REVEW 1: PROSPERITY GOSPEL, Portraits of the Great Recession,
by photographer Charter Weeks and writer Keith Flynn
Occasionally I read, view, listen to, or in some other way discover a person’s film, text (on-line commentary, poem, novel, theatre piece, music, etc) that I believe to be important in some way or simply beautiful, which helps in all ways. Of course I think of friends and loved ones whom I believe would be touched by the work and want to inform them of it. But the same is true for all those who may read my articles, if you are sticking to them, you may well appreciate these suggestions. Let me know….kindest regards Robert
As a practicing photographer and film-maker, what do I ask of a photoessay? To show real life in all its naked frankness, no matter how heart-aching or deceptive it may be. I want unity between what it looks like, that is its form, and its content or narrative. That is the essence of what the French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson called the ‘Decisive Moment’.
Charter Week’s photographs in PROSPERITY GOSPEL, Portraits of the Great Recession, are consistent within a book “dedicated to the tenacity, ingenuity, and integrity of the American worker”. He partnered with the experienced writer Keith Flynn on this hugely impressive work. Of course, they both deserve congratulations, but I have decided to first be guided by the pictures alone and later will carefully read Mr. Flynn’s texts.
Whereas Cartier-Bresson’s images are of fleeting time, Charter combined that sense of truth with the American essayist’s Paul Strand’s work, which captured time as an accumulation of social and cultural history. There is a stillness in these images, even as people prepare to speak, or look up from some activity. It is as though the movement and motion of actions and time have stopped, trapping them in a tragic suspension.
Throughout history people have been taught to surrender to the lords of the earth so as to be graced by the lord of all. In one of Charter’s photographs (p.10), under the strip lighting we see people’s faces in bliss, in pain, having surrendered to more earthly exploitation. In the background we read “Baptist Church - road to recovery” from what? Pernicious capitalism? Addictive prescription drugs? Poverty? Lack of education? An infantilized popular culture? Uncaring politicians? When reaching this page, viewers may realise they have been introduced to a hidden world, one avoided by the corporate media. Later we learn from these impoverished people that the same religious rap of the Middle Ages still works: “whatever your sorrow, however you are exploited, you can be assured that God takes care of his own.” This is the stasis Charter shows us.
I remember a young Jewish writer asking ‘what happened to God during the Holocaust?’ His answer was that God blinked, but as universal time is so much longer than human time, the blink lasted from around 1933 until 1945. In this book and in Charter’s photographs we are viewing the same: time rigidified, engulfing these people’s lives.
With a cigarette between index and middle finger, his head leaning forward, an expression of loss, the loss of someone still taken aback by his and the world’s emptiness. (p.16) He is another man in pain, on his porch, perched above what below? In the next image, you see his devasted family.
People are overweight, poorly dressed, holding on to dogs as if to their lives or some remote love. People standing in front of prized possessions surviving inside a materialist existence the Neoliberals have so cleverly constructed, in which stuff has replaced people’s inner being. In many of these portraits we see people’s mobile homes, their mini tractors, motorcycles and pickup trucks…yards spewed with the remnants of cigarette packs, soda pop bottles and flattened waxy fruit juice containers.
Multicoloured quiffs, metal in the skin, earnings clanging against cheeks. This is a life assembled out of industrial and cultural detritus, the remains of agriculture and manufacturing that has either become outdated or offshored to non-unionised economies where more disenchanted people can be exploited. These photographs repeatedly ask, ‘is this really what the Neoliberal’s economic system can be allowed to do to so many blameless people’?
It is right that the images are black and white. In most cases, colour is a distraction, or worse, a decorative dalliance over the plain truth of things as they really are. Colour often takes the sting out of a captured moment. And when I think of these captured moments, I remember that they are unique in the universe, never to be returned to, except in Charter’s photographs. But really, these moments or their doppelgangers are endlessly repeated in both American and the many other places, as I have seen, where the Neoliberal’s globalization has taken them.
A woman holds a sign cut as an arrow with the words, ‘we buy gold’ on it (p.23). What is she doing, where is she, how long does she stand there? It’s like an image of purgatory, an expansive empty patch of grass in front of an almost empty parking area, where a flatbed has a 12-foot-high rectangular box with a sign reaffirming the young woman’s arrow, telling all the world that they purchase gold, as though this poverty-stricken area had heaps of it to offer. Or is it that these buyers are predators, preying on people’s utter despair, needing to sell their last possessions, many of which will be valuable because of their memories rather than their market price. What kind of illusion is this? The same as the one that says materialism can replace a meaningful inner life of love, care, concern and neighbourliness. Charter sees the irony as he continues this essay of agonies.
There is nothing normal in these annals but abnormality. This isn’t civilization, its survival in someone else’s desolate landscape, a place unsettled, left behind, unremarkable except for the presence of emptiness.
Man with thumb notched into his jean pocket, legs apart – that teenage macho ‘I- gotta-cock’ stance,’ I-gotta-big bike’ announcement, ‘I-gotta-fist and I can hurt ya’ threat (p.32). And all the white-nationalist nonsense of flags, swastikas, and crosses, as though nationalism is about anything but hatred of the ‘other, rather than love of one’s own.
