Focus on the 'Forgotten' Man
CAPLAN, LINCOLN
Focus on the 'Forgotten' Man The Middle Americans By Robert Coles Photographs by Jon Erikson Atlantic Monthly Press. 182 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by Lincoln Caplan RESEARCH FOR The Middle Americans...
...It is therefore largely through an accident of timing that psychiatrist Robert Coles and photographer Jon Erikson have come out with a neatly packaged volume to inform the U.S...
...The joint effort would have been more integrated had Erikson concentrated on the lives of only a few (perhaps even the same) families as did Coles, enabling us to see them in a broader range of moods and to feel that we really know them as people...
...The commentary Coles appends to his interviews with working people reveals the same careful perception and gentle sensibility that marked his earlier works...
...Influenced by the methods of his friend, the late anthropologist Oscar Lewis, he finally pulls back slightly from his subjects to analyze and generalize about their lives...
...The ethos Erikson portrays is similar to the one Coles describes, but the photographs occasionally seem unrelated to the text...
...Coles met Jon Erikson when he was compiling his extensive study of the photographer's father, psychologist Erik Erikson, published last year...
...While Cole exhibits a willingness to understand the experience of working people as they perceive and interpret their own lives, Erikson seems to photograph situations that substantiate preconceived notions of blue-collar life...
...Having neither a precise outline nor a publishing date in mind, Coles initiated friendships with a number of working-class families in the Boston area...
...reading public, distant from itself, about the American mainstream just as the '72 campaign is getting underway amid cries of a new populism...
...His hope was to establish the kind of rapport with each family that would result in their trusting him and themselves enough to speak openly for his tape recorder...
...Choosing a basic wide-angle tele-photo lens for his 35-mm...
...He thus often succeeded in capturing splendid and delicate moments...
...The two men were immediately drawn to each other, and Coles later asked Erikson to contribute a photoessay for The Middle Americans...
...His psychiatric training, too, prevents him from allowing the people of Middle America to speak entirely for themselves, as he originally intended...
...Yet, while the details he selects to illustrate the complex strains felt by the American working class do not call for endless qualification, he fails to adequately explain the pride and uncertainty of the poor or working communities who evoked strong liberal empathy in the '30s and '40s but were abandoned to Agnew and George Wallace in '68...
...During an eight-month leave of absence from his job as a theater stagehand, Erikson devoted himself to photographing the life of the working man first along the West Coast and then across the country...
...These interviews ultimately grew into a full-length book...
...But Coles' text betrays his indeci-siveness about the approach he should take as a student of humanity...
...Nonetheless, Erik-son's expansive and exhaustive collection of visual symbols effectively dispels the notion that pictorial material can serve sociologically only as illustration for other data...
...camera, and using versatile high-speed black-and-white film, he concentrated on the content of his pictures rather than their technical form...
...Reviewed by Lincoln Caplan RESEARCH FOR The Middle Americans was begun in 1965, before Richard Nixon and Spiro Ag-new drew our attention to these 130 million "forgotten" citizens and before political analysts identified this enormous and amorphous block of voters...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 17
