three together

This is a block of wood from which an artist, Agnes Weinrich, made white-line prints. She made it about 1916 during a summer stay at the art colony in Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Lately I've been filling gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of some American artists. I've completed work on one, am finishing off another, and have begun work on a third. There are interesting intersections and parallels among them. They are roughly of the same generation, were born to immigrant parents, lost one or both parents while still young, and lived in artists' colonies.

They also all lived their lives in family groupings of three. Agnes Weinrich lived her entire life with her sister Helen. In 1922, when Helen married the aspiring painter, Karl Knaths, it was he who moved in with them. Agnes was then 49, Helen 46, and Karl 31. He was living hand-to-mouth while they were blessed with a comfortable inheritance. The trio spent the rest of their lives, living, traveling, and working together.

Andrée Ruellan was the third artist. She had no contact with Agnes, Helen, and Karl so far as I know. Her living-arrangement-of-three consisted of herself, her widowed mother, and her husband, Jack Taylor. As with the other, this one came together when Andrée and Jack married and continued intact thereafter.

Throughout much of the 20th century there was nothing particularly unusual about family groupings that included members outside the nuclear parents-and-their-children grouping. During the first half of the century, it was probably more likely than not that a maiden aunt (in the phrase of the time) or aged grandparent, or even the struggling nephew would be part of the household. The family arrangements that my three artists worked out interest me mostly because they were tightly-bonded trios. Neither of the marriages produced children and, although you might think there was cause for friction in the makeup—two artists and one other in each case—the bonds within each group of three were reported to be strong ones. Whatever difficulties they had getting along, none of any consequence were known to the world.

canal

This is the Amstel canal from Grand Café Amstelhoeck. We'd been caught in a spate of rain. You can see the outdoor tables are wet. The big building at left is NH City Centre. The handsome spire belongs to Oude Kerk. The canal is the Amstel. I took the photo in September 2012 during that trip to visit places where ancestors once lived. I like the near symmetries in the vee of blue sky topping trees on one side, building fronts on other, descending down the Rokin to the church; them and the three strong verticals.

a boat on the bay

This shows a lobster boat moving down Blue Hill Bay as the sun is about to rise over the southern end of Western Mountain. At least I think it's Western; Cadillac is farther away but taller. You can see the darker outline of Tinker Island just before it. I've been slowing getting used to the utility cables crossing this view. They showed up sometime in the last couple of decades. At first I was sure they spoiled the view, but I've come to accept that they can contribute to the design of a photo, as the large one does here, scribing an arbitrary division just above the horizon. Creating an eye-arresting dissonance it helps keep the photo from being just another pretty picture.

Schwarzwald

I didn't think too much of this photo when I took it. The subject seemed busy and incoherent; the landscape is not picturesque. You can't tell what the point of it is.

Those things are true, but I've come to like the image anyway. Looked at as a two-dimensional surface—blocks of light and dark, colored shapes—it has an interesting design. Seen as presenting three dimensions, it nicely segregates fore-, mid-, and background elements.

What you can't really see is that these nondescript structures are set in the quaint German hamlet of Schwarzwald, at the foot of a dam, the Ohratallsperre, which holds back a large, scenic reservoir. The dam is dead center in the photo just above the two whitish-gray structures. My brother, sister, and I hiked there from Oberhof, a ski sport center which was pleasantly quiet during our brief September stay there.

collection

The college I attended turned 150 this year and the my class celebrated its survival all of 50 years from the date we graduated. This photo seems to show a church, but since the college was founded by Quakers, it's actually a meeting hall where we turned out for a mandatory lecture each week (called "collection") and, that burden having been lifted, where current students go to hang out.

I took the photo as myself and classmates, with all the other classes present, trooped to the school's amphitheater to hear speakers in what the program named an Alumni Collection, which turned out to be something like a graduation ceremony without the graduates.

