The eye of the documentary photographer

Nancy Wood saw with compassion, recorded for the ages

Terry England | The New Mexican

12/23/2007 - 12/23/07

In the short history of photography, styles have come and some have gone, but one that remains is the documentary photo.

This is the where everyone pretty much agrees the image as presented is telling the truth, that nothing has been changed, eliminated, added, moved around or otherwise faked. Today's digital images and computer programs have made photographic lying fairly easy (raising the question of whether we can ever trust photographic image again), but the old processes could be faked, too, perhaps just not as easily.

Documentary photography is supposed to tell us things about ourselves we've might not noticed before. The human experience is a shared thing, so when we look at a photo of a villager in Rwanda, we can recognize a fellow traveler despite the surface difference of culture and skin color.

The task is easier when the photos were made in the same country where you live. A Santa Fean can empathize with a New Yorker because simply being residents of the United States makes us part of a shared culture. Even though our ancestors came from different parts of the world, leaving behind vastly different cultures, eventually we become acclimatized as Americans enough to see what we share as contemporaries.

Often the photo as artifact spurs more questions than answers, but the fact that we can raise questions means we share something.

Boy, I tell you what, looking at photos and seeing all this is a lot easier than explaining it. Just look as the photos in Eye of the West (University of New Mexico Press, $39.95) and you'll see what I mean. Photographer — for our purposes here, anyway — Nancy Wood has captured a lot of American culture though her lens and has put several images from various projects together for this book. (I say "for our purposes" because Wood also writes novels, nonfiction, poetry and children's books. Quite a busy lady.) If the photos remind you of some you've seen in other places, it's not entirely by accident. Look at who the book is dedicated to: Roy Stryker.

In the introduction, Wood describes her journey from middle-class New Jersey life to western photographer and writer. It wasn't easy; both parents saw her as continuing the standard women's path: secretary, teacher, housewife. ("My father jumped out of his chair and threw his newspaper on the floor. 'Why should I educate you?' he raged. 'You'll just get married and waste it all.' ")

Wood dodged it the hard way, getting married and having kids young. "Elvis" (he imitated the singer a lot) eventually was sent to Ft. Carson, Colo. The mountains, the air, the clouds did it for Wood.

"It was if a door had opened," she writes. "I was going to be somebody. I knew it."

The journey had its detours and personal bumps, but eventually Wood met Stryker. "Roy Stryker! It was like meeting God!"

Stryker had directed the photographic project at the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. The result was thousands of images of Americans across the country trying to survive the tough economic times. It made some names famous — Dorthea Lange, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Walker Evans among others. Over the next
10 years, Wood helped Stryker organize an exhibition and book of the images, and to do so, she had to look at every single negative.

It was a lesson in photography without the camera. When Wood did pick one up, she had a deep reserve to draw on. It didn't start immediately, of course, but eventually, she, too, became known for her pictures.

Eye of the West collects images from three projects: "The Grass Roots People," "The Utes" and "Taos Pueblo." The "grass-roots people" were ranchers and farmers of Colorado, who "were different from other people," she writes. "They were survivors. They were stubborn." Their character comes through in the photos of them going through their daily lives.

Such people in New Mexico had been visited before, and yes, Wood went to Pie Town, too. Russell Lee made the place famous in his Depression-era photos (and it makes one wonder of the place would have been as famous under any other name).

The Ute and Taos projects were unprecedented because Wood lived among each group.

The photos bear the Wood touch. She has that ability to make her subjects comfortable, willing to be themselves in comfortable poses and not the stiff "stand still and don't move" mode. (Or they ignore her, another valuable technique.) And look in the backgrounds of the portraits, at the items on the walls, the objects in the background. These help give a fuller picture of the person.

There are photos of Wood inside and on the cover of her dancing joyously at the Continental Divide high in the Colorado mountains. A lovely portrait of the woman, and the book is an engaging portrait of the photographer, too, a sometimes rare-thing in such books. She doubts she'd ever be able to take the Ute and Taos Pueblo photos again. It's true of all of them; most were taken in the '70s and '80s when these people on the cusp of change.

And that's another value of documentary photography: To show us where we came from.

England is the Books page editor.