When a picture says much more than one thousand words

Ella Watson, Washington, D.C., August 1942 in a photograph by Gordon Parks

for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress

Remembering with Dorothea Lange

The photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) gifted us with photographs that document times and people that the standard histories of the United States don't deal with in and substantive way. I don't post the Lange photographs on this blog out of nostalgia or sentimentality but because these people lived and their lives mattered. These were your grandparents or great-grandparents. This is what was done to them, these are the things that happened to them that they barely spoke of when you knew them. This is our true history. Knowing that might help you find your place in the world and carry on the good that these people did or hoped to do.

The photographs were taken from the Dorothea Lange, Photographer Facebook page. That page is a great source for photographs and helps greatly in recollecting

Title: Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. The first grave at the Manzanar Center's cemetery. It is that of Matsunosuke Murakami, 62, who died of heart disease on May 16. He had been ill ever since he arrived here with the first contingent and had been confined to the hospital since March 23.
Creator: Lange, Dorothea
June 30, 1942
Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, between 1942–1945.

Title: San Francisco, California. Young musician of Japanese ancestry plays his guitar at the Wartime Civil Control Administration station. He is a member of the first contingent of over 600 persons of Japanese ancestry to be evacuated from San Francisco.
Creator: Lange, Dorothea
April 6, 1942
Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, between 1942–1945.
Access: Unrestricted
Use: Unrestricted

Title: San Bruno, California. Old Mr. Konda in barrack apartment, after supper. He lives here with his two sons, his married daughter and her husband. They share two small rooms together. His daughter is seen behind him, knitting. He has been a truck farmer and raised his family who are also farmers, in Centerville, Alameda County where his children were born.
Creator: Lange, Dorothea
June 16, 1942.
Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, between 1942–1945.
Access: Unrestricted
Use: Unrestricted

Title: Children of evicted sharecropper, now living on Sherwood Eddy cooperative plantation.
Creator(s): Lange, Dorothea, photographer
Date Created/Published: 1936 July.

Title: Daughter of migrant Tennessee coal miner. Living in the American River Camp near Sacramento, California
Contributor Names: Lange, Dorothea, photographer
Created / Published : November 1936

From the past

I try to put up many historical photographs on this blog with the ideas that memory can be very subversive and that it helps to remember where we come from. It happens that much of what I put up comes from mining communities in the United States, but I will try to change that.

Coal miners and a flat bottom cutting machine as it undercuts 30 inch coal so that it can be popped down later with a small charge of explosives. This photograph was taken at the Reels Cove mine at Marion County, TN. on the Cumberland Plateau, near Whitwell.

Child of a squatter family moving out of the Camp Croft area near Whitestone, South Carolina, March 1941 in a photograph by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

Grandmother from a farm in Oklahoma; eighty years old. Now living in camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. "If you lose your pluck you lose the most there is in you - all you've got to live with" November 1936 in a photograph by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

A coal camp in West Virginia

‘Aunt' Samantha Bumgarner of from Dillsboro, North Carolina, fiddler, banjoist, and guitarist, Asheville, North Carolina, 1937 in photographs by Ben Shahn for the United States Resettlement Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

Pauline Clyburn's garden, Manning, Clarendon County, South Carolina, June 1939 in a

photograph by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

Logan, West Virginia in 1974

The Homestead Steel Mill in 1970

More From Steve Cline---The Beauty Around Us And Within Us

I did a post on Steve Cline the other day that has received lots of attention. You can find him on this blog and on Facebook. I'm impressed by him. Since that first bog post went up, Steve also put up a lengthy testimony on his Facebook page that reads like the stories of so many people right now. I know that some folks read these testimonies because they want drama or a happy ending or they want to be more secure in whatever belief system they have. I read them because I think that I owe it to someone who is doing recovery and going forward to take them seriously and because they're giving me a picture of where they are in the minute. Come back next week or next year and they will be somewhere else on their journey. Those stories are where God and power are.

Steve Cline recently posted the following photograph and caption with it:

Took this pic bout a month ago. looks like an angel of light to me.

I see that angel also. Maybe you see something else, and that's fine. It's not just that Steve saw this and took the picture, which is beautiful by itself, but that he took a minute to analyze it and share it. There is a connection here between what is beyond us, what is around us, what is within us, and what we give to others. It takes some courage to do that. I want to celebrate the picture and the angel, but I want to celebrate courage and every time we share something of the beauty in this world.

Sacred Images

In my faith tradition---not where I am now, but in my tradition---we use icons to remind us of what is sacred and in order to make real and better communicate to us what we read in the Bible and what we hear and sing or chant from our traditions. It is not that we pray to the icons or think of them as magic. It's better said that we believe that there are saints, that death does not hold the saints as prisoners, that the saints can intercede for us in the state they inhabit now just as they could when they were living with us, that we don't know all of the saints, and that we pray through icons (rather than to them).

Here are three images that hold what I think of as a common sacred theme that illustrate what I'm trying to say.

The first image is a Coptic icon of the Nativity of Christ. Note that Jesus, Mary, and the wise men have dark skins and that Jesus is giving a blessing. The second image is from Appalachia in the years of the Great Depression. I think that the photograph was taken by Dorothea Lange, but I may be mistaken. The same synergy (dynamic interaction and cooperation) is there as it is in the Coptic icon. The third image comes from Kristin Kennedy of Virginia Lee Studios in Southwestern Virginia. There again is synergy, and the man is looking at us much as one of the wise men in the Coptic icon is.