The building is called Clothier Hall. Philadelphians will recognize the name. Strawbridge and Clothier was one of the city's most prominent department store chains. Strawbridges and Clothiers were both Quaker families and, while the Strawbridges favored two other nearby Quaker colleges for their charitable contributions, the Clothiers gave a lot of their money and much of their time toward making the school I attended a good place to study. The Clothiers were also somewhat fanatic about football and, though the college has since abandoned that sport, it was for a long time a major interest for those who could tear themselves away from their books on a Saturday afternoon.

daylilies

Though not much different from other tricoleurs, the Dutch flag is a handsome one and, since I like to find occasions to fly it, I've been putting it out when the national team wins a game in Brazil.

As the world knows, Dutch people consider orange to be their national color. When they wear orange clothing to cheer on the home team, Dutch spectators do not also show some red, white, and blue. The colors don't mix well together. Nonetheless, I liked the look of my flag behind the orange daylilies that front our house. The orange does well with the green foliage that surrounds it and, in design terms, the backlit flag is more an interesting counterpoint than a jarring distraction.

sunset

My sister lives in a mobile home perched midway on a palisade a half mile above the Pacific near Santa Monica. I took this photo on a visit there a couple years back. Her place is behind my right shoulder. I'm watching the sun set over Malibu. The scene is paradisiacal.

barn

This shows the field of a small farm at Herrick Bay in the Penobscot region of Maine. I was first brought to this area in 1949 and have returned many times since. Its memorable features are sea views across broad bays to islands and a great expanse of ocean glimpsed among them, rocky shoreline teeming with sealife, and cabins nestled around a great house, the Lookout. There are woods of spruce, pine, and birch. In my youth there was a dirt road which lay warm, inviting summer's hardened bare feet.

This photo is clearly not the standard against which scenic images of the place are measured. I took it during a pause on my daily run when the brilliant, low morning light made views like this one, seen hundreds of times, seem fresh and new. I like the variations of green and ochre in the grassy foreground, the line that suggests the presence of the bay without showing it, and the play of light on the barn and trees.

travel diary

In the summer of 1932 my grandmother sent my father and his older brother on a visit to Germany. My father was then 21 years old. This is a page from the travel diary he kept through most of the trip. There were members of the family to meet with and a short stay at the University of Munich, but also much touring to see the sights. On debarking at Bremen the two bought a tiny car which gave them constant trouble and had to be abandoned putting them on trains for the last segment of their journey. Their route took them clockwise through much of Germany and a bit of Austria.

The diary is conventional: the weather was so, we stayed here, saw this; we ate, we drank. You would not guess that in those months the Nazi party was becoming ascendent. Brownshirts were marching through the streets of the cities and towns they visited. The swastika flag was omnipresent and posters extolled the Party, condemned Communists, and vilified Jews. These things the diary never mentions.

When I and my siblings were young, my father would tell us stories of that trip. One involved witnessing a Nazi rally. The pair did not attend out of interest in Nazism, only for the spectacle. My father's politics at that time were undeveloped; later he was a left-liberal, tending to vote Socialist. The rally is not mentioned in the diary. He said he and his brother arrived early and seated themselves on some bleachers. As others arrived, they noticed that those who seated themselves on the bleachers were all in Nazi uniforms. It gradually dawned on the brothers that they were in a VIP section of the viewing stands but nobody told them to move. My father said that in the Germany of that time everyone was always expected to know what do do, what place to occupy. Since the two brothers were obviously not ruffians but rather middle class gentlemen, they were not questioned or asked to move, much less man-handled by the Brownshirt enforcers who kept order at rallies.

One of the many ironies of our family history is that my father (and his whole family) did not know that his grandfather on his mother's side was the grandson of the most prominent rabbi in Westphalia. The grandfather had converted to Christianity on emigrating to the U.S. and never spoke of his German family. That family can be traced these days via internet searches. During the Nazi era, many emigrated and those who didn't were almost all exterminated.

Not long ago, my brother, sister, and I travelled through the Netherlands and Germany to see the places where our ancestors had lived. In Germany we stopped in Celle, source of the photo I showed yesterday, and also in Beckum, where many of my great-grandfather's relatives lived. One of them was Salomon Windmüller who was great-grandson of a brother of the prominent rabbi who was the grandfather of my great-grandfather. He was a prominent merchant in Beckum. Two years after my father's summer tour, Salomon was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for and act of defiance: having a servant remove a Nazi anti-Jewish poster from the wall of the building where he lived. He was an old man at the time and did not live long after the end of his prison sentence.

