Mexican Coal Miners, West Virginia, and Marion Post Wolcott

The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) produced some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression and World War II and included photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn who shaped the visual culture of the era both in its moment and in American memory. Unit photographers were sent across the country to document and combat rural poverty. The negatives were sent to Washington, DC. The growing collection came to be known as “The File.” With the United State’s entry into WWII, the unit moved into the Office of War Information and the collection became known as the FSA-OWI File. Marion Post Wolcott began her work with the FSA on assignment in West Virginia where her mother had distributed family-planning literature. Her mother advised her to do things like observe clothes hanging on the line to better understand the people she wanted to photograph. Wolcott would go on to canvas the United States for her work with the FSA from 1938-1942.

Wolcott was one of eleven FSA photographers and one of only two women (Dorothea Lange, the other) hired for the project. While researching her photographs from West Virginia, something caught my eye. Mexican miners. In addition to whites and blacks, I knew all manner of immigrants had come to the coalfields in search of steady work: Hungarians, Italians, and others. But it never dawned on me that Mexican coal miners would've been working in West Virginia nearly a hundred years ago (or perhaps longer). A minority (woman) photographing minority (Mexican) coal miners and their families. These are the primary images I wanted to share for this article. It seems timely in our current political climate. Women are still underrepresented, overlooked, and underpaid. Immigrants, particularly Mexican immigrants, still struggle to take hold of the American Dream while constantly facing the threat of harassment or even worse, deportation. I doubt the coal operators in West Virginia's mines cared much about immigration status as long as the coal continued to run and profits remained steady. (I also stumbled upon this brilliant piece of research by Heidi Taylor-Caudill and Whitney Hayes called Immigrants in the Coalfields.)

In a 1965 oral history interview,  Wolcott shares, "And so my first assignments were very close to Washington. I think one of the first ones, if not the very first, was in the coal fields in West Virginia. That was a very short assignment, of course. And it was a very interesting one, too. I found the people not as apathetic as I had expected they might be. They weren't too beaten down. Of course, many of them were but they were people with hope and some of them still had a little drive, although, of course, their health was so bad it was telling . . . ."

On another note, Roy Stryker, overseer of the FSA photographers, was known for killing negatives of the work that didn't pass muster. He rendered the images useless by punching a single a hole through them with a manual hole punch (see the first and fourth images in this article as examples). In 2016, Bill McDowell published Ground: A Reprise of Photographs from the Farm Security Administration (below) with Taj Forer and Michael Itkoff of Daylight Books, which is a collection of Stryker's hole-punched rejections sequenced in an altogether poetic and resonant project. The resulting book contains 185 plates from more than 1,000 files from the Library of Congress. (Just one of Wolcott's rejected images made its way into the book - also a West Virginia image).

Editor's note: Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). Below is a screenshot of my search for Marion Post Wolcott's images from West Virginia during her time with the FSA.

In that beautiful, that blessed forever

The moderator, elders, delegates, and congregation of the Dix Fork Old Regular Baptist Church gather around to close out a river baptism with prayer. Just out of sight, Sister Ruth Vanhoose stands soaking wet in the small gravel lot, wrapped in a towel, her clothes trying to dry in the July sun. She was surrounded by blood kin and church family, on the banks of Big Creek in Pike County, Kentucky. Minutes earlier, in a public declaration of faith, she cast off her former self of 84 years, and was baptized in this small, quiet stream. This was an Old Regular Baptist baptism of total immersion.

I attended the service prior to the baptism and with the permission of the moderator, recorded the service, which included incredibly beautiful lined-out hymnody singing. This is a tradition of singing, worship, and baptism that is slowly fading away like many other parts of mountain culture. I'd love to do some more extensive visiting and work with Old Regulars in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia.

I sometimes think it's too good to be true When they talk of life's fair river Of that city so bright, where there is no night In that beautiful, that blessed forever.

And I sometimes ask when I'm weary and sad, That the golden gates were nearer, But I know I can wait for a joy so great In that beautiful, that blessed forever.

And I sometimes ask, when I think of the end, Will the Lord on me have pity. Will He bid me come to His own dear home, To His own everlasting city.

And I sometimes grieve for the friends I must leave, For the bond is hard to sever. But the joy is so sweet, when I know we shall meet, In that beautiful, that blessed forever.

And I sometimes think of the dear old Saints, On the banks of Jordan's River, Who with weary hearts are waiting to depart, To that beautiful, that blessed forever.

And I sometimes pray on my toilsome way, For the faith of the true believer, Whose hopes shine bright, as the stars of the night, In that beautiful, that blessed forever.

