THE RUGGED AMERICAN
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art THE RUGGED AMERICAN By Vivien Raynor photography critics have begun to voice doubts about the medium's efficacy as an instrument of social reform-and not a moment too soon either. This may...
...Chico, says Ms...
...Moreover, that a part of society is surviving by its noncriminal wits should be a cause for rejoicing...
...The Colorado trappers, Charles and Marjorie Orlosky, talk informatively about the getting and preparing of food and about their grisly trade: Don't trap foxes late in winter because their hips are bare from sitting in the snow-the fur, having frozen to the snow, pulls out when they get up...
...All the interviews were transcribed from tapes...
...Now Subsistence USA (Holt...
...he does this with so much humor and style, no matter what he says, it seems always to be bordering on both philosophy and entertainment...
...Hill is aware of the problem...
...Godsend that the tape recorder has been to writers, its faithful rendering of natural speech patterns can be less than fascinating to read, at least for any length of time and especially if the speaker is semiliterate...
...No sir...
...and one of the ways he expresses this is how he talks...
...Fitting together a satisfactory variety of specimens was undoubtedly difficult...
...Not only is this fortress still too hard-won, but it has to be held against the image of black-man-as-colorful-criminal...
...For Davidson the job must have been particularly difficult, yet his photos are good in an unusual way...
...What is more interesting about Chico is that, despite his ghetto bluster, he works as a floor waxer 12 hours a night...
...Relieved of the obligation either to feel or arouse outrage, Davidson has avoided the extremes of romanticism...
...Can't do nothin bein alone...
...Such men suffer for their "independence," though not enough to make us feel sorry for them...
...As she and Davidson proceeded with the assignment, she explains, it "came to include principles of survival, originality, wholeness and independence...
...His photographs stimulate thought about the whole concept of work...
...What the book boils down to is a picture story about people who are poor but not on welfare, outside the system but not entirely free of it...
...Hill's notions about vitality and art, possibly because she and her husband-a musician and a man of many other talents-are respectable people...
...Yet Davidson all too willingly complies with the voung man's romantic need, inflamed by the media, to be seen as a street person...
...Take the young man from the "surplus culture" of the hills outside San Francisco, talking about making houses from leftover materials found on building sites: "If you have a lot of the same of something, which is like an industrial spin-off or something, you might find a big pile of something you could use, and there's ways of putting those things together now...
...The problem is not the pictures, which are closer to documentary than to art, or the design by Samuel N. Antupit, which is appropriately plain, even reminiscent of books about the Depression...
...They seldom occupy more than two-thirds of the page-most take up one-half-and at the beginning they are as unobtrusive as the bass and drums behind a soloist...
...So long as pointless research is here to stay, why not inch farther out into society and do an anthropological study of the haves...
...The pictures of California dropouts taking a bath in their tree house is hardly a recruiting poster for the movement, nor is it an indictment...
...Whether the publishers intended to extol the work ethic or not, it is the workers in the book who have something worthwhile to say...
...Considering how many people are trying to get back to the land and lead the "real" life, it is tragic that some of them can't be funneled into sheep herding...
...Gene Thornton effectively removed such work from its hitherto inviolate pedestal, placing it by default in the realm of art-Specifically, social protest art...
...He has too much imagination, feeling, and style to accept any convention...
...Sure, it's cool to be alone when you wanna work out a problem...
...The naturalism that works so well in the photography is less successful in the writing...
...The photographer and the writer both seem to sigh with relief at finding firm liberal ground beneath their feet...
...Inarticulateness, genuine or affected, has become such a cliche that one wonders why she lays it on us here, especially since her own descriptive material is superior to the taped stuff...
...Na's a fool that wanna be alone...
...In a recent New York Times review...
...Bear meat is not all it's cracked up to be in the summer because these animals will depart from their usual diet of fresh food and eat carrion, maggots and all...
...Life looks as chilly and hard for them as it does for the hobo knife-and-scissors-sharpener standing bundled up in a freight car...
...An then, you can't work it out without somebody bein there...
...How strange that the fashion for work clothes-blue jeans and boots-caught on at about the time work itself fell into disrepute and, in some areas, disappeared altogether...