This news item appeared shortly after his conviction (translated from the German):

Last Saturday several persons were sentenced at the Beckum district court, to several weeks’ imprisonment for damaging posters of the Westfalen-Nord district command. They were the following opponents of the National-Socialist movement and government: Mrs Franz Windhövel, Wilhelmstrasse 61 (three weeks imprisonment), the innkeeper Ferdinand Hagedorn, Weststrasse 45 (three weeks imprisonment), the Priest Stroetmann, Provost of the St Paulus Workers Association (three weeks imprisonment), and the last of this illustrious company; the 73-year-old cattle Jew Salomon Windmüller, Weststrasse 19 (six weeks imprisonment). All those sentenced were taken into custody. The Jew Windmüller was imprisoned immediately.

With this verdict, the Beckum district court has made it abundantly clear that the National-Socialist state will not be intimidated by anybody, not even by the Catholic clergy. All subversive activities will in future be severely punished.

Celle

This morning I looked at an online folder full of images and asked myself which would intrigue me, supposing I were coming upon them for the first time. Since it's not at all easy for me to do that, I gave myself a leg up by viewing them in thumbnail. Squashed to the size of a 35mm slide, each appears different enough from its true self that it just about takes on an individual identity.

This one immediately caught my eye. Taken in one of the few German cities that were left intact by the Allied bombing campaign of World War II, it isn't a treasured memento of a pleasant trip to view ancestral homelands (which is true of other photos in the folder), but more of an abstract study in light and shadow. The place is Celle, in Saxony, and it's full of medieval timber-frame houses, nestled side by side, above cobbled streets, mostly free of cars, trucks, and buses. Though well-preserved, it's not a museum-like restoration, like Colonial Williamsburg in the United States, but a commercial center, the capital of the district in which it's located. Quite a feat.

Typifying Celle's modernity mingled with historic preservation, our brief stay in Celle was in a building from the early seventeenth century and our landlady was Lithuanian, youthful, outgoing, with a decidedly contemporary outlook.

sunlight

As we near the summer solstice, rays of early-morning sun slant through a north-facing window and cast this reflection on the west wall of our dining room. Sometimes, if there's a light breeze, rustling leaves cause the light to dance, but today the image simply descended slowly downward as the sun rose.

digger

There's construction going on where I do my daily shopping. The food store that serves most of my needs is on the top floor of a building where an exterior balcony makes a theater of a construction site in one corner of the building's plot. Lately, the contractors have been excavating and their tracked digger has the tricky job of removing earth from a confined space, all the while leaving itself a steep pathway to give itself a route out of the hole. The current one is out of view to the camera's left.

Just as interesting as the digger and its work are the holes in the retaining wall. I can't tell why they occur or what purpose they serve. My engineer-brother would know. I'll ask him next chance I get. In addition to the mini-cavern in this photo, you can see two others, one fully shown, blocked with timbers and the other, at far left, only partly in view. The site has two others.

The retaining wall keeps two streets from collapsing into the excavation. It appears to have been put in place long ago, was, until recently, kept in place by the dirt and rocks that the digger is removing, and clearly now needs to be shored up.

I don't know what the owners of the building plan for this space. It surely is expected to be revenue-producing whatever it is. Before the digging began it was a pleasant, nicely-landscaped courtyard, bordered on one side by old and many-blossomed Japanese cherry trees.

a miller

This is the milling machine that removed the top surface of our street. When it's operating a carbide-toothed drum scrapes up old asphalt and the long-neck conveyor transports it to a dump truck. In its present waiting state this machine reminds me (to continue yesterday's thought process) of the spaceship Firefly in the Joss Whedon TV series of that name.

In my photo, the miller has finished work on our part of the street. It feels strange and a little unnerving to have big machines so thoroughly disrupt the quiet routines of our little neighborhood and some of us wonder what flaws lay in the old surface, not visible to our eyes, that made it necessary for our village council to carry out this major transformation.

