Verde Smoke

This week we’re transitioning a bit away from the daily light observations, into some deeper observations based on our readings, primarily from Anne Spirn’s Language of Landscape. This week, we delved deep into discussion of the vocabulary used by language: processes, matter, form, and performance spaces.

At the same time, I started to get deeper into defining my own project work with MIT@Lawrence, around the idea of gathering and translating a collective identity for Lawrence. Collective identity in this context means the sense of belonging or “we-ness” an individual feels toward their participation in a community, especially in contrast to the idea of the “other.” My goal in Lawrence is to collect (or encourage the self or youth-led collection of) the personal narratives of both the key decision makers and everyday citizens/residents individually, and synthesize these narratives into one piece by common themes or temporally. Hopefully, many new media forms such as videos, audio pieces, digital stories, and digital photographs will be used to represent these narratives. I hope to mirror my text and audio collection with my own personal photography of not only the people of Lawrence, but also the physical landscape.

I started the week by reviewing the work of Dorothea Lange (An American Exodus, 1939) with the migrant workers in the South and Midwest. I choose to consider Lange’s work because of her concentration on depicting social concerns and her amazing technique of focusing on people in relation to their place and time. I’m hoping to emulate her work greatly in my photos in Lawrence, especially because of her detailed non-statistical notes from the field, which included interviews and quotes from her subjects. I’m also hoping to perhaps work with some youth to take on this photographic style as well, as a collection technique for the narratives.

In reviewing Exodus, I noted a few methods Lange used that I found pertinent:

• Shot angle to capture the feeling of closeness of buildings in the slums of the South
• Use of a silhouette to make a farmer dwarfed and faceless as compared to a huge farming machine, as if he was “every man”
• Re-occurrence of empty houses and dry land in the photos not only because it was reality, but also to stress the dire situation of the people in them
• Use of visual irony, such as laundry (proof of life) in the background of a photo filled with sand from the Dust Bowl in the foreground or the “Travel While You Sleep” road sign behind children of migrant workers camped out in front of it.
• Use of repetition, such as the arched backs of workers in row mirroring the rows of the plants in the field, highlighting how humans were forced to become mechanized and ordered.
• Extreme significant details, such as intense focus on a worker’s hands, shirt wrinkles and pebbles on the ground in “Waiting for Work,” to convey extra meaning, like he’s been waiting for work for longer than you’d think at first, superficial glance.

Lange’s photos included just as many landscapes as human portraits, but all these images told stories under the genres of production, community, movement, and waste. They followed common themes of survival in the face of slow natural and economic disaster and of human society and relations in response to what could be described as anarchical conditions. But the most striking aspects of these photos for me lay in Lange’s obvious integration into these people’s community and a fluency in the vocabulary of the landscapes they lived and worked upon. She used the lens of her camera and her field notes to not only publish their stories authentically but also to shed light on their condition as a prompt for change.

Later in the week, I started to consider some of the vocabulary that could be expressed by the landscape of Lawrence. A fellow student and I visited with the only intention of walking around, identifying a few key central community sites, and observing the economic flow of some of the streets. Unlike many New England towns, Lawrence’s form is based on an orderly structure of a grid, but the current shape of the landscape has changed significantly as industry has leaked out of the city. Obviously, the original designs for the city of Lawrence were focused on the process of production and movement spawned by the dam and subsequent waterways. The original designs of pathways of human interaction were focused on getting to and from work in the mills. But these performance spaces, the mills themselves and the roads to get to them, have been either left fallow or reapportioned to the use of art studios and galleries and other small businesses. Walking down the canal is now scenic and no longer part of movement of industry. What would the architects of the original Essex Company think of all this art and society (such as playgrounds) functioning in the shells of their old designs?

In the last assignment, I found myself drawn to spaces where natural elements were taking over the imposing orderly structures of the mills - ivy, cobwebs, flowers growing between planks of abandoned train tracks. The dueling processes conveyed in those landscapes tell a story of Lawrence as place of potential for triumph or loss.

I think the contrast of the original meaning of these spaces to their use (and meaning conveyed) now is why is may be so visually interesting to take photos of a community garden between or a mural painted on these starkly ordered brick buildings. I like finding homemade business signs, gardens and graffiti- these bits of proof of life so like Lange’s clothesline- in the midst of what’s being called a “forgotten city.” The MIT@Lawrence project hopes to nurture these anomalies into new structures and shapes of the city’s landscape. I’m thinking my photos for the next assignment might focus on these bits as well.

My goals this week in taking more photos for the significant detail assignment is to find some proof of economic life on Essex Street (or growth processes such as new immigrant owned businesses in contrast to the stereotype of economic flight or decay) and other positive processes conveyed in the landscape. I’m also planning to attend the Canal Illuminations celebration next Sunday, where I think I can get some interesting shots of the canal as a performance space, not for industry growth but community regrouping and revitalization.

Also, my longer-term goal is to get a tour from some community groups, preferably youth-led, of the local neighborhoods, so I can get garner some of the language of the landscape through their eyes and not just my new photographic one. One great example of this happened spontaneously on the street last Friday. Laurie and I had stopped at a local Italian bakery to buy some rolls, and exited a little unsure of where we should head next. A woman stopped us to ask if we were lost and launched into a complicated story about finding her uncle who had owned the now closed bakery across the street and still lived beside it. She told us the story of the bakery’s closing in detail but scoffed at the idea of me interviewing her uncle for my project. As we walked down the street toward the closed up bakery, she continued to comment on her own flight from Lawrence and the accomplishments of her children, who had all moved far away. When we stopped in front of the closed bakery (and next to some now Latino owned shops and cafes), she changed gears to complain about how she was afraid to walk down the street these days, and that “those people” parked in her uncle’s lot without caring what it was originally intended for or asking for permission. I’m definitely headed back to take some photos of that closed Italian bakery storefront, surrounded by new Latino businesses and obvious resentment. I wonder what other stories local residents can tell me just by pointing out aspects of their landscape.