By Clyde Edgerton | Nov 08 | 

Keepers of the Land

Farmers - and their dirt, dogs, boots, and jeans - shine from the pages of a new book

The photographs in American Farmer: The Heart of Our Country (Welcome Books) are so genuine, so real, you feel as though you are reading them—that is, you feel you understand something about the subjects not shown directly—and you hear the first-person narratives written there. The book, alive, will move around in the room where you leave it; and leave it on the coffee table if you must (it’s big), but this is not a coffee-table book. It is beyond that. The narratives have suspense and tension. And they don’t go on and on. The book sings with a visual poetry, and crops, and dirt, and animals, and hard work, and a direct, plain simplicity.

In 2004, Paul Mobley, a commercial photographer who’d spent fifteen years working for Ford, Compaq, Max Factor, Citigroup, American Express, Chevrolet, and other industry giants—we’re talking umbrellas, bright lights, dim lights, assistants, light meters, tripods, all that—took a simple photograph of a farmer. He immediately thought, This is the most pure, honest photograph I’ve ever done. Then he went out and did this masterpiece, American Farmer. Three years on the road—and out of more than 32,000 photographs, Mobley picked about 150 for us to look at. Farmers; farm families; farmers with chickens, horses, sheep, and crops. From thirty-two states (about thirty of the farmers are Southern). Mobley visited with and got to know each farmer and family before touching his camera. This book brings to mind James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Eudora Welty Photographs, and Studs Terkel’s Working.

The writer (and editor) for American Farmer, Katrina Fried, made editing decisions that shape the narratives just enough to preserve the robust power of the language of farmers—a robust power that’s rare in most professions. Her art guarantees that you listen to talk rather than read a transcript.

Here are a few words the photographs bring to my mind: family, hard work, gentleness, honesty, pain, meanness. I don’t mean meanness as in cruel. I’m speaking of a directness and a clarity that come from daily life with animals, soil, and plants. A directness that is often tinged with humor. A father is quoted as saying to a son who’s looking hungrily around the table, “If you don’t see it, you don’t need it.” In the Carolina Piedmont of my upbringing, the “real life” of farming belonged to many families but to many more grandparents and great-grandparents. From centuries back, farming is the heritage of most Americans, and a great product of this book is a reader’s remembering that heritage. Another product of the book may be the sprouting of backyard gardens and chicken pens across this great land of ours. My uncle Calbert is of the opinion that that’s still possible. He says, “Our confused culture is not yet entirely washed down the drain by shallow, vain, abysmally dull entertainments. I’d rather watch my chickens than TV any day. Chickens are stupid. But not that stupid.”