In any event, today our street sports new blacktop, richly black and still warm after being poured, let set, and rolled smooth.

resurfacing

In our little neighborhood messages from our village manager arrived in email inboxes over the weekend. They warned us that in coming days the narrow lane outside our houses would fill with trucks and paving equipment. The street is having its top layer of old asphalt removed today and a new layer put down tomorrow. The front loader in this photo came into view shortly after the first pass of the milling machine. It's highly maneuverable -- can turn literally on a dime -- and, as you can see, is not afraid to travel with its front wheels lifted up. It has a sort of compact cuteness that reminds me of Wall-E from the sci-fi movie of the same name.

a painting by Karl Knaths

This is a painting by Karl Knaths. He was one of America's first modernist painters. Out of an early affection for the work of Cézanne, he let his work evolve into a personal blend of abstract and realist elements, all of it pretty much influenced by the sort of cubist technique that led from those early Cézanne innovations. It's all interesting and mostly good. Art critics, museum curators, and collectors all liked (and still like) his stuff, though not so exuberantly as they like the work of many other American artists (that's why you're probably not familiar with it).

I wrote an article in Wikipedia on him. It's remarkable for snagging only one gripe from that institution's picky editors. She or he put a box at top of the article telling the world that I used too many external links.

I'm fond of this particular painting partly because its owners gave me permission to use it in the Wikipedia article. In my experience owners almost never wish to do this since it requires that they, basically, give up all rights and put the image in the public domain. I'm sure you realize that restrictions imposed by copyright or Creative Commons licenses do little good in keeping protected works off the Internet, but that doesn't make these protections entirely useless and owners are understandably reluctant to let them go.

The painting is called Pumpkin. Knaths painted it late in his career, in 1964. It is oil on canvas, measures 30" x 36" and comes from the collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum; gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Orr, in memory of Louise Ault.

Flag of the USS Blessman

On June 14th the United States celebrates Flag Day. During the battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945, the USS Blessman was severely damaged in an attack by a Japanese bomber. The ship was a destroyer escort converted to high-speed transport and only the day before it had been under bombardment by shore defenses as the underwater demolition teams that it carried were conducting reconnaissance of the Iwo beaches where Marines would soon be landed.

My uncle, Arthur Hettema, was one of the swimmers who surveyed the waters where the amphibious landings would take place. Like the other frogmen, he swam more than a thousand yards from drop off point to the beach, dressed simply in swimming trunks and having a noteboard strapped on his leg so he could make notes of sand, surf, and obstructions using a grease pen. He swam under the waves, dove to check the sandy bottom, and, hoping not to become a target, surfaced in troughs to breathe. He and his partner did the job and swam back to their pickup point without being hit.

Later, he was onboard the Blessman when it took two bombs mid-ship, immediately disabling it. He and the other surviving UDT members had to deal with explosions; dead, dying, and wounded sailors; fires; and the confusion that's inevitable when a ship receives direct hits. For the work he did in the water and on shipboard he was given the Bronze Star.

He was also presented with this flag, which the Blessman had flown.

Last summer I noticed a bee nosing around some hosta blossoms, sought out my camera, and, amazingly, was able to catch this shot.

close observation

There's a story about this tiny blossom and its out-of-focus cousin behind. While eating lunch on our side porch I noticed a little girl stooping to look at something in the dirt at the foot of our driveway. She squatted to look closely and said something excitedly to her mom. I thought whatever it was she saw had to be pretty unusual, like a dead baby bird maybe. When I'd finished my sandwich and strolled out to look, I found these two little flowers which had sprung up under our scraggly hedge.

windowsill

My blogging impulse having fled some months ago, I'm ready to try something new; well, not exactly new, but borrowed from my friend Deniz (whose inspiration has also waned). Starting today, it's my goal to post occasional photos, all of them my own taking and most in that vague category of images that stick in memory for reasons difficult to state. This, above, is the first.

