Curtis' Aberrant Criticism

[Review of Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered by James Curtis, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989, 139 pp. $29.95, as published in The Journal of American History, December 1990]

This book reinvents the wheel--badly.

James Curtis argues that the pictures by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) were often propaganda made by photographers who wanted their images to carry certain messages and who "manipulated" what they photographed to make their points stronger. This has been a truism of photocriticism for a long while, and few readers will accept Curtis's claim to have invented "a new methodology for visual analysis."

Some readers may be surprised, as I am, that Curtis thinks all manipulation the same. He would have us believe that Russell Lee's choosing to go off the beaten path and photograph a settler community in New Mexico is morally equivalent to Arthur Rothstein's carrying a cow skull around so he could photograph it in various parts of South Dakota, and that Dorothea Lange's making a closeup of a migrant mother pea picker showing only three of her seven children is as duplicitous as Rothstein's stage-managing a picture of a father and two sons running from a dust storm that had in fact passed over, telling the young boy to put his sleeve in front of his eyes as though he were having trouble seeing, and later lying about how the picture was made.

Curtis's chief intention is to prove that the most admired of FSA photographers, Walker Evans, also manipulated photographers. On this question I must declare a personal interest. My Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973, 1986) quotes Evans saying that documentarians should disturb what they photograph as little as possible. Specifically, they should not add things, as Rothstein added the cow skull. "That's where the word 'documentary' holds," Evans told me in 1971. "You don't touch a thing. You 'manipulate,' if you like, when you frame a picture--one foot one way or one foot another. But you're not putting anything in."

Curtis points out that several of Evans's interiors of sharecropper houses differ in small details--a cotton smock missing from the wall, a windup clock on the mantel--from the elaborate written descriptions James Agee gives us in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). This point was made by Erling Larsen in his James Agee (1971), though Curtis does not credit Larsen. I discussed it with Evans, and he discussed it with students in University of Texas classes when he visited in 1974, a year before his death. He said he and Agee worked in the houses at different times. This would be likely since the two would have gotten in each other's way (Evans was using a view camera on tripod and external flash). When I mentioned Larsen's specific accusation--which Curtis echoes--that Evans moved a bed to an oblique angle, Evans said he was sure he had not. "Why should I?" he said. "It was fine where it was."

This is the central problem with Curtis's theory as regards Evans. It fails the pragmatic test. He does not show that Evans's picture are aesthetically any better for the the manipulation he thinks took place than they would have been had they followed Agee's descriptions to the letter.