Urban vs. Rural Photography in the U.S.

This photograph from Clarence John Laughlin offers a romanticized view of a changing urban landscape. The window light pouring into the room filled with rubble turns our focus to forgotten structures of the past. The mysterious setting of the photograph serves as the backdrop to a draped, masked figure posed artistically, uncovering hidden and cryptic stories. Laughlin was particularly dedicated to the landscape of New Orleans and its folklore. He was dubbed by Lewis Kachur a “regionalist surrealist” for his mythical projections onto the landscape. Growing up for the first few years of his life on a plantation, Laughlin longed for the past New Orleans and society he saw dwindling through the abandonment of certain architecture such as Victorian buildings and plantations. Much of his photography like The Auto Eroticists takes place in dilapidated buildings with jagged light pouring onto his choreographed subjects. Kachur says of Laughlin’s work, “He continued his elegiac meditation on the American ruin, with its suggestions of decay and entropy. Laughlin wrote at some length of the dystopian symbolism: ‘This kind of animistic projection grows out of [the photographer’s] profound fear of what machines are doing to our society, and of the still more dangerous things they may do in the future’” (Kachur, 223). The fascination with crumbling infrastructure and the mythical qualities imbued in this version of the city shows how Laughlin grappled with the changes happening to his urban landscape. These qualities, along with Laughlin’s own writing on the subject, show how photography was a vehicle for grappling with the change happening to urban landscapes. By defining his work through the forgotten, outcast buildings, Laughlin romanticized the past and mourns the future he was seeing constructed through development and industry progress. Though his body of work, including The Auto Eroticists, is focused on themes specific to New Orleans, his  ability to attach a personal meaning to larger developments within urban development is important to photography’s role in shaping social myths around urban life.

Five Cents a Spot forces the viewer to confront the gruesome conditions of city life in poverty. The frame is crowded with the reality of tenet conditions at the time, seeing both the high body count of the room as well as their belongings encroaching on them. Riis places the viewer on the floor with the people experiencing these dire living circumstances, using the perspective to push the viewer to imagine life in their shoes and under these constraints. After coming to America as a poor immigrant himself, Riis started working as a reporter on the crime beat. Riis uncovered and exposed the living conditions for poor people, particularly immigrants, living in New York City. Riis would uniquely present his photos in lectures that were wildly popular among middle and upper-class people of the time. Not only had Riis exposed conditions that his audiences were most likely socially segregated from, but just the sheer amount of images and Riis’ incorporation of visual evidence into his lectures captivated his audiences. At a time where photographs were understood as objective evidence, Riis’ viewers discovered realities they were protected from by economic privilege. Riis’ work received national attention for exposing the depth of poverty in city life, even spurring a personal relationship with Theodore Roosevelt who upon seeing his photography promised to help this issue. While he wasn’t the only voice speaking to this issue, his use of photography was seen as a major contributor in the shifting of cultural perceptions around poverty, “through his photographic slides, he was able to demonstrate tenement conditions to the nation in a way which made them irrefutable.” (411, Szaz et al.). This spoke to his innovative nature of infusing photography with his lectures and writings in the field of documentary photography. The combination fought against stereotypes circulating at the time that poverty was the result of moral failings.

Riis’s In the Sun Pressroom at 2 a.m. is a testament to the power of photography to garner sympathy. The bright flash literally exposes these children outcast from society who would’ve gone otherwise unnoticed. The child’s body taking up the length of this tiny space visually reinforces their youthfulness, driving home the message that poverty affects even the most vulnerable and undeserving in society. The dusty, dark space is complemented by the clothes falling apart on the boys, with rips on the pants and jacket making the extent to which the boys are suffering even more apparent. Riis’ images, especially emotionally poignant ones like this, served as evidence for Riis’ campaign to improve living conditions through philanthropy. Riis’ image here chooses the heart-tugging subject of children living in dirt in an effort to identify through which the public is most likely to sympathize with and understand the plight of poverty. The combination fought against stereotypes circulating at the time that held that poverty was the result of moral failings. The existence of such innocence in abhorrent conditions allowed people of privilege to question whether poverty was the fault of the poor or their environment. As a religious man himself, Riis’ photography appealed to the Christian values of the nation by making viewers encounter people and conditions that demanded their moral attention. “Christian viewers faced in Riis’s photographs of the poor an uncomfortable claim on their conscience: they could not easily ignore the condition of the poor without violating the fundamental moral commitments of their faith” (Morgan, 148). This shift of responsibility from poverty being the fault of the poor to a social responsibility of the community was a radical change at the time. The sheer change created from the act of witnessing the pain of these two children speaks not only to Riis’ impact on the concept of poverty but on the concept of photography. By wielding photography to change minds on issues he was passionate about, Riis set a precedent in how documentary photography can create change through forcing the viewer to bear witness to problems they might otherwise be able to ignore.