Delano's cupolas

This photo shows a crewmember of a freight train looking out the left side window of a caboose's cupola. It was taken in March 1943 by Jack Delano for the U.S. Office of War Information. The train was on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe system somewhere in western Texas or eastern New Mexico.

The photo is held by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Although it is unlabeled, its composition and the details it shows are similar to other photos Delano took of trainmen in caboose cupolas during a photo shoot of March 1943 on frieght trains traveling from Chicago to San Bernardino along the AT&SF line. In the files assembled from this shoot the photo is located near photos whose captions give locations in the vicinity of Amarillo, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The trainman's tie and jacket, as well as the fedora he wears with train badge just visible all indicate that his job was conductor. You can see these details a little more clearly in this cropped image. Click this image (and all the others) to view full size.


This photo, taken a few days earlier of a different trainman, gives a full caption. The two images are strikingly similar.

{Caption: Conductor W. E. Zink, watching the train from his window in the cupola of the caboose on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Emporia and Wellington, Kansas; photo by Jack Delano created 1943 Mar.; source: Library of Congress Prints and Photos Division}

The purpose of these photos was documentary. They and the many other images that Delano captured during his journey south and west aimed to show one aspect of war mobilization — the great strength of the U.S. transportation system. Nonetheless, they are far from being naïve propaganda.

The outline that Delano prepared as part of the OWI request for governmental clearance to undertake the work shows his intention to give "a photographic story of the important role played by the railroads in the national war effort," and to this end he showed the astounding magnitude of U.S. rail freight operations.[1] There are lots of long shots of great rail terminals, huge plants for manufacture and repair of locomotives and rolling stock, and the vast landscape of the American Southwest. But he also showed individuals, men and women whose work enabled this vast system to function.

It's in keeping with the philosophy of the FSA/OWI photographic unit that the thousands of photos in its archives contain no photo-op news-shots of politicians, rail system managers, or other public figures. As Delano's boss, Roy Stryker put it, the units images contained "no record of big people or big events ... and absolutely no celebrities."[2] This down-to-earth approach comes out fully in Delano's AT&SF photos. We see yardmasters, engineers, conductors, brakemen, oilers, and wipers. We see workers in locomotive repair shops, on the tracks, in telegraph rooms, and in switch towers. We see workers of European heritage, American Indians, African Americans, and Mexicans.[3]

During the Depression Era the FSA was well-known for its photos of impoverished Americans. The FSA photographers showed them to have a self-possessed grace and this inherent dignity conveyed to viewers some basis for hoping that the millions who suffered misfortune would not just survive but potentially thrive within a reconstructed economy.[4] When the photographic unit was moved from FSA to OWI there was less need and no mandate to produce compelling images of poverty and individuals' struggles to overcome it. During the war buildup and after Pearl Harbor the photos taken by the photography unit both encouraged and reflected a growing sense of American cohesiveness — people working together to produce the industrial output that would be needed to win the war. The OWI photographers did this, however, without entirely abandoning their earlier point of view. From 1940 onward the photos they took continue to show the great diversity of a people who were considered at the time to be "ordinary" citizens.[5]

The portraits that Delano took of the hundreds of workers he encountered during his assignment with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe demonstrate that he possessed the skill necessary to show the simple human dignity in the "common man" (a phrase, like "ordinary citizen" that was in vogue at the time). He disassembled this collective stereotype into its very specific, individual components. The captions he gave his photos frequently state the job a subject performs and give his or her name and home town and the photos themselves tend to show personal habits through grooming, clothing, and posture. More than that, his photos have a broader aesthetic and cultural value. Delano's understanding of photographic design lifts them above the level of journalism. It's his skill as an artist which leads us now, in examining them, to see that they are something more than documentary artifacts. Delano had to plan his photos. The camera he used most frequently was awkward to use for snapshots. This wasn't really a drawback since it's obvious that he planned his photos carefully, choosing his subject, composition, and camera angle and waiting for the light to be right. It's reasonable to assume he sometimes posed his subjects, or, anyway, asked them to adjust their position to achieve the effect he wished to see.[6]

