Con
Nombre
By
Michael Penn MA'97
Photos courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, FSA-OWI Collection
To
a point, Ketchum's project is an answer to Shakespeare's
musing, "What's in a name?" While FSA records don't
offer a definitive rationale for why the subjects
remained anonymous, it seems clear that it was no
clerical accident. James Curtis, author of the FSA
history and critique Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth,
suggests that the project's handlers were influenced
by the social progressivism of the day. They wanted
the FSA collection to have an everymanism that transcended
the individual lives or circumstances of the people
in the photographs. "Stripped of their identities,"
Curtis writes, "they became the common men and women
whose plight the Roosevelt administration was working
to improve."
Dorothea
Lange's famous Migrant Mother, for example,
appears to have been left anonymous on purpose. When
Lange found the woman with her children in a California
pea-pickers camp, she spoke to her briefly to ask
permission to take pictures, but she made no attempt
to learn her name. "It was not necessary," Lange later
wrote, saying that the woman's face captured "the
essence of the assignment."
It's
plausible that the FSA photographers were following
the norms of social science, which traditionally has
kept the identities of its research subjects private.
Few things are as public as a face, however, and few
faces have been as public as the Migrant Mother's.
It seems reasonable that someone might eventually
want to look for her. In 1975, photographer Bill Ganzel
did just that, as part of a project to trace the lives
of Oklahoma migrants featured in the FSA collection,
which eventually became the book Dust Bowl Descent.
He found Florence Thompson, the woman who thirty-nine
years earlier huddled with her children for Lange's
picture, living in Modesto, California. Thompson,
who had ten children, died in 1983.
In
Dust Bowl Descent, Ganzel writes that the project
made him feel "more like a detective than a photographer."
With such work, he and Ketchum have moved the FSA
collection beyond artistry to anthropology, which
has opened it to a new school of researchers who are
using it to tell new stories about life during the
Depression — and about what can be revealed by photographic
records. Ketchum's students, who have been weaned
on healthy portions of cultural pluralism and respect
for individuality, are generally less interested in
seeing the FSA subjects as representative motifs for
political agendas. More often, they're asking who
the people are and what their lives were like. They're
keen to hear the individual instruments that make
up the symphony of FSA images.
"It seems like [the FSA] just wanted to show a photograph,"
says Ya-Ling Tsai '01, one of four graduate students
whom Ketchum took to New Mexico last summer. "They
didn't pay that much attention to actually knowing
people, to finding out who they are. I think who they
are is a very important part of the photograph."
Tsai,
a native of Taiwan who is pursuing an MFA in photography
with an interest in visual anthropology, says she
wanted to go to New Mexico "to get to know people's
lives." In the villages, the students splintered off,
following separate families for hours or days at a
time. Tsai spent a day with a graying woman from Chamisal
who taught her how to make tortillas and showed her
the bleaching animal skulls she had in her backyard.
It was quite a while before Tsai took her camera out
of her bag, but she regards the time she spent listening
to the woman's stories as essential for making a picture.
"If you want to document people's lives, you have
to get to know their lives first," she says.
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