THE RENAISSANCE
SOCIETY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
~Hamza Walker
Julie Moos: Monsanto
September 22 - November 2, 2002
“Corporate America
How am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,'
as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social
integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals,
fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends
as I 'know' you? Granted--more, insisted upon--that
it is in all these particularities that each
of you is that which he is; that particularities,
and matters ordinary and obvious, are exactly
themselves beyond designation of words, are
the members of your sum total, most obligatory
to human searching of perception: nevertheless
to name these things and fail to yield their
stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious,
seems criminal, seems impudent, seems traitorous
in the deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible:
yet in withholdings of specification I could
but betray you still worse.”
James Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 1
In 1936, a young
James Agee was assigned to write an article
whose subject was the sharecropper's life in
the Depression South. It was to appear in Fortune
magazine. At Agee's suggestion, the article
would be illustrated with photographs by his
friend Walker Evans whom Fortune had used before
and who had become aquatinted with the region
through his work for the Farm Security Administration.
Agee and Evans spent part of July and August
in Hale County, Alabama documenting with conviction
the lives of three sharecropping families. Fortune
declined to publish the article which one editor
characterized as "pessimistic, unconstructive,
impractical, indignant, lyrical and always personal."
2 Remaining deeply troubled yet inspired by
what he saw, Agee developed the article into
a book-length account published five years later
as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Part prose poem, part ethnography, and part
reportage, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has
since become a seminal literary and photographic
document forming our most immediate impressions
of the Great Depression. It yielded some of
Evans's most stark yet intimate work from that
period including the well known portrait of
Allie Mae Burroughs. But despite its historical,
geographic and biographical specificity, Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men is something more than
the portrait of an era. So strong are its images
of rural life that they have become part of
a deeper myth involving the fiber of the nation's
character. Evans's photographs of sharecroppers
become less specific and more emblematic of
not only harrowing poverty but the farmer as
the embodiment of an American roots culture,
one expressed in those pious souls wed to the
country's soil.
Although Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men has become folkloric,
Agee's question and insights remain of utmost
importance to the work of Birmingham-based photographer
Julie Moos (b. 1966). The Society is pleased
to present Monsanto, Moos's most recent series
of ten, large-scale, color photographs of farm-owners.
In August of 2001, Moos photographed pairs of
Northern Missouri/Southern Illinois farm owners--husband
and wife, father and son, a pair of brothers--standing
amidst their crops. The project was conceived
and instigated by Moos during a residency at
The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. In her
last three bodies of work, Moos has developed
a signature formal device of pairing her sitters
centrally within the frame, arms casually by
their sides, their faces relatively expressionless.
Moos's resolutely formal portrait practice betrays
a confidence in photography's status as an autonomous
fine art, one capable of strict adherence to
visual signification. But Moos's practice goes
further than indulging our desire to simply
look at people, consuming them through their
comportment. Her work allows us to compare and
contrast individuals through a formalism that,
to use Allan Sekula's words, "neutralizes
and renders equivalent" its subjects whose
relationship is otherwise made clear in the
series title whether it is the fierce competitiveness
of the Hat Ladies (2001), the stark binary relationships
that define adolescence as in Friends and Enemies
(2000), or simply that of employer/employee
as in Domestics (2000).
Moos applies this
same device in Monsanto. But unlike her previous
bodies of work in which the sitters were captured
under clinical, studio conditions before a gray
backdrop, Moos has moved her camera outdoors,
placing each pair of farm-owners in the center
of a horizontal frame containing a generous
portion of heartland prairie. The images are
striking in their richness of detail, lushness
of color and last but not least, their scale
(6 feet by 8 feet) that qualifies them as both
portraiture and landscape photography. But it
is their simplicity that speaks the most..
The Monsanto series is not narrative but iconic.
The decision to traffic in myth rather than
photojournalism was determined less by Moos
and more by a subject that when it comes to
representation within the fine arts can only
be engaged at the level of myth. Although Moos's
recent body of work partakes of myth, the Monsanto
series is counter-myth whose status as such
relies on a discourse established through a
project such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Unlike Evans, who thoroughly documented extended
families, their homes, possessions and land
holdings, Moos's photographs are singular, the
sitters are removed from their domestic environment
and any suggestion of family is conjured through
a discreet unit of two and not through a sprawl
of relations. But more important, Moos was not
accompanied by a writer. Although Agee and Evans
conceived of their respective contributions
functioning independent of one another, the
interplay that results from reading word and
image together is nothing short of what Evans's
biographer James R. Mellow dubbed a game of
chicken and egg as each artist exhibits a wholesale
investment in the descriptive powers of their
medium.
By contrast, Moos
has restricted the camera's descriptive capabilities
to that of the farm-owners' personages set within
the context of their crop. The images are astoundingly
mute, stripped of Agee's "particularities,"
begging the question, in and of itself what
can a photograph tell us. Foregoing any attempt
to engage her subject through traditional photodocumentary,
with its reliance on a combination of sequential
imagery and explanatory or descriptive text,
Moos has summed up her singular, iconic images
with the title Monsanto naming the series after
the chemical corporation headquartered in St.Louis
and whose seeds are used by all of the farmers
she photographed. Moos's decision to title this
body of work after a corporation whose business
practices and products have landed them at the
center of an international controversy, with
Monsanto's name appearing regularly on the front
pages of the newspaper, is a gesture meant to
carry a descriptive burden no singular image
could possibly bear. But then again, Moos's
work is operating as counter-myth. Invoking
the name Monsanto is enough to dispell any suggestion
that these farmers might have anything to do
with those depicted in Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men. The farms which serve as the backdrop in
her photos are many thousands of acres and the
crops are the product of a multi-national corporation
that is a leading producer of bio-engineered
seeds whose yield although greater and impervious
to pests is questionable as it relates to issues
of biodiversity. In short, these farmers represent
the agri-industry, they are the New New Deal.
The images, however, are not simply counter-myth
in relation to Evans's sharecroppers, they radically
revises another deep seated stereotype. With
nary an office tower in sight, not to mention
suit and tie, Moos's subjects give a new face
to Corporate America.
Moos's
Monsanto series comes at a time of renewed patriotic
fervor and anti-corporate sentiment. Her images
of farm-owners, however, deny us refuge in old
myths that would serve both purposes. But Moos's
Monsanto series, like the Agee/Evans collaboration,
is not an indictment. Despite structural shifts
in the economy allowing the new myth of corporate
culture to supplant an old myth of a nativist
roots culture, both myths still abide by a national
narrative built around a sense of ourselves
as pioneers and settlers. Even under corporate
aegis, our belief for better and or worse remains
that we are children of the corn (and soy) indeed.
This exhibition which inaugurates The Society's
87th season and its 23rd in the Bergman Gallery,
is dedicated to the memory of Edwin Bergman.
Through his commitment to new and provocative
art, Ed championed all that The Society stands
for. We remain grateful for his outstanding
example, friendship, service and support.
1) James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) p88-89.
2) Dwight MacDonald cited in James Mellow, Walker
Evans, (New York: Basic Books, 1999) p334-335
http://www.renaissancesociety.org
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