The FSA/OWI photographers were supposed to make factual images and not to alter them "for effect." During the Dust Bowl years, one of them was criticized for moving a bleached skull to improve his composition, but Delano, and his boss Stryker, understood that there was no fakery involved.[7] A photographer needed to be trusted to show a subject as it actually was in real life, and they lived up to this trust, but they also knew it to be their responsibility to make a photo that was meaningful. Stryker's mentor, Rexford Guy Tugwell, put this objective concretely in a conversation Stryker recalled long afterward. "Roy, a man may have holes in his shoes, and you may see the holes when you take the picture. But maybe your sense of the human being will teach you there's a lot more to that man than the holes in his shoes, and you ought to try and get that idea across."[8] Stryker stated the matter in his own words when, in an interview, he said how wage earners, like the trainmen in Delano's photos, could be photographed in a way that revealed their inherent worth. "They had dignity." he said, "And they sensed this guy [the photographer] could give it to them. Not make them beautiful, not make them look like something they weren't. But he put a dignity into that picture. They responded to him."[9]

Here are some more photos of trainmen in cupolas and a couple of others showing the position of the observation benches within the caboose. All are found in collections of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

This shows the cupola from the outside of the caboose.

{Caption: Marceline, Missouri. Brakeman in the cupola of his caboose in the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad yard}

From within the caboose, you can see the cupola benches in front of and above the rear door of the caboose.

{Caption: Conductor (right) and brakeman, in their places in the cupola of the caboose on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Argentine and Emporia, Kansas. On the wall between them is the air gauge showing the amount of air brake pressure in the train}

Here is the caboose interior with the end of one of the cupola benches visible at back.

{Caption: Freight train operations on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad between Chicago and Northwestern Railroad between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa. The caboose is the conductor's second home. He always uses the same one and many conductors cook and sleep there while waiting for trains to take back from division points}

In viewing all these photos you can tell that Delano had an aesthetic appreciation for the dramatic blocks of light and dark present when trainmen observed the train through the cupola's side windows.

{Caption: Brakeman H. L. Duffield, watching the train from the window in the cupola of the caboose on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Emporia and Wellington, Kansas}

{Caption: Conductor J.R. Crawford, watching the train from his window in the cupola of the caboose along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Canadian and Amarillo, Texas}

{Caption: Rear brakeman M. H. Burdette, watching the train from his window in the cupola on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, between Chillicothe, Illinois and Fort Madison, Iowa}

It's apparent that riding in the cupola was something like sitting in the upper deck of a London bus — a place to relax and watch the world go by. I'm suspect Delano was making a joke in saying the bottle contained hot coffee.

{Caption: Rear brakeman George Clark having his lunch in the cupola of the caboose on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, between Marceline, Missouri and Argentine, Kansas. The bottle contains hot coffee}

This is one of the few shots in which Delano used flash and it's the only one he took from below. Although it suffers the flattening that always occurs with single-source flash photography, it's still interesting in its composition, subject, and point of view.

{Caption: Hart (vicinity), Missouri. The conductor uses his air valve in emergencies when it is necessary for him to stop the train along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad between Fort Madison, Iowa and Marceline, Missouri}

Here is Delano himself, taken by an unnamed photographer.

{Caption: Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographer, full-length portrait, holding camera, standing on front of locomotive, taken ca. 1943, location not given}

I've marked this 1939 AT&SF map to show Delano's route in March 1943.

{1939 Map of Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railway; source: North American Railroads of the 1930's by Richard Parks}

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Some sources:

I've done earlier posts of Delano photos, including one from the March 1943 shoot. Click the Jack Delano label at right to view them. For posts showing other photos from Office of War Information files, click the OWI label.