Russell Lee’s Caravan of Striking Cotton Pickers depicts immigrant workers holding a strike for their rights. Standing in an orderly fashion in front of their transportation vehicles, and standing on top of them, the workers are in the midst of it. As in, they are not fresh on the scene, nor about to leave it, but have been at the location long enough to build confidence in their cause. This is shown by the forefront figures who are grounded quite firmly, determined to be seen. With mostly their profiles visible, you see the workers not as much fixated on the photographer, Lee, as they are on whatever or whomever was outside the frame to the right. Given the contextual history of this photograph, the immigrant workers are likely facing members of the Association of Farm Owners. Hitting the United Stated in 1929 and ending with World War II, the Great Depression affected all communities and workers, but specifically the agricultural industry and the rural landscape. To help address these problems, a New Deal agency called the FSA, Farm Security Administration, was created. Russell Lee was an FSA photographer. Lee, as well as the other FSA photographers, followed a script from Washington D.C; the script said who and what should be documented. These strikes met the guidelines. Early 1930s rural California faced a multitude of strikes in particular because immigrant workers were underpaid for their services. In October of 1933 labor strikes throughout California were instigated by the cotton farming industry. The pickers, the Mexican immigrant workers, took on the growers, the Association of Farm Owners. However, it wasn’t just members of the latter association that tried to stop these strikes—it was law enforcement too. Throughout the strikes, laws were put in place that tried to regulate them, if not completely stop them from occurring. For example, a sheriff in Tulare County, the place this photograph was taken, invoked a debilitating policy that prohibited strikers from stopping on roads, double backing on roads, getting out of their vehicles, and screaming into fields. Yet, as you can see in the photograph, the strikers are doing all of the above. Instead of seeing these strikers contained by these laws, you see them empowering themselves  and persevering through oppression. Nevertheless, it makes you think about what happened before and after the photograph was taken, and whether or not there were more photographs that captured the scene from different perspectives. What else happened behind the scenes of this photograph, and behind the scripted filter of Lee's camera lens?

Arthur Rothstein’s High School Students, Migrant Camp captures the results of New Deal programs and its impact on the migrant community. Smiling at the camera, the four high school students look happy. Their clothes are well-kept and they look clean. Overall, their appearance could match that of other high school students at the time, who that did not live in a migrant camp. In the beginning of the Great Depression, Americans from the Midwest had to migrate due to the Dust Bowl. Many migrated to California. These migrants were viewed by locals in the area with disgust as foreigners, because many contracted diseases while living at the camps. Given the high and unprecedented levels of migrants, migrant camps were not sanitary or regulated properly until after New Deal programs were implemented. If taken ten years earlier at the start of the Great Depression, as opposed to at the end, these high schoolers would not have been presented to you in this way. It is not only because of the unsanitary living conditions faced a decade earlier, but because FSA photographers had a different script to follow. In the early 1930s FSA photographers’ jobs were to document poverty and the unhygienic living conditions migrants were living in; they wanted to show Americans America and the lives of rural poor. This type of photograph--even if possible to capture at the time, though unlikely--would not have fit this script. You would not see it being used to promote Roosevelt’s New Deal Programs because it wouldn’t tug at the American people's heart strings. However, by the end of the 1930’s, the script changed. Roosevelt needed footage not to get support for his programs, but to show that they worked. So, images like Rothstein’s started to be produced by many FSA photographers. In the top right corner of the window on the office building is a sign that reads “U.S Department of Agriculture Farm Security Administration.” Placing these four students in front of an FSA office building at the Migrant Camp links the high schoolers to the New Deal. If they weren’t placed here, would you think they were migrants? Is the placement of the students all that Rothstein staged, or did he dress them up to make them look more presentable as well?