Review - Appalachia: A Self-Portrait

Softcover| 9 x 9.5 inches | 114 pages | 79 black and white photographs | Gnomon Press for Appalshop, 1979 | Edited by Wendy Ewald

A few years ago, as I was interviewing Shelby Lee Adams for this blog, he suggested I get my hands on a copy of this book. I'm glad I did. Published in 1979 by a group calling themselves the Mountain Photography Workshop, it's a result of work created by seven photographers: Lyn Adams, Shelby Lee Adams, Robert Cooper, Earl Dotter, Will Endres, Wendy Ewald, and Linda Mansberger. In 1976, the group was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant to document West Virginia and Kentucky's Appalachian regions. Since buying this book, I can't tell you how many times I've thought about doing something similar with a small group of photographers.

Ewald writes, "Each photographer chose one subject to document. We met every two months to talk about the work we had done. At the end of the year, as a group we began to edit the photographs and decide how best they could be used. We felt it was more important for each of us to look in depth at an aspect of the culture we were most concerned with rather than to document the region overall. This book is a result of our work together for a year and a half. It is a personal view of a people and a landscape, which has nurtured us as photographers and individuals."

The book begins with a foreword by Robert Coles, which I can't seem to escape. I mean that as a good thing. Coles' influence on many of the documentarians I admire so much is everywhere and I was glad to find it here as well. We're then treated to a lengthy forward by Loyal Jones, which if you aren't familiar with, please stop reading this now and go familiarize yourself with him. Do it.

As with most of the Appalachia themed books I've acquired over the years, I bought this one used. There's something I admire, prefer even, in the worn cover, the imperfect pages, and stray marks here and there. I believe I bought my copy for around $10 online, but I've seen a "collectible" copy listed for $400. This is a book that was created to be handled, to be studied, and used. I'd like to think it honors both the people and places photographed as well as those who made the pictures to be used as such.

Most of the book is devoid of text with the exception of caption information. When text is present however, it is pleasantly arranged in the voice of the person being photographed. We're brought in to glimpse the lives of Rena Meade (by Wendy Ewald) and C.F. "Catfish" Gray (by Will Endres) in near first-person accounts, which is really something wonderful. As I've said before, I'm a fan of text when it is done well or with purpose, but I don't always believe it's necessary. In these two cases, it adds a great deal to the images to better inform us of who we're looking at and learning about.

There seems to be an air of faithfulness to these images, which I think is challenging when you consider the total number of photographers involved. Two or three photographers, sure. But when you more than double that number (again, seven total), faithfulness and its pursuit can be diluted, subject to ego, arrogance, and self-centeredness. I find this collection remarkably absent of such pitfalls.

In Loyal Jones' foreword, A Remembrance, he shares, "John Campbell wrote that more is known that isn't so about this place and people than any other on the globe. Perhaps so. The old stereotypes and supposed facts are pervasive. Almost everyone has an opinion of this place, whether or not he has any firsthand knowledge. How does one describe this place and its people? It depends on who is doing the looking and his assumptions, attitudes, and cultural baggage. It depends on the relationship between the looker and the looked-at, the photographer and the photographed, the recorder and the recorded. In the end we who are part of the region and who try to describe it can only report what we have seen, what has happened to us and what we have come to believe. When we compare our pictures, we know that the same land and people are different to each of us. So it is everywhere."

This is another book I highly recommend. Given its affordability and availability, it would be a shame to not have a copy and to sit with it for a while.

I've included a few spreads here and some brief notes about the photographers who made them.

*Editor's note: The photographer's notes listed below are verbatim from the book, which was published in 1979 and are not current in reference to where the photographers are now.

*Earl Dotter's major work as a photographer in Appalachia has primarily focused on coal miners and their communities. From 1973 to 1977 he was the photographer for the United Mine Workers Journal. His work focuses on the workplace, health, and safety of Appalachian coal miners.

*Shelby Adams was born and raised in Letcher County, Kentucky. In 1968, he left to go to art school. He now lives in Cincinnati, but makes frequent trips back to visit his family and the two families he has photographed. He has take pictures of the Caudill family for four years and the Childers family for two years. He works with a 4x5 view camera and uses Polaroid film to let his subjects share in the excitement of making the images.

(This series of pictures from Shelby Adams (later Shelby Lee Adams and no relation to Lyn Adams) are some of his first published in book form. It wasn't until 1993 that his first monograph, Appalachian Portraits, would be published. Like many others in the book, Adams offers a minimal amount of text along with his twelve photographs of the Caudill and Childers families. RM)

*Robert Cooper began to photograph the area around his hometown, Sutton, West Virginia in 1966. In a way he photographs his autobiography by his evolving relation with his hometown and the surrounding area. He was worked on a photographic essay of Central West Virginia for several years and continues to work there now as a photographer-in-residence for the Arts and Humanities Council in Braxton County.