Another man, offering his graffiti covered torso as if a thing of desire and beauty; these third-rate popular culture spider’s webs, cartoon faces, scattered above the slit of his fat-encased navel, a proclamation in faux Germanic script, that he is a preacher man. This road accident of childish imagery, religious iconography and Hallmark card lachrymose emotions reflected in the pale flesh of his face, which is both arrogant and lost in wonderment (P.39). Is he hateful? No, he is probably a lost soul, attempting to know who he is while claiming a role in his bitter and broken world. In a better life he’d be a useful man to the wider society.
Here and there throughout, are portraits of lament, people looking off, remembering, perhaps thinking about how they have wound up where they are. Perhaps Charter or Keith asked them a question they’ve been too close to be able to ask themselves. There are half smiles accepting life, half laughs at the terrible comedy; there are the concentrated looks of people searching distant years and lost dreams; constantly probing the viewer, posing ‘is it really acceptable to live in this country, supposedly not just theirs, but mine as well, while this crushing weight of profits and power pick over the remnants of these people’s lives’? This book, with its simple truths and straightforward images, asks that, over and over. There is great power in these photographs, simply in the witnessing, showing how it is, what despair looks like, what survives in the shadow of an uncaring economic system.
Then there is a plaster Jesus on his knees praying before a plaster replica of The Ten Commandment’s two tablets, while behind this effigy is a large sign selling seafoods and a county buffet, whatever that may be (p. 43). The viewer knows that those ardent believers in Jesus, would have no idea that he was Jewish and that the tablets were carried down the mount and delivered to a needy world in the hands of a Jew.
Around Christmas time for many years, I have received images from Charter, revealing some ironic accident between wealth and poverty, between meaning and superficiality and of course this image of a plaster Jesus is another one, a perfect visualizatio of one of Leonard Cohen’s last lyrics, “he died to make men holy, we die to make things cheap”.
There’s a guy making a ‘living’ by picking up bits of tin and other metals. His toothy smile is a horrible grimace, as though the pain of being seen by others provides him a reflection of himself; how he has sunk into some godless oblivion between prison and nightmares – with only those pipes and cans he pushes to the buyer in the ‘borrowed’ supermarket basket, as his salvation for food and dignity. Still enslaved if to nothing else but white America’s hatred of its own guilt.
And on page 55, the young wanderers, one starring into a bald winter sky, the other, knitting in the cold bare season, adorned in something between hippiedom and the ghetto, holding on to the tatters of lost dreams, latching on to some homespun ideology that will see them through their victimhood. To what? To sudden wealth and 2 minutes of fame? To those dreams spun by the corporate media, so they may escape their material and spiritual destitution for simply another spiritual destitution?
These images are filled with innocent victims, those who have lost hope of having hope, holding onto fragments of ideas threaded through with emotional loss, trying to be decent in an indecent society. They are perhaps trying to be principled in an unprincipled world, lost to a culture that has impregnated them with ‘false consciousness’ – a state of believing that what is bad for you is good for you. This, from a skein of lies woven by education, textbooks, the media-made popular culture and the speechifying of pastors and politicians.
Charter shows us the theatrics of a tour operator (p.75, see first picture above) with the body language of someone who seeks either adoration or at least a moment of attention. Later we see a member of the Cherokee nation (p.134), dancing in front of what looks like a tourist shop. Scholars believe that upon the arrival of the Europeans in 1498, there were between 40 and 50 million native Americans. By 1800 there were only about 600,000 people left. That is a genocide of between 39 million 400 thousand and 49 million 400 thousand individuals. Upon this, and slavery and the exploitation of the American farmers and workers, the American rulers gathered huge wealth for themselves. For me, this image of the cavorting Native American is perhaps the saddest in a book of infinite sadness: history turned into spectacle, dignity stripped away as a useless encumbrance of entertainment.
If the Neoliberal wealth and the politicians had the ability to feel shame, this book could be their Bible.
This photoessay reveals the American soul. It demands that we see what we have done and continue to do, or at least, allow others to do to us and our neighbours. It gives us a sorry perspective on the days of the Farm Security Administration sending photographers and other documentarists and artists to see and study the poor, vanquished by the vagaries of capitalist instability and the driving winds of the over-farmed dust bowl. This is a part of America today. Charter’s pictures demand that we see and look at the truth, that a nation capable of annihilating millions of people in their own land, of enslaving millions of others and of making endless wars, can really be allowed to be proud of itself, to claim the American way of life and business is superior to others?
Nations that have done evil can never regain their humanity until they admit to their guilt. This book by Weeks and Flynn should become a digest for Americans who would like to arrest the tragic failure of the Neoliberals and to reclaim any shards of humanity and any of the precious vision of liberty, justice and equality promised by the American dream.
Finally, there is a challenge in this book: do we turn away again or do we act to change this horror?
If you are interested in this book please contact Charter Weeks HERE: