much more than that.  It is a full, thorough, truthful account of their subjects in both narrative and photographic form; a conversation, albeit limited by the asynchronous nature of their chosen medium, among the families, the writer and photographer, and the reader; an indictment of the capitalist system that abuses those lowest in its hierarchy; a study of the humanity of the poor; and - let's be honest - a way to make a little money for Agee and Evans, too.

Both photos and narrative touch on all of these themes in depth, but the most central one, I think, is the humanity - both unique to them and common to all people - of the tenant families themselves.  And, possibly because they lived with George and Annie Mae Gudger for the four weeks of their study, or because this couple was closest to their own age but occupying such a different part of the socioeconomic hierarchy, both Agee and Evans express this theme best with respect to George Gudger.

Since Evans' image of Gudger comes first in the book, he gets to speak first here.

I'm not the best at reading images, but I will say this: from the distance of nearly 80 years, this image is very much the image of the depression: the gritty black-and-white exposure, the half-clean shirt and overalls, the rough background, the eyes looking directly into the camera in a mixture of strength, frustration, and despair.  It is the stuff that American ideology is made of: the depression may have beaten America down, but the people are determined, and we will win!  But there are so many different emotions playing out at once in Gudger's face, and the tight framing of the photo accentuates not the poverty of his surroundings, but him: in creating this portrait, Evans has allowed a single man to express the way he feels about how his life is turning out, and simultaneously created something that speaks to many, many people who've been there.

Agee, no less poetic, describes Gudger in this way:


George Gudger is a human being, a man, not like any other human being so much as he is like himself…. [S]omehow a much more important, and dignified, and true fact about him than I could conceivably invent, though I were an illimitably better artist than I am, is that fact that he is exactly, down to the last inch and instant, who, what, were, when and why he is.  He is in those terms living, right now, in flesh and blood and breathing, in an actual part of a world in which also, quite as irrelevant to imagination, you and I are living.  Granted that beside that fact it is a small thing, and granted also that it is essentially and finally a hopeless one, to try merely to reproduce and communicate his living as nearly exactly as possible, nevertheless I can think of no worthier and many worse subjects of attempt. 

Like Evans, Agee describes Gudger as both a "human being, a man" and "himself;" he belongs simultaneously to his own day to day life and to the world of "you and I;" he is at once irreplicable and reproducible.

This theme, by the way, ties in nicely with the title of the book; the second half of the verse that begins "let us now praise famous men," which Agee intentionally leaves out, only to append at the end, is "and our fathers that begat us" - irreplicable but reproducible men in their own right.

12: Stephen Daniels' Fields of Vision

Fields of Vision is a book about the relationship between landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States. This is not exactly a topic that excites me, though to his credit, Daniels does manage to make a bunch of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings a lot more interesting than I thought they were.  He also (thankfully) goes beyond painting to include a landscape architect, a printmaker, and a building.  And his theoretical argument, that over time, certain landscape imagery can become a repository for so many different people's interpretations of national identity that it becomes a symbol for the nation - well, that sounds cultural studies-y enough for me.

Daniels' first example, St. Paul's Cathedral, made the most sense to me.  After the Great Fire in 1666 destroyed an older cathedral, London commissioned Christopher Wren to design and build a new one.  Legend has it that when Wren was to place the first stone for the new cathedral in 1675, the laborer they sent out to find a stone came back with a piece of gravestone that was inscribed with a single word: RESURGAM, "I rise again."  This same word was written above the South transept of the rapidly-built new Cathedral along with a phoenix; in a mere 35 years, London, Christlike, had risen from the ashes in the form of St. Paul's.

Over the centuries, St. Paul's took on a variety of uses and meanings.  In 1789, the King went in State to St Paul's for a Thanksgiving service - the first official royal visit in 75 years - and the Cathedral and its surroundings were a blaze of lights; St. Paul's had been transformed into a symbol of monarchical power and English strength and solidarity in the wake of the French Revolution.  And throughout the 19th-century, as the British empire grew, panoramas from (and of) the Cathedral's dome situated it at the center of London and at the center of empire; it became a symbol of both British power abroad and Little England at home.

By World War II, St. Paul's was such a treasured symbolic landscape that Churchill ordered it to be saved at all costs; during the Blitz in 1940, while the rest of the Cathedral's neighborhood went up in flames, an Allied Watch of firefighters did indeed save it - they minimized the damage, anyway.  And the most famous image of the Blitz is a photograph published in the Daily Mail, which shows St. Paul's rising, phoenixlike, above the smoke.

Though he couldn't have made the comparison (this book was published in 1993), this beautiful image reminds me of another incredibly powerful landscape image - the photograph of the twin towers right before they fell.  This photograph, like that one, makes a strong case for the relationship between landscape imagery and national identity, both in the heart of the viewer and in the political and cultural ferment that developed in response to it.