In this image here titled Arkansas Squatters, Dorothea Lange portrays the destitution characteristic of labor worker life. Occupying most of the image is a typical shack found at a squatter camp, one of the two housing options available to labor workers in 1935. Lange captures the shack with high definition, allowing you to delineate every makeshift material used to assemble its walls: the dusty canvas blanket, the overlapping cardboard boxes, and the thin pieces of wood. You may also notice all the trash around the shack that not even Lange’s camera lens can contain. In the foreground is the lumpy and uneven terrain on which the shack sits haphazardly. All of these features of the space that have been accentuated by Lange’s focused and highly-defined photograph make the structural flimsiness of the shack palpable. You may even worry how the shack would fare if a light breeze swept through this place. In just this one snapshot of a shack, Lange encapsulates the unstable life of migrant labor workers in California. Labor work in California’s agribusiness industry was fickle and unpredictable. During harvest, which typically lasted a short spell of time, farmers needed hundreds of thousands of workers but only ten thousand workers the rest of the year. This meant that labor workers remained unemployed for months at a time and constantly relocated themselves and their families throughout the year to follow the various harvest seasons. Therefore, they never had permanent accommodations, let alone accommodations up to building-standards. Though primarily an FSA photographer, Lange also took photos for her husband, Paul Taylor. Taylor was a progressive agricultural economist and consultant for the State Department, who hired Lange to help him build   a case for federal housing for farm workers. This was likely Lange’s reason for documenting workers’ squatter camps in this photograph here. Taylor considered himself and Lange objective experts, uncovering and documenting the facts to make better government policy. But knowing their underlying political agendas, do you think this photograph is factual or objective? How do Taylor’s political motivations complicate Lange’s photo, which presumably she took for him?

Dorothea Lange’s Mexicans, field laborers, on strike in cotton picking season, apply to Farm Security Administration (FSA) for relief. Bakersfield, California pictures migrant workers standing outside an FSA building waiting to apply for financial aid. With their hands in their pockets and their bodies leaning against the brick wall of the FSA building, the workers appear passive, bored, and tired as they wait for admission into the building. The figures form a disorganized cluster along the stairs where there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to where they stand or where they direct their semi-conscious gazes. Evidenced by the title, the figures are some of the cotton pickers participating in the migrant farm workers strikes. But because they ceased to work to devote their energies towards advocating for their better working conditions, their financial situations became so dire that they needed to apply for relief money from the government. Lange documents their slouched postures and dazed expressions to communicate migrant workers’ sense of hopelessness as it relates to their fight. They can no longer actively participate in the protests; they can no longer be their own advocates. Because of their dire financial circumstances, they must address the crises, like homelessness and starvation, which were once looming possibilities, creeping closer and closer into reality for these workers. As an FSA photographer, Lange documented workers for the widely contested New Deal farm policy. Lange and other FSA photographers had the job of taking pictures of rural life that garnered public, specifically urbanite, sympathies for farm workers so that there would be less backlash against the government for spending its money on programs that helped only some (though needy) segments of the population. Consider how you feel viewing this image now. Does Lange’s picture of labor workers’ helplessness make you feel sympathetic for them? Lange was a city-born city-dweller and the FSA hired her in part because of her novel, urbanite eyes on the rural vistas. How might her positionality as an urbanite herself come through in this photograph? How might Lange’s own urbanite perspective in these rural scenes attract fellow urbanite sympathies?

In Folsom Street Fair, Janet Delaney confronts a person belonging to the LGBTQ+ community, a community whose presence within the urban landscape, though long-held, has only been recognized, accepted, and celebrated publicly in the last thirty years. The person in the photograph stands upright and stares sternly at Delaney. They proudly wear a leather ensemble consisting of a black bra, black leather corset with buckles, and black underwear. Their leather outfit undoubtedly makes reference to the leather bars and other trysting spots for the gay community once concentrated on these same blocks in the 1970s. In their seriousness, they assert  their claim to Folsom' Street and SoMa—places that provided the gay community in San Francisco a safe home when few places did. Folsom Street Fair belongs to Delaney’s series “SoMa Now,” a response to her earlier series “South of Market'' she made while living in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco during the 1970s and 1980s. When Delaney first photographed SoMa, it was on the cusp of major demographic transformation because of urban flight. The gay community began moving into San Francisco in the 1960s, however not until the 1970s and the 1980s did the community accumulate a commonly known presence. In the 1970s and 1980s families fled to the suburbs so the city experienced an influx of gay folks who quickly occupied all the vacated apartments and established spaces in SoMa for their community to exist safely.