...Hill in her preface, "does not talk or sound like any typical middle-class person...
...The sheep barons, with government assistance, put out poison for coyotes...
...So it is perhaps not surprising that Ms...
...Eventually, it was the subsisters themselves "who showed us what it was...
...Subsistence USA is an altogether perplexing book...
...Hill opens the book with a brief rather than a foreword, in which she struggles to define the title...
...The emotions of the photographer will inevitably edit?or frame-the scene to some extent...
...The most interesting chapters are, naturally, about the people who can do something, notably the two middle-aged married couples who are, respectively, farmers and trappers...
...It is partly the lack of herders, who make only $250-300 a month, that causes the ranchers to resort to poison...
...His shot of man-and-wife farmers in Maine laughingly embracing beside a wheelbarrow full of vegetables could be a family snapshot...
...I'm gonna tell ya, I don't dig bein alone...
...The Orloskys' attitude toward nature is unsentimental and humane in its frugality...
...Perhaps it is the idea of a foundation -ford in this case-financing still another examination of the have-nots and their little ways that sticks in the craw...
...Bein alone...
...Although Davidson's work is uniformly good, whatever the subject, he seems to respond more warmly to those who hang in than those who drop out...
...Rinehart & Winston, 186 pp., $12.95) has come along, with pictures by Bruce Davidson and text by Carol Hill...
...Like Dorothea Lange, Davidson permits his subjects their dignity with no loss of realism, and he is willing to forgo a lot of photographic ego...
...He manages close-ups of his subjects that do not patronize their wrinkles, and captures the satisfaction they appear to be getting from the tangible results of their labor...
...Subdividing subsistence from poverty sounds like an editorial idea conceived in great weariness...
...Um-um...
...What is meant by "imagination" isn't clear, but Chico certainly has a great deal of feeling for himself...
...So he duly photographs him staring contemplatively with toothpick in mouth, or leaning roguishly against a jukebox with his girl...
...a synonym for existence differing only in its suggestion of endurance...
...One can only guess at the feelings of a black person capable of grammar and syntax-by no means the monopoly of the fully educated -on witnessing our fascination with Chico's misdirected vitality...
...Obviously, she is impervious to Ms...
...But even as propaganda, Thornton concludes, "art . . . can do no more than express or reinforce our attitudes toward the world...
...Ms...
...Motivated by a desire to change conditions rather than merely to document them, photographers have been bursting, as it were, into the cabins of the starving and getting magnificent shots for too long...
...This may stem from the often noted fact that the camera is only as objective as its handler, which is to say not at all...
...In general, the more dramatic the picture of injustice, the less reliable it is as a factual report...
...The only serious mishap occurs in "Plainfield, New Jersey," the section on Chico, black boy-of-the-streets...
...At the risk of compounding the impertinence, it seems respectability does not always carry the stigma among the poor and the black that it does among jaded middle-class whites...
...By way of the victims' vomit, a substance that practically all animals consume avidly, the poison spreads through a whole range of species, from minks to hawks, killing indiscriminately...
...Chico's mother was "surprised and angry" when she read this transcription, feeling it made her son "sound like a hoodlum, some uneducated person...
...she notes that the group in question "consider[s| the ve bal approach to anything, most particularly the question of why, an absurd convention...
...Circumstances conspired to spare us the madam of a Peoria whorehouse, who may not be everyone's idea of a subsister anyway, though it would have been interesting to see Davidson's version of so Arbus-like a subject...
...Like the Indians before them, they waste nothing they kill, and their explanation of the disappearance of wildlife in their area is depressing...
...As for humor, style, philosophy and entertainment, here is a typical sample: "I don like bein by myself...
...The selection includes an 86-year-old ex-convict, just paroled, and "representative" blacks from town and country...
...The book ebbs and flows according to the personalities being examined...
...Gradually, however, they appear increasingly important as illustrations to the text, until finally they become indispensable...
...The majority are variations on that most beloved of stereotypes: the rugged individual who presses on, the odds notwithstanding...
Vol. 56 • October 1973 • No. 19
