tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post3940231141850381598..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Red Shuttleworth: One Winter Night in York, Nebraska / John Vachon: NebraskaUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-84585038693033199712013-09-26T02:08:14.018-07:002013-09-26T02:08:14.018-07:00Well, that shot I've just linked to didn't...Well, that shot I've just linked to didn't come from JV's initial Nebraska survey in 1938, but from a return stop two years later... not that the weather had improved much in the interim.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-61821611282429729682013-09-26T02:01:35.171-07:002013-09-26T02:01:35.171-07:00By the by, John Vachon's brief visit to York i...By the by, John Vachon's brief visit to York inevitably touched upon the necessities. <br /><br /><a href="http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsa/8c18000/8c18200/8c18256v.jpg" rel="nofollow">Erecting snow fence, York County, Nebraska, November 1940</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-41438805273775972242013-09-26T01:30:12.981-07:002013-09-26T01:30:12.981-07:00It took a bit of frosty woolgathering to compute t...It took a bit of frosty woolgathering to compute that when Red was up across the state line having all that High Plains fun in Nebraska, we were shivering up in the Front Range down on the Colorado side of the line in an unwelcoming little burg named Nederland, where we had managed to land in a spot called Hurricane Hill... 'nuf said. <br /><br />The intended segue then would be a frigid leap from York to York, as viewed on another balmy occasion in the second shot <a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/white-out.html" rel="nofollow">here</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-64497627076709296102013-09-25T08:50:33.664-07:002013-09-25T08:50:33.664-07:00Poetry is the memory of Time. Red remembers this s...Poetry is the memory of Time. Red remembers this snow storm in Nebraska in late February 1980, when a community college basketball team, of which he was serving as co-coach, was stranded in York.<br /><br />"We were returning from the regional tourney... and we were lucky to make it to a motel in York... with an indoor pool and roof insulation falling into the water."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-64183559260346461382013-09-24T13:11:48.638-07:002013-09-24T13:11:48.638-07:00There's crash-and-bang from the room next door...There's crash-and-bang from the room next door, then sobs from some woman, then laughter.<br /><br />Thin walls (like the ones we have here) draw you in a little too closely to other people's lives. <br /><br />Blizzards do sharpen up the attention.<br /><br />Can't get enough of Red's work at the moment.Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-82713844509998015602013-09-24T10:12:53.658-07:002013-09-24T10:12:53.658-07:00What a contrast in innocence. Reading Red and look...What a contrast in innocence. Reading Red and looking at Vachon, I wonder, can the word “innocence” get any traction anymore? Those faces in Vachon’s photos reveal something like trust when confronted by the camera/photographer. Not too much, maybe, because even then it was a manipulated world. Presto-Change-O, it morphed into ours. <br /><br />And then there’s Red’s dead-on dissection of a necrotic world where cars and trucks and people too skid and crash into each other; spoken words are threats at some level or other; and death and decay hang in the air. We’re still in Nebraska. Hell has frozen over. What is, is.Hazenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13417573435195561519noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-35529056608165455652013-09-24T08:17:12.371-07:002013-09-24T08:17:12.371-07:00Tom,
Great JV photos (as always) -- "I knew ...Tom,<br /><br />Great JV photos (as always) -- "I knew that I would photograph only what pleased me or astonished my eye, and only in the way I saw it." And great poem, Red, "Pink ceiling insulation / . . . falling into the antiseptic-stench water" and all.STEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-43929259520174664242013-09-24T06:14:38.369-07:002013-09-24T06:14:38.369-07:00John Vachon took a job as a filing clerk at the Fa...John Vachon took a job as a filing clerk at the Farm Security Administration in 1936, at the age of twenty-one. The following year, on the instigation of his boss, Roy Stryker -- who had suggested, "When you do the filing, why don't you *look* at the pictures" -- he started to make photographs himself. With advice from Ben Shahn he tried out a Leica in and around Washington. His apprentice work consisted of shots of "everything in the Potomac River valley". His boss, Roy Stryker, lent him equipment and encouragement. He had further guidance from Walker Evans, who insisted that he master the view camera, and Arthur Rothstein, who took him along on a photographic assignment to the mountains of Virginia. In 1938 Stryker sent him out on his first road trip, to Nebraska. He photographed FSA rural programs in that state for the agency's regional office. And Stryker asked that he concentrate on Omaha. Upon his return Vachon added 208 images from Omaha to the files. "I spent a cold November week in Omaha and walked a hundred miles," Vachon recalled in a 1973 interview. Stryker's instructions had been vague. What was he meant to be looking for? "Was it Kearney Street where unemployed men sat all day on the steps of cheap hotels? A tattoo parlor, and the city mission with its soup kitchen. Men hanging around the stockyards. One morning I photographed a grain elevator: pure sun-brushed silo columns of cement rising from behind CB&Q freight car. The genius of Walker Evans and Charles Sheeler welded into one supreme photographic statement, I told myself. Then it occurred to me that it was I who was looking at the grain elevator. For the past year I had been sedulously aping the masters. And in Omaha I realized that I had developed my own style with the camera. I knew that I would photograph only what pleased me or astonished my eye, and only in the way I saw it."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com