Sherry Chandler

One thing I meant to mention yesterday and forgot: the new Oxford American has several articles in it about the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. One of them, “Dying Order,” is written by Patty Friedman, a novelist who stayed behind and got caught in the flooding. Her narrative is compelling and I was reading intently, when I came across the following passage. After several days alone in a house in a flooded neighborhood without even a radio, Friedman is about to be given a ride to her sister’s house by a young man in a rowboat:

I threw random items into a red canvas carry-on: toothbrush and toothpaste (travel size), Visa card, license, health card, and all my cash, two hundred dollars. Two shirts, two pairs of pants, underwear. A piece of my new novel that I’d tried to write on legal paper right after my laptop battery died the morning of the storm. My friend Lynn Pruett’s novel… (OA Fall 2005, p 60)

Whoa! Lynn Pruett is writer in residence at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning here in Lexington, a woman I personally know. We have friends in common. All of a sudden, the plight of artists in/from New Orleans, which had been an intellectual concept, was very real indeed.

When Friedman is taken from New Orleans, she has to wade through several blocks of flood waters, pushing her son’s kitten in a storage tub sort of like Moses in his basket. Lynn’s novel is one of the things she takes with her.

Friedman’s grandmother died in a death camp in Germany in 1943, which also connected her to the experience of the “This Is Home Now” symposium last week.

Erik Reece, in his article “Friend of the Underclass?”, points out that Shelby Lee Adams is a cousin to Hobart Ison. Ison is infamous for having shot the Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor in 1967, an incident that is the subject of an Appalshop film, Stranger with a Camera. Many in Appalachia in the 60s resented the negative publicity they received after the publication of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Ison was expressing that resentment. Reece points out a certain irony in the fact that his cousin now gets away with publishing a far more negative image of Appalachia because he is an insider.

In general, Reece sees Adams as much more exploitative than O’Connor and his ilk because, instead of trying to shed light and bring help to a neglected people, Adams’s photographs seem to imply that…

…these people somehow deserve their suffering…that all of this is somehow self-imposed and unavoidable, as if in Eastern Kentucky there’s just something in the water.

Well, there is something in the water. There’s arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and a host of other heavy metals — byproducts of the mining and burning of coal. A recent study out of Eastern Kentucky University found that children in Letcher County, where Adams grew up, suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath — sometimes called “blue baby syndrome” — that can almost certainly be traced back to dissolved minerals in their drinking water. (OA Fall 2005 pp 148-149)

Reece is speaking as a social critic here and he very much disapproves of Adams’s work because he thinks it furthers dangerous stereotypes and clichés: “The danger in a cliché lies in its power to oppress…” He prefers the “understated lyricism of William Gedney’s photographs of Appalachian poverty” or the photographs in Voices from the Mountains (The University of Georgia Press, 1996). I am not versed enough in any of these works to discuss what Alan MacKellar might call the difference between photojournalism and art photography or whether there might be some danger of romanticizing the subject. I do know that artists are notoriously hard to keep on message.