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Fuller’s Earth

I had a reputation as a photo journalist in the late 1970’s. Not the most solid, as reputations go, but I had enough credits in NYC to keep an agent after suggesting a project in Nebraska. He seemed excited about it, like it was the Manhattan project.

The trip was to be a continuum of subject matter. It started with a spread of photos I did in the upper corner of New York state. A group of farmers were protesting governmental indifference to their plight following a  water shortage, and I went up there to do a photographic study of their protest.

If the spirit of the time could be raised, the public wasn’t ready for what was immediately available to my lens. Many of the farm houses had decks built on them, and their handsome agricultural equipment was like a hybrid of a Cadillac and a giraffe. There was a visual challenge presented to the argument that they were in trouble.

One of the things that gets resolved early in a photographer’s career is that things don’t naturally look like the photographs that get published. I had to do a lot of talking to get the humorless farmers to pose for pictures that might better inform of their circumstances. For one thing, most of their houses had stuff from Hammacker Schlemmer, and their barns looked like play houses with giant Muppets inside. I had to convince people to take a drive in my car to find something that looked like a barn, or even a rotting wooden fence, for fuck sake. I got some hailward-back-to-the-Great-Depression shots of people speaking to a group on a fair ground , there was plucky woman screeching that devastation follows depravity, which had little to do with a lens, but those shots at least depicted anything a blighted farmer might be saying to a furrowed crowd. Still, it would of been nice if that community had come up with a tractor with spiked steel wheels.

The inconvenience, remonstrations, and out right ridicule was worth it. A week after I gave the pictures to my agent, Roman, he sold them. The spread was noticed, and some critics mentioned “a latter day Dorothea Lange.” Then I was honored with the Wallis Fleener Award for Pathos in Photojournalism. The Wallis Fleener Award is an inverse congeniality award. It is believed that people who make pictures of misery are empathic. Can’t argue, and with the Fleener in hand, I was in a better position to work with my agent.

Roman had to agree that rural subject matter was more on the plate than city scapes and crime stills. There was too much competition for those squares on the glossy page. Again, Roman had to agree with me. The trend was to be bucolic, or to associate with that which appears rusticated and dripping with country wisdom.. I used to enjoy watching upper middle class pups effect pastoral charades in the city. They weren’t too photogenic. Jerks. By moving to Nebraska, it could only be closer to the source of what urban America wanted.

It was the golconda. It was the year that a new strain of weevil killed a hell of a lot of crops. Better, people had an adequate supply of splintery barns and rotting wood fences. And these people actually liked me. I had to explain that a photographic study might hasten federal disaster relief. They were so agreeable!

These were some energizing photo sessions. There is the feeling that something is happening for the first time, I don’t have to explain it. People doing as I ask and looking like what I want them to look like has that effect on me. There was a man named Horton Fuller who out did himself in looking like a ruined farmer. Easy to work with! He would pose as I said, not a shard of friction. The ease with which this was progressing caused me to wonder what had happened to those aggie pricks in New York state, but by gones were by gones. There was a little bad blood about taking them for a ride off their real turf. The past. Things were working in Nebraska.

A working relationship took a more personal right turn. Mr. Fuller kept inviting me to have dinner with them. He had a small family, just two daughters and his wife, and they were all plain, lined, bitten and wholesome. Religious, too. They always prayed together. Mr. Fuller seemed to have this thing in his prayers about snake venom not hurting him nor vermin entering his house.

Drat that I was limited to still pictures. The part about vermin entering his house was droll, considering that the weevils had already scotched that vigil. But it wasn’t all bible thumping. These were fine people. It was as much about the food, too. The ham Mrs. Fuller served was delicious. The gracious, quiet dinners caused me to formulate a theory! I think there is something in ham that makes people peaceful and happy.

With many rolls of film and some large format plates all done, I took on a side project. There was the new strain of weevil that had caused the disaster. It was the culprit in the farmer’s pain and loss. All ninety billion of the hard shell nasties with spindly legs. The public, coast to coast had the right to know what the enemy looked like. My job and joy to show them.. I got out my macro lens for a close up study of the little beasts.

And I encountered that photographer’s first real lesson.. While alive, the weevils wouldn’t co-operate. They moved around. They wouldn’t mate with one another in the glass terrarium I made for them. That might have made some good pictures if they could get an entomological hard-on in captivity. Nothing they did while alive helped me to make compelling photographs of their destructive daily routine. A jar and some CTC did the trick.

Not that that was easy, either. These miserable weevils get rigor mortis quickly, and would look like dead insects. I had to get a system down for getting them out of the jar and into position on stalks of wheat. But I don’t give up, and soon I was getting results that looked like living, pestilential little horrors. An idea came.

I was getting good at setting up my scenes, and with the help of some clear fast drying epoxy I was able to fasten the dead bugs to each other to simulate most positions seen in books, movies and the domiciles of the daring. It looked like salacious, vigorous, frightening bug orgies among the broken stalks. It worked, supporting the theme of devastation and looming anxiety. Especially if you look at them side by side with my pictures of quiet, suffering, honest American families.

I called Roman to let him know how well everything was going. He might have been cooling off some. He sort of said shove the bug pictures up my ass and stick with the farmers. I said, “Roman, these are pictures of rampant bugs. They swarm. Their most productive swarms can make a plush corn field look like an afterbirth of weeds.”

I had to agree with Roman about what he thought, because it was after all the farmers in New York who got me the Wallis Fleener Award for Pathos in Photojournalism, and not close up pictures of no rain. He wasn’t completely off the bug sex thing, it was fairly original, and it’s not like I wasn’t really working. One last try, I said, “ Look, we both know drawn faces against the rotting boards is good. A couple things about the damaged crops. Have to have it. And I would go with the insects. Remember, Roman, that a pervasive water shortage was the problem in N.Y., where as weevils hit in Nebraska. You can take pictures of bugs in hot pillow passion, and you can’t photograph not enough water.”

He said we could talk about it later.

I am a fast worker. A few weeks in Nebraska can go by fast when you are busy as a one armed paper hanger. It was a good time to get back to New York, before Roman decided something I didn’t want him to decide. I was still solid, and you can’t do nothing and stay solid.

Since the project had brought me close to so many farmers, I decided it would be professional to stop by some of their houses before heading back to NYC. I was making the rounds in my rented BMW, stopping, talking, shaking hands and such. Yet people didn’t seem as pleasant as usual. I had a feeling they might be displeased with something.

It was unsettling, but by the time I got to Horton’s house I had collected myself and resurrected my usual good cheer.

I knocked on the front door, and there was no answer. I knocked again, and knowing them not to be the sort of people who harbor even the most harmless secret, I guessed it was all right to turn the knob and call in.

I pushed the door open, and though I had my camera handy, I didn’t get the best photos. It’s not that it wasn’t a scene that would love the camera, but the logistics were bad. The Fullers were scattered on the living room floor, moving slightly, groaning, their white, lined skin swollen, bluish, greenish, purplish. The trouble was that I was wearing deck shoes from L.L. Bean, no socks, and hiking shorts. There were hundreds of live rattle snakes calmly coiled all over the place, surrounding the Fullers. It’s seems that the farmers were turned down for federal disaster relief, and that was the unpleasantness I was reading on the others. I wondered where Mr. Fuller got all his snakes. Perhaps he had had them in his basement all along. Probably kept them in a barrel. The sly dog held  secrets after all. Most people have them. I’ll tell you about Roman, sometime.