*Wendy Ewald moved to Letcher County, Kentucky in 1975. Soon after, she began photographing Rena Meade, who lives in Cowan, a neighboring community. Wendy portrays Rena's life, her relationships with the land and her family, and her passage through life's most difficult transition - the death of her husband of 40 years.

Review - American Hollow

Hardcover| 8 x 11 inches | 144 pages | 128 black and white photographs | Bullfinch Press, 1999 | Rory Kennedy | $35

The Kennedy name is not an unfamiliar one in Appalachia. Brothers John and Bobby campaigned there, visits that were well documented and widely circulated. Bobby's son, Robert Jr., has been a longtime environmental advocate working to shed light on the destructive practice of surface mining. For this film (HBO) and companion book, his younger sister, Rory, spent a year off an on with the Bowling family of Saul, Kentucky in Perry County.

I struggle with both the film and the book (for example, constantly referring to the Bowling family as a clan, written twice in the dust jacket alone), but I'm convinced that's not necessarily a bad thing. The issues addressed - poverty, welfare, and violence to name a few - aren't as black and white as we'd all like them to be. They never are. And while I struggle with some of the framing of the story, even its very premise at times, it really asks us to consider the complexity of issues - and people - we tend to generalize and marginalize, intentionally or not.

(Bass [Bascum] at the supper table.)

Nearly every review I read of the film American Hollow used the word "hardscrabble." I can't tell you how much I hate that word as it seems to be perpetually used to describe life in Appalachia. There should be a drinking game designed around this. In fact, Kennedy's introduction to the book begins, "American Hollow is a many-textured story about a hardscrabble life of poverty in a beautiful and unspoiled landscape." Drink.

She continues, "We expect Appalachia to be a place of inbreeds and six-fingered children, of hillbillies and moonshine, an America more backwards than backwoods. But in my year with the Bowlings, I discovered that the truth is not so simple. Early on, the Bowlings and I forged a powerful connection. They immediately opened up their home to me, and I spent more time with them, I was struck by their sense of dignity and pride as they survived life in this forgotten corner of America." Yes, she went there.

(Lisa Raisor, age twelve, jumping.)

The book's foreword was written by Robert Coles, distinguished Harvard professor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and founding member of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (as well as cofounder of DoubleTake Magazine with Alex Harris). Coles poignantly writes, "The further hope, of course, is that the rest of us take notice of Appalachia, that we become thereby connected in mind and heart to a people both proud and vulnerable, who at a distinct remove from us, even as they salute the same flag we honor, speak the same language we favor. Under such circumstances a nation lives up to its name." Coles describes working in Appalachia as a young physician, which seemed to leave a lasting impression.

Most of the film's focus is on the Bowling family matriarch, Iree. She is really something. She birthed and raised children (thirteen in all), cooked, cleaned, sewed, gardened, doctored, quilted, and did just about everything else that needed to be done on the family land. "I feel like I'm rich, rich as the Lord wants me to be," she declares. She has dedicated her entire life to preserving the old ways, the traditions, and worked to care for her family. Kennedy writes, "Ultimately, I think she knows that her way of life won't survive much longer."

As one might imagine, there is a clear distinction between American Hollow the film and American Hollow the book. It bothers me to no end that photographer Steve Lehman's name is absent from the cover. It is understandably Kennedy's film, but it is very much Lehman's book. As such, it's hard for me let go of this oversight. Without question, the book is beautifully printed and bound. I appreciate text-heavy photobooks when the text isn't merely ornamental; here it is instrumental. The interviews, conducted by Mark Bailey, are masterful and work well in concert with Lehman's photographs. One particular interview with Ivalene Estep (the third child of Iree and Bass), is especially moving. "I've been taking care of kids all my life...It's like this circle we all get in and we're afraid to get out," Estep shares. This could very well be my family.

You can pick up a copy of American Hollow for incredibly little money (as of this writing, I count at least eight copies for less than five dollars including shipping). As I mentioned earlier, I struggle with this book but feel it's a good addition to any collection. It's certainly worth your time to sit with and study a while.

(Iree and Lonzo.)

A couple of side notes:

I met director Rory Kennedy at the Full Frame Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina in 2010 after screening the film (and she signed my copy of American Hollow). A few months earlier, I photographed her brother, Robert Jr., at a debate with Don Blankenship, former Massey Energy CEO, in Charleston, West Virginia. I met two Kennedys in the span of four months.

The film can be seen in its entirety here.

For the first time, I've added a flip-through of the book I'm writing about (below). It's not the best quality as I'm not a videographer (as evidenced here), but I thought it would be nice to provide a more complete overview of the book, its pace, sequence, and design. We'll see how this one is received and if there's a demand, I'll add more. Thanks for looking.