But photographs are also pictures - organized forms on a two-dimensional surface - and they are part of the history of pictures. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But I love the photograph for its compositional harmony, which is like the harmony of a chain gang’s song, or like the paradoxical pleasure Northup took in the sight of a cotton field in bloom.Ī photograph can’t help taming what it shows. I hate “The Cotton Pickers.” It’s unpleasant to be confronted with the abasement of these men in the form of a photograph. It reaches back to images from the 19th century and before, and it stretches forward to the crouched and hooded prisoners of Guantánamo Bay. Within a single frame, we witness forced labor, the plantation economy, cotton’s allure, black subjection, government control and the facelessness of the impoverished. “The Cotton Pickers,” considered by itself, is also a work of compressed history. But it certainly couldn’t stem the huge increase in the number of imprisoned Americans between the late ’60s and now, or the way that increase disproportionately affected black Americans.
#Photo sense unit series#
Lyon hoped that his prison series would change the way people thought about incarceration. “The Cotton Pickers” is an activist picture. And I think of the way “The Cotton Pickers” is bound to other rhythmically satisfying images from the history of photography: Paul Strand’s silhouetted figures dwarfed by the great buildings of Wall Street, Dorothea Lange’s bent-backed Mexican migrant picking tomatoes, Lee Friedlander’s note-perfect scatter of musicians walking on a New Orleans street. But is the suffering related to an exodus, with its uncertain future, or is it related to brutal servitude, with the grim certainty that the labor is unending? This photograph is sometimes titled “Slaves Returning From the Cotton Fields in South Carolina,” which suggests the latter but the feeling of ambiguity remains. It is an image of suffering, no question. When I began to think about Lyon’s image, the Salgado and Bruegel pictures, quietly at rest in my memory, glowed in response, as though summoned.Ĭonsider, for instance, an 1860s photograph by an unknown photographer of a winding line of black people standing in a field carrying loads on their heads. And in the drawing of “Prudence” (1559) from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s series on the Seven Virtues, there is a detail of two figures side by side, almost identical to each other, their heads obscured by the two enormous sacks they prudently haul away for a future time of need. There is no individuality: The men are interchangeable parts in a terrifying theater of mass labor. These men in Lyon’s photograph with their outsize burdens immediately remind me of figures in one of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil, the entire picture plane of which is an array of small sacks set on glistening backs. We can track it better when we locate it in relation to other stars.
A strong photograph like “The Cotton Pickers” is like a star on a clear night. The pattern of the cotton field in Lyon’s photograph reminds me of something the great art critic John Berger once wrote: that when we look at a star-filled night sky, we are able to tell stories about it only by organizing the stars into constellations. The images that associatively come to my mind when I look at “The Cotton Pickers” are highly personal, but they remain opaque until I name them. But words have their place, too, and what goes without saying often needs to be primed with speech.
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