When I was a young child I had problems with ear aches. Lots and lots of ear aches. They would keep me up in pain all night. I eventually had surgery to put tubes in my ears. To this day I cannot swim below 6 feet without experiencing pain in my ears.
To help soothe me my mother would let me stay up late and watch movies. Most of the time the movies were old black and white dramas. The ones I remember the most were directed by John Ford. My perception of the world was deeply influenced by these black and white films and I think it is why I have been so drawn to black and white photography over color.
The most significant film I remember was watching his depiction of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. I felt like my family shared a similar struggle to the family depicted in the novel. My Grandparents had migrated from farms in the midwest searching for work and ended up in southern California seeking opportunity. My own father struggled to make ends meet and we piled into the back of his camera repair shop where we lived illegally for a year while my parents both worked and saved money for our first house.
After only a couple of years my parents decided to move north to Spokane Washington. We kids had to help load up the back of a beat up U-Haul truck. I felt like crying when my father determined that there wasn’t room for the surfboard my uncle in Australia had custom made for us and bestowed on our family as a special gift. It was a long board that had a spectacular abstract color pattern on the top surface. The fiberglass encased swirls of oranges, yellows, and reds on one side and greens, blues, and cyans on the other side in a perfect color harmony. I don’t remember if my dad sold the board or just left it out in the alley behind the cinder block fence with the large cactus. The alley is where anything you didn’t want would be gone by the next morning in an impressively efficient up-cycling system found in poor neighborhoods.
In high school I read the original novel by Steinbeck along with others like East of Eden and Cannery Row. Grapes of Wrath was the one that has stayed with me. I think of the car sales man that filled the engine with sawdust to hide the leaks and cracks in the engine. I think U-Haul might of done the same thing as we had to stop every 100 miles or so to add oil and gas. The truck got less than 10 miles per gallon.
My mom drove our orange 1976 Datsun station wagon and followed the orange U-haul truck up the highway. She packed sandwiches for the journey. The kids would take turns rotating between riding in the car with her and riding in the truck with my father who seemed perpetually stressed due to the fact that the truck would slow to a crawl at every hill.
I remember passing through Crescent City California and hearing stories about how my great grandfather had worked in a logging camp there. As we approached the Oregon border we began seeing signs saying Californians Go Home and Californians Not Welcomed!
I felt a little apprehensive about moving to the northwest because of the signs but my father didn’t. He had been born and raised in Spokane and kept talking about finally getting back to God’s Country. I can still remember driving down I-90 heading east as we dropped down the hill into the city. Today I drive over a bridge that is above that very spot and I remember the view. There is a sign along the freeway that says Spokane is an All American City.
I got the first glimpse of the house my parents bought for us with the proceeds of the California house. It was butter yellow and sat on a dirt road lined with maple trees. I felt like a fish that had been pulled out of the ocean and thrown to shore. It felt completely foreign.
The house had been built in 1978 during a housing boom. Later on we would find out that home inspectors had just driven past and approved the houses without even looking at them. My brother and I had a room in the unfinished basement. After the first winter of struggling to pay $300 a month electric heating bills which would be like paying $1000 a month for heating today, my father built a wood burning stove out of a 55 gallon oil drum. We didn’t have a pickup truck but somehow we managed to drive that Datsun Station Wagon all over the logging roads of north Idaho with a chainsaw and fill up the back with firewood. The springs would bottom out on every pothole.
By the time I was eleven my older brother and sister had moved back to Los Angeles to live with their father. They couldn’t adapt to living in Spokane. We shared a mother but not a father. Like the Joads we struggled. I had three paper routes to help put food on the table while my mother worked nights and my father went back to grad school to change careers.
In many ways the poverty years of my childhood were some of the happiest albeit lonely ones. Aside from missing my brother and sister, I had a strong since of purpose. My family was unified in a survival mode.
The literature of Steinbeck helped me create my own sense of meaning from these experiences. The hard scrabble experiences shaped me in ways that I am unable to explain to my son who has wanted for nothing in life. I am grateful for that too.
Much of my photography has been dedicated to convey a sense of an enduring human spirit. Although Spokane has evolved into a contemporary metropolitan city that has been discovered and is experiencing an economic boom, I still see it’s humble beginnings and choose to point my camera at those fragments that remain.
Steinbeck and the work of the photographer Walker Evans connect with my own internal narrative about my family of origin. My photography is a way of enshrining those memories and creating some lasting value out of the struggles and hardships that have tempered and forged my spirit.
Recently I have been doing some research on Steinbeck for a screenplay I am writing. I came across his acceptance speech he gave for