So, I was doing some reading this evening [or more like looking] for the Photographing American History class I teach on Thursday evenings and I was paging through both Robert Frank's The Americans and Edward Steichen's The Family of Man. Of all photo essays I've ever come across, Frank's is my very favorite as a historian and also just as a casual observer. It is so much of America from the perspective of the outsider--sometimes the only one who can see without the baggage of citizenship, residence, or claim. And yet, Frank is no tourist, just an introspective soul on a journey. As many times as I've read Jack Kerouac's introduction to the photographs, I find something new in it. Today, this phrase struck me:
"What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. Whether 't is the milk of human kindness, Shakespeare meant, makes no difference when you look at these pictures. Better than a show."
Frank's images [among others] do provide proof that photographs can be poems. And yet, I wonder if there are poems out there written by just the young upstarts [or the old ones] Kerouac talks about, and if not, what a fun book project that would make some day--inviting poets young and old to choose a picture of Frank's and write about it--to tell a story from within and without the frame. Maybe in my next life I'll put that together. Which photograph would I write about? Many probably, but there are a few stories to be told within [and without] "Yale Commencement--New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut." Graduates mill about in the uncomfortable conformity that is academic regalia. Where to put one's hands? In fists, behind backs, in poses of nervousness and excitement--one foot in the past--one in the future--and a mind everywhere but present on graduation day. As for the old man on the bench with the folded up newspaper, well, his mind is in the past, imagining his own commencement and replaying images in his mind of a life in between, when he walked in these robes [or didn't] and where he thought he would be, and where he is, on this bench, on this morning, in New Haven.
In fact, I would like to read more poems inspired by photographs, because they tend to be poems of vicarious experience and displacement, and thus interesting. I was at once surprised [and not] to learn earlier this semester that not only was Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" originally based on the text of a poem written by Abel Meeropol, but that the poem was his response to viewing Lawrence Beitler's brutal photograph of a 1930 Indiana Lynching. It is amazing how many lives an image can have [and yet not save] when translated into text, and then later, song.
And then I looked through Steichen's famous MOMA exhibit of 1955 [how I wish I could have seen this in person--the catalogue does NOT do it justice], and Kerouac's words still resonate: "the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind." Because in "The Family of Man," we see human kind, and love and music and dancing, and eating, and life and death in all of its human-ness everywhere, not just in America. And we are, despite our quibbles, and foibles, and differences of belief, still a family of man. The show is so hopeful in the middle of a century filled with so much death and destruction by the hand of man. And wisdom from throughout the world is quoted, as on p. 60:
"Before me peaceful,
Behind me peaceful,
Under me peaceful,
Over me peaceful,
All around me peaceful..." --Navaho
And maybe it was Steichen's audacious hope, but its' tenacity persists, and the images continue to work against disconnection and forgetfulness of the human condition, especially the universality of it. In a way that only images can, evoking both past and present.
Both of these works were of the 1950s, and neither fit stereotypes of the decade. That is, perhaps, why they work so well as history. Because, in Montaigne's words [as quoted in the catalogue]: "Every many beareth the whole stamp of the human condition." And Montaigne knew that, I think, better than most of his era, as he sat, in his library in his estate in France, writing essays borne of his very ordinary struggles with kidney stones, friendships lost, and war and death.
Our own struggles, be they ordinary or extraordinary, find perspective in Steichen's masterful exhibition, because we have all, when looking at each and every photograph, literally been there--emotionally if not physically.
And so, I think this has helped me organize my thoughts for Thursday. Or, perhaps just set me on a path strewn with more questions. But isn't that the point of looking? Yes.
Robert Frank, "Yale Commencement--New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut."
