This
photograph, taken by Russell Lee in 1940, is
captioned "Wife of a Spanish-American farmer
and her child, Chamisal, New Mexico." More
than sixty years later, Ketchum located the
woman, Matilsa Lovato, still in Chamisal. When
she saw the old photograph, she nearly fainted.
|
Con
Nombre
By
Michael Penn MA'97
Photos courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, FSA-OWI Collection
Nearly
six decades after John Collier snapped the picture
of the rancher's sons, another photographer followed
his path through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north
of Santa Fe. Driving a battered AMC Matador, Cavalliere
Ketchum navigated along what locals call the "high
road" — a series of snaking, dusty lanes that ascend
from Santa Fe into the dazzling indigo of the New
Mexico sky. His target was a remote collection of
Spanish and Indian villages that are found only on
the most ambitious of maps. He, too, was looking for
the face of America. But the America he sought was
one faded into the sepia of an old photograph, one
that he wasn't sure still existed, and one that he
had little idea how to find.
Ketchum,
a professor of art and UW-Madison's primary teacher
of photography for more than three decades, didn't
go to the New Mexican highlands to re-create Collier's
work. He went to finish it. For nearly half of his
sixty-four years, Ketchum has been in a slow, patient
quest, retracing the steps of Collier and other FSA
photographers in an attempt to find and identify the
people whom they captured on film. Grasping time in
snatches whenever classes and other academic commitments
allow, he returns to New Mexico to comb the dozens
of tiny pueblos and Spanish-speaking communities between
Santa Fe and Taos that Collier and Lee photographed
years ago. With each visit, he totes a thick file
of Xeroxed photographs — the collection of history's
ghosts whom Ketchum calls, in their lingo, sin
nombre, without a name.
Attaching names to those faces — and there are hundreds
in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains alone — is a mammoth
task, one that Ketchum can't hope to achieve in his
lifetime. But he can't fathom leaving it undone, either.
He is driven by a desire to complete the unfinished
jigsaw puzzle of the FSA collection, which he believes
yields a fascinating, albeit fragmentary, look at
American lives and cultures.
Like many people of his generation, Ketchum recalls
seeing FSA photographs first as a young and curious
boy. Taken between 1935 and 1943, they were essentially
a propagandist masterstroke of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
administration. Wanting to show the struggle of farmers
and other rural Americans — and hence the need for
federal support programs — the government commissioned
the massive project, disseminating images widely to
newspapers and magazines. FSA works appeared prominently
in such national publications as Look, Life,
and Fortune, as well as in exhibits at the
Museum of Modern Art and at the 1936 Democratic National
Convention.
In a day before television, when photography provided
the only visual imagery most people had of remote
lands and unfamiliar lives, the photographs made a
lasting impression. A 1939 special edition of U.S.
Camera Annual called the collection "the most
remarkable human documents ever rendered in pictures."
Poet Archibald MacLeish wrote "Land of the Free" after
seeing FSA images of American poverty, and countless
other artists were similarly influenced. Ketchum believes
that John Steuart Curry may have drawn upon an FSA
photograph when painting the mural that hangs in the
Biochemistry Building.
Some
evocative FSA images — such as Lange's heart-rending
portrait of a migrant mother with her children or
Evans's careful images of Southern sharecroppers — helped define urbanites' mental geography and ethnography
of their nation, and have retained great recognition.
The accuracy of the portrayals is debatable; FSA shooters
followed specific scripts and were instructed to play
up certain themes. But no one questions the artistic
vision of those behind the lens, or their ability
to bring life to two dimensions.
"What I saw in their work was a great sense of humanity,"
Ketchum says. Raised in Arizona, he vividly recalls
the images of Southwestern ranchers and cowboys whose
stories he felt he understood from shared life experiences.
"I grew up among the people I saw in those photographs,"
he says.
The
FSA works remained an influence as Ketchum pursued
his own artistic career. During the 1960s, as a graduate
student at the University of New Mexico, he traveled
into many of the same villages the FSA photographers
had documented, although he didn't know it at the
time. His dissertation combined his photography from
the small Spanish villages in the southern part of
the state with samplings of traditional stories and
folk music — something the FSA very well might have
done if it had been born in a multimedia age.
It
was only years later, after Ketchum had come to UW-Madison,
that he began plumbing the FSA collection. He applied
for a grant from the Graduate School to study at the
Library of Congress, where he intended to pull images
from the northern New Mexican villages between Santa
Fe and Taos. While examining the black-and-white prints
in Washington, he had a startling realization. He
recognized several people in the photographs.
Ketchum
has a photographer's eye for detail, and an extraordinary
visual memory that can recall people and places he
first saw years before. It may seem fantastic that
someone could recognize in a thirty-year-old picture
the face of a person whom he'd met perhaps once or
twice, but for Ketchum it's nothing out of the ordinary.
That gift launched his career within a career.
He
took the photographs back to Chamisal, a town high
up among the cottonwoods and orchards sixty miles
north of Santa Fe. "I asked around at post offices
and grocery stores," he says, "and finally someone
said to me, 'Ay, that's my cousin. Where did you get
this? You should show it to him.' "
In
Latino culture, to be sin nombre is a terrible
consequence. It is to be more than just without a
name, but without connection or culture. It is to
be lost. In some communities, to take in a wandering
stranger is to make that person con nombre
— to give him or her identity. At that moment,
Ketchum realized his mission. He wanted to bring all
those lonely travelers home.
back,
1, 2, 3,
4, 5,
6, 7,
next
On Wisconsin home