But after the gay community’s substantial growth in SoMa in the 1970s and 1980s, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency designated SoMa a “blighted zone,” which in turn caused the city government to largely neglect this area. The city government only paid attention to the improved, redeveloped, and “beautiful” areas of San Francisco. Hence, the motivation for the first “Folsom Street Fair'' in 1984. “Folsom Street Fair'' was a BDSM and leather themed block party created to draw public attention to SoMa as a vital and energetic part of the city desiring further development. As evidenced by the date Delaney took the photograph here, the “Folsom Street Fair'' was a success and stood the test of time; now it happens every year, focusing its goals now on supporting local SoMa businesses and bringing together diverse, eclectic populations from around the world to celebrate leather lifestyles and LGBTQ+ communities out in the open. In Delaney’s Folsom Street Fair here, you, the viewers, confront the participant next to the same homes and on the same streets that had been the safe enclave for this gay community in San Francisco since 1960. How do you feel confronting an LGBTQ+ person here? Why does Delaney capture a person at this event? How does this photograph respond to Delaney’s earlier photograph series and experiences living in SoMa in the 1970s and 1980s?

Diagram for Gallery I

Instead of simply separating our photos by their categorization as rural or urban scenes, we strategically integrated our photos so the viewer could see conceptions of urban and rural identities side by side or directly across from each other in the gallery space. We thought this design choice would help the viewer compare and contrast the photographs. We also thought dividing the space into two via a partition would allow us to better group photos with stronger and more obvious connections together. For example, we grouped Lange’s Arkansas Squatters, Riis’s Five Cents a Spot, and Laughlin’s The Auto Eroticists together on one side of the gallery (the upper half of the diagram) because all three of those photos’ subject matters depict living conditions. And though depicting a mix of urban and rural subjects, all three photographs show squalor, destitution, and structural frailty as characteristic of people’s living conditions in both types of places. Their placement at the beginning introduces the viewer to the landscapes geographically. Meanwhile, in the second half of the gallery space, we purposefully grouped the photographs of people as the main subject matter together. We wanted the viewer to see the demographic influence in shaping places’ identities and the many kinds of relationships different people have--or rather photographers show people as having--to rural or urban places. There are a whole range of relationships present in these photos. To name a few of these relationships, Riis’ In the Sun Press Room shows children corrupted by industry and modernization in cities. Meanwhile, Lee’s Caravan Strikers shows cotton workers fighting for federal support of more just and humane treatment on rural land whose owners exploited them. Finally, in Delaney’s Folsom, Delaney captures a participant in an LGBTQ+ parade standing with quiet authority, publicly reclaiming their belonging to this landscape that once ostracized them and their community. The last notable design choice within our exhibition is placing Delaney’s Folsom Street nearest the exit so that it is the last photograph viewers encountered before leaving the gallery. This photograph, we thought, might resonate most with the viewers as the photograph was taken in 2012 of a scene    similar to one viewers have likely seen either first-hand if they attended an LGBTQ+ parade or indirectly, online from news coverage of different LGBTQ+ pride events. The intention of this placement is to force viewers to confront the ramifications of the urban fears established at the beginning of the twentieth century that still exist today by being face-to-face with someone who, as evidenced by the photo, constantly has to prove their positive contribution to the urban and broader American landscape. We hope the organization of the photographs as given in the diagram above will allow the viewer to see the similar categories of subjects photographers captured and manipulated while showing the nuanced and complex relationships between the subjects of the photographs and the landscape. Ultimately, as the viewers leave, we hope they realize the implications of the photographs in forming the pervasive fears, identities, and images still attributed to rural and urban spaces and the people within them today.