These are sacred images for me, each in their own way. There is tenderness---and it comes from something great that is both within us and beyond us. There is synergy. There is hope and faith---and faith is always the "confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." And there is the reality that the Jews were oppressed at the time of Christ's birth in a manger or a cave and that today in Appalachia people live in colonial or semi-colonial conditions and that it is not always easy to find doctors to provide prenatal care and deliver healthy babies.

I imagine that the woman in the coal camp either had a midwife or a company doctor and that her baby was delivered at home, a house rented from the company and paid for by a miner's labor. And I know that conditions changed because people borrowed some courage from the saints and left their Egypts, not fearing the coal operator's anger, and persevered on picketlines because they had a vision of a country of their own. (Hebrews 11)

These are also sacred images for me because carrying and bearing and caring for a child and supporting a family are all hard work, and honest work is scared. We all have within us a precious icon of God, the imprint of God's work and love and solidarity. Our responsibilities to one another are thus sacred or are sacramental. And if we look carefully and give ourselves time, we can see something of God in everyone.

I might have chosen a photograph from Kristin Kennedy's outstanding work showing a mother holding her newborn, but I wanted to make an additional point. It's okay to think of God as feminine or as both feminine and masculine or beyond gender. It's okay to think of God as a Sacred Parent or as Father or as Mother. Mary held Jesus in her arms. Joseph likely held his son as well. 

The theology of a falling-down bridge and photography.

Andrew Ace Gess at the Friends of the Tug Fork River Facebook page posted this photo with the captions "Old truck bridge fading more into history" and "Don’t be afraid to remove bridges in life. Some are better not crossed again."

There is a lot of wisdom right there.

I also got a great deal out of the comments. One person wrote "I lived right there growing up. The road was moved there in that curve and you can’t even tell that area was big enough for a two story house with a front porch facing the river and a store/post office. Our coal pile was right by a path to the river there. My aunt and some friends lived in W.Va and we waded it all the time. Every time someone post a pic from that area it takes me back." Someone else wrote "Yes it does me too so many memories from the mouth of calf creek you on the right side of road and me on the left side a little farther up on the hill.I miss that time of my life much but it where my life I live now got started Sweet memeroies!!"

Two other comments said "Shot a lot of pop bottles off that bridge with dad when the river was up!!" and "Good word...that will preach!"

People who live in the coalfields have long memories, but the way these got expressed seem so dear and touching to me. One photograph of a falling-down bridge opens an emotional or mental photo album, and in a few minutes folks are talking about home and family and neighbors, high water and shooting pop bottles, and someone else gets the significance of it and calls it all what it is---a good preaching sermon.

The theology of a falling-down bridge and photography.

 

Some Wisdom From Peggy Smith Photography

“The shell must break, before the bird can fly.”

Whatever weighs you down. Whatever difficulties your facing. You my dear were born to be brave, born to be beautiful, born to be deserving…. You were always born to fly……
Kanawha County Wv

Some of the art and beauty in our lives

The following photos come from the Appalachian Americans Facebook page. Many people in the coalfields have special creative abilities. They can make something beautiful and interesting out of scrap. Lots of people in the coalfields are collectors and I've been in homes and workshops that are small museums. All of that and some folks are just beautiful in their love and respect for one another. Check in with some of my posts about Virginia Lee Photography. This artistic work and the preserving of history reinforces long memories. I'm sure that someone has written a book about all of this by now.

 

Hope And Beauty

I lifted the picture below of the father and baby from the Virginia Lee Photography page on Facebook. It's one of my go-to places for beauty and hope and I have blogged about the great work done by Kristen Kennedy there several times on this blog. Please support her and her business if you're in Southwestern Virginia.

I'm sorry to say that I don't know where the other photos came from but I know that they're from Central Appalachia. Most likely I found them on the Appalachian Americans Facebook page. If these are your photos and you want me to take them down, just let me know.

 

Some things to support and encourage, give you a smile, and help you think

I pass by this old mailbox every day. The old rusty box is nailed to an oak that has to be 150 years old. After years of passing it by, I decided to open the box to see if anything was inside. After all, there isn’t even a house nearby to which it could serve anyway. Any home it serviced long ago is torn down, I’m sure.

I noticed an old letter inside, as you can see in picture #2. I looked at the postmark date, and it said July 7, 1903! Due to age and moisture, the addressee on the envelope was not readable, so I opened up the envelope hoping to find some local history and a good story I could share with you. Here is what the letter inside said. “We have been trying to reach you about your vehicle’s extended warranty.”

Peggy Smith Photography: Great Blue Heron in Kanawha County, W. Va.

Rosalio Urias Munoz---Los Angeles

Larry Allen--Beautiful Red Evening, Fayette County, West Virginia--Taken from the

All Things West Virginia Facebook page

 

From Peggy Smith Photography---A Great Blue Heron In Kanawha County, West Virginia

 “She was a storm, not the kind you run from, the kind you chase.”

I really appreciate the great work done by Peggy Smith Photography and posted on Facebook. Please "like" their page.