Outline for a trip aboard a fast freight from Chicago Illinois to San Bernardino, Calif. (3 p.) by Jack Delano, in LOT 12024, Box 1, Clearances, Army, 1942-1943, held by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Letter: Roy Stryker to L.I. McDougle, 1942 October 12 [PDF file, 1 p., 134 kb] LOT 12024, Box 1, Clearances, 1942-1943, held by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Interview with Roy Stryker, conducted by Robert J. Doherty, F. Jack Hurley, Jay M. Kloner, and Carl G. Ryant on the American Suburb X web site

Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12 conducted by Richard Doud for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; transcript, 63 pp of a sound recording on 2 tape reels

Jack Delano in wikipedia

Jack Delano in the Museum of Contemporary Photography web site

https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/3145/Jack Delano.pdf?sequence=1 biography, Program of Digital Scholarship, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Documenting America, 1935-1943 by Carl Fleischhauer, Beverly W. Brannan, and Lawrence W. Levine (University of California Press, 1988)

www.lllevin.com/users/LarryLevin3660/docs/ASPP Stryker's America 3-08p21-24.pdf by Larry L. Levin on his own web site

Capturing the faces of railroading Who is Jack Delano? And how did his photography change the way Americans perceived railroading? by John Gruber, December 21, 2009, on the web site of Trains, The Magazine of Railroading

www.archives.gov/atlanta/education/depression-curriculum/section-2.pdf, "This Great Nation Will Endure": Photographs of the Great Depression A Curriculum Guide, National Archives at Atlanta

Chicago and Downstate: Illinois as Seen by the Farm Security Administration Photographers, 1936-1943 by Robert L. Reid and Larry A. Viskochil (University of Illinois Press, 1989)

A Chicago Hub Railroad of the 1930's - 1940's The Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway (Santa Fe) on r2parks.net

Picturing Texas: The Farm Security Administration-Office of War on the Portal to Texas History

Visual Sociology by Douglas Harper (Routledge, 2012)

The History of Photography: An Overview by Alma Davenport (UNM Press, 1991)

Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression by Colleen McDannell (Yale University Press, 2004)

Ordinary People: Jack Delano by Arthur H. Bleich in Rangefinder magazine

Crucible of Freedom: Workers' Democracy in the Industrial Heartland, 1914–1960 by Eric Leif Davin (Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010)

American Photography and the American Dream by James Guimond (UNC Press Books, 1991)

THE ART SPIRIT By Robert Henri; Notes Taken By M. R. From Robert Henri's Criticisms And Class Talks on Afterall / Online

The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration by Stuart Cohen (David R. Godine, 2009)

Jack Delano’s American Sonata by David Gonzalez, Lens, New York Times, October 13, 2011

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Notes:

[1] Outline for a trip aboard a fast freight from Chicago Illinois to San Bernardino, Calif. (3 p.) by Jack Delano, in LOT 12024, Box 1, Clearances, Army, 1942-1943, held by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The outline shows that Delano originally expected to take frieght trains pulled by the new diesel electric engines. As it turned out the trains were engined by steam locomotives, then acknowledged to be more expensive to operate, though now seen as highly romantic. Here is the summary page from this three-page document. Click to view full size.

{Outline for a trip aboard a fast freight from Chicago Illinois to San Bernardino, Calif. (3 p.) by Jack Delano, in LOT 12024, Box 1, Clearances, Army, 1942-1943, held by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress}

[2] Quoted in Documenting America, 1935-1943 by Carl Fleischhauer, Beverly W. Brannan, and Lawrence W. Levine (University of California Press, 1988)

[3] You can see something of this diversity by skimming the results of an online search of Delano's photographs from March 1943 in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division catalog.

[4] Stryker's approach to documentary photography of the American Depression contrasted the dignity and despair of the Depression's victims. His optimism about this dicotemy came out when he said: "Maybe I'm a fool, but I believe that dignity wins out. When it doesn't then we as a people will become extinct." (Quoted in Documenting America). Stryker's biography in The History of American Photography says he came to understand this dignity and and attain his positive outlook while he and his wife were living in a New York tenement during his school years: "Their neighbors were mostly immigrants who worked feverishly simply to maintain the barest requirements of life. This experience impressed Stryker immensely. Food may have been lacking, clothing may have been scarce, but the fiber of these people was based on dignity, endurance, and the simple pleasures afforded by freedom."

