Romanticising poverty?

"Strand sought to find a peasant world and reconstitute a preindustrial purity he could no longer grasp in his own country."

Maria Antonella Pelizzari/Etudes Photographiques

This photograph appeared in my desk journal as the picture to contemplate for the week. It's a very striking, and I now find, very famous photograph taken in 1953 by an American photographer called Paul Strand, of whom I had never heard. It is part of a project of his, that became a book called Un Paese:

"Paese in Italian means village. It also means country, territory, fatherland. Perhaps it could be translated as home town or native land. and therefore as one commentator said, a very canny choice of title." Benjamin Newell/Aperture

The project was to photograph a specific place to illustrate the not quite card carrying Communist, but Socialist Paul Strand's belief in:

"dynamic realism as truth which sees and understands a changing world and in turn is capable of changing it, in the interest of peace, human progress, and the eradication of human misery and cruelty, and towards the unity of all people." Paul Strand

Having explored venues in America and elsewhere, particularly a village called Gaeta in Italy which he rejected because, fundamentally it was too poverty stricken and full of despair, he settled on a village in the Po valley in the north of Italy called Luzzara, the hometown of his collaborator Cesare Zavattini the screenwriter of The Bicycle Thieves, who wrote the text of the book.

I have now been looking at this photograph on and off for five days. At first I just admired it, which I had decided was taken in Italy before I even saw the title. Although really it could be anywhere in Europe really. The longer I looked at it the more I became uneasy about it and eventually decided to try and express that unease and relate it to food, because I wanted to share my thoughts and this is, after all a foodie blog. Yes you can relate almost anything to food if you try. But then everything is connected isn't it?

Initially though I was just simulataneously struck by how he had conveyed how hard life was in that long ago place, how hard it is to be poor and yet he had made it somehow beautiful and surely poverty is not beautiful. In fact it is interesting that he could not face the hardship the people of Gaeta were suffering and apparently focussed on architecture rather than the people which were just too distressing.

It's a dilemma isn't it for those who want to show the plight of the poor so that something is done about it and yet great photographers - and artists - somehow also make it look beautiful - even, if not especially, in black and white. Like those photographs taken by Dorothea Lange in the dustbowl of America, of which this is the most famous. Yes it's distressing, but it's the photograph that impresses not their plight. At least that's the danger. And is it posed? Not the woman - I'm sure her expression is real, but the children may well have been told to turn away.

In fact I read an interesting article about the Strand photograph by Steve Middlehurst in which he pointed out how posed the photograph was:

"On considering the detail of the Lusetti Family my eyes are drawn to the lack of shoes; only Anna Spaggiari-Lusetti is wearing full shoes and one brother wears slip on sandals. Has Strand asked them to remove their shoes? Does he intend  the bare feet to connote poverty? If so, it is unconvincing, the feet are clean and undamaged, not the feet of people who are generally barefoot. ...

I sense that Strand like many liberal artists who subscribe to the ideals of communism is in some way idealising and as a result patronising his subjects. Bear in mind that he had travelled far and wide in France and Italy to find a town that lived up to his expectations, a place that, in Pelizzari’s words represented a “serene microcosm of communal life” Steve Middlehurst Identity and Place

Of course others are more forgiving and admire him for bringing to our attention the plight of these people, and their noble endurance of their plight:

"He was willing to sit and wait for the world to look the way it does when nobody notices it." Matthew Leifheit/Vice

Sit and wait - or carefully stage? I wonder which it was. Posed, however slightly, surely?

And so to food, however briefly. I think writing about Harira - a peasant food if ever there was one - yesterday, made me finally try to tackle the problem of the nobility of the poor. There is no nobility in being poor, as Van Gogh really did show in his painting The Potato Eaters. His peasants are ugly, anxious and depressed and they only have potatoes to eat. The poorest peasants do not have much to eat, and they do simple things to the food that they either grow, forage, steal or buy with a few meagre coins. Peasant food is simple and not bound by rules of 'authenticity'. It is entirely based on what is available. But yes they do endeavour to make it taste good. And therein lies a kind of nobility.

They would be reliant on seasonal food and preserved food, and the diet would therefore very probably have been very boring. But then even today there are many who eat a very boring diet, in spite of the plethora of options available - well still not to the peasants of the world. Although I did find this quote from Theodore Parker: "As society advances the standard of poverty rises." which might be true in a wealthy country like Australia, although even here there are pockets of society which would disagree, and try telling a starving peasant somewhere in Africa that.

Even here however, we patronise. This is a picture that heads an article in Taste called The Peasant Diet. What is it? I'm willing to guess that no peasant would ever eat anything as sumptuous as this. Although I am being somewhat unfair as it is meant to show the kinds of foods a Medieval peasant would have eaten not the quantity. They would not have eaten all of this in one meal. Mind you even though they say that meat would have been a rare thing, there is a lot of meat on that plate. In a different way it is just as misleading as my original photograph.

We also find that those fundamentally peasant foods like harira, vegetable pasties - the infinite variety thereof, shellfish, ancient grains ... have been lifted up to the heights of haute cuisine, complete with rules attached to make every peasant dish either completely authentically, deconstructed or fused with something else.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps the very fact that a dish such as cassoulet - surely a peasant dish - can be found on the menu of every restaurant along the road between Narbonne and Toulouse whether it be a humble village routier caff or a three star Michelin restaurant.

Then there's what I consider to be the insulting advice from the environmentally aware, that we should all be eating organic, artisan, unprocessed foods that are only to be found in expensive farmer's markets and boutique enotecas and the like. Not even the relatively well off can afford them.

Boyd Tonkin in The Independent said that Paul Strand's photographs showed "the deep patterns of the past". Which perhaps is another way of saying "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (The more things change the more it's the same.")

In 1993 Stephen Shore, another American photographer revisited Luzarra and took a series of photographs in the village. He said it wasn't a reconstruction of Un Paese, but you'd have to say it was a very similar approach when you look at the above example of his work. Possibly not quite as posed - there is more of a 'moment in time' feel about it, but only slightly and sort of the same image - if somewhat more prosperous which would seem to reinforce the standard of poverty rise theory.

I think if you are poor and live amongst the poor, and know of nothing else (is that possible? - certainly not today) then ignorance is bliss and you can be happy - as

I was when very young. This is a photo of my brother and sister outside our first home in East Ham - sort of London docklands. You can tell from their clothes that we were not wealthy, but I certainly remember those years as some of the happiest in my life. A time of innocence I suppose. A time when I had no idea that others had more money and a better life than myself.

We ate simple food from a few things grown in the garden, cheap cuts of meat and fish, white bread and probably lots of potatoes to bulk things out. But it tasted good. Sort of peasant food.

Apologies for this possibly boring post - another art inspired post. It was just such an arresting photograph and not quite what the artist perhaps meant to convey, but then:

"No photograph, no matter how justly done, can convey the full story: complex, intricate human lives cannot be completely captured by a two-dimensional frame." The Borgen Project