[5] Stryker wanted pictures of "the common people," the hard working survivors who built America. "I think it's significant," Stryker later said, "that in our entire collection we have only one picture of Franklin Roosebvelt, the most newsworthy man of the era ... You'll find no record of big people or big events in the collection ... not a single shot of Wall Street, and absolutely no celebrities." Quoted in Crucible of Freedom: Workers' Democracy in the Industrial Heartland, 1914–1960 by Eric Leif Davin (Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010)

[6] Delano's military authorization for the photo shoot enabled him to have the train stopped or moved for vantage to get a photo he wanted to take. If he could have the engineer and conductor do these things for him, there's little reason to believe he wouldn't also ask his sujects to move about a bit to improve a composition for him.

When WWII began, the FSA was folded into the Office of War Information (OWI) and its photographers were assigned to projects that would promote the war effort. Much to his delight, Delano was tapped for a month-long trip to document America’s railroads; he’d ride with the crews and even had the authority to stop the train (with the engineer’s consent) to get any shots he needed. ... Delano’s first attempt to stop a train for a shot he wanted was met by the engineer’s blunt refusal. “Young man,” he said, “if I stopped the train here we could never get it started again but would go rolling down the hill backward.” So Delano waited until he was aboard a different train, one that was rounding a curve with more than a 100 cars strung out behind carrying bombs, tractors, trucks and tanks. This time the engineer complied and brought the train to a halt. Delano hopped off but found the composition wasn’t right; the train needed to be moved forward some more. He shouted instructions to the engineer and the train inched forward. “Never had I had such a sense of power,” he recalls. “I felt like Hercules. Wow! To think I could move that whole train with just the wave of my hand.” When he’d finished shooting, he signaled the engineer to get moving again and hopped on the caboose as it rolled by.
-- Quoted in
Ordinary People: Jack Delano by Arthur H. Bleich in Rangefinder magazine

[7] On the skull controversy see:

1. Photography and the Great Depression: Arthur Rothstein, a site was created for a Photographic Archives course at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College
2. The History of Photography: An Overview by lma Davenport (UNM Press, 1991)
3. The controversy was eventually quelled when Stryker pointed out that while he moved the skull ten feet, he certainly did not move it out of the drought area, which was littered with such skulls.
4. THE NATURALISTIC ENTHYMEME AND VISUAL ARGUMENT: PHOTOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION IN THE 'SKULL CONTROVERSY'. by Cara A. Finnegan in Argumentation and Advocacy › Vol. 37 Nbr. 3, January 2001
5. Oral history interview with Arthur Rothstein, 1964 May 25, an interview of Arthur Rothstein conducted in New York, N.Y., 1964 May 25, by Richard Doud, for the Archives of American Art; Transcript: 31 pages

[8] Quoted in Documenting America, 1935-1943 by Carl Fleischhauer, Beverly W. Brannan, and Lawrence W. Levine (University of California Press, 1988).

Robert Henri, famous painter in the New York Ashcan School, his paintings are realistic, in the usual sense of the word, rather than abstract. He understood the difference between a painting which records an observation and a work of art — the difference between a work of art which simply records a subject faithfully and one that brings out something more from within it. In notes from lectures he gave at the Art Students League he said "Rather paint the flying spirit of the bird than its feathers." Quoted in Affirmations for Artists, ed. by Eric Maisel (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1996)

Delano realized that a good photograph could sometimes capture this flying spirit, but not always. He put a poem in his diary which he called "Things I cannot photograph." Here's its end:

A train is approaching us!
The glare of the headlight
With a WHOOSH of thunder as it flies by us.
The brakeman gets down from the cupola and watches it go by
Two red lights and a white one pass us
The white one waves up and down.
We answer
Then back again to the drone
I throw a cigarette out of the window
It whirls off in the backwash scattering sparks wildly like fireworks
The blackness again.

-- Quoted in: Jack Delano’s American Sonata by David Gonzalez, Lens, New York Times, October 13, 2011

[9] Oral history interview with Jack and Irene Delano, 1965 June 12 conducted by Richard Doud for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; transcript, 63 pp of a sound recording on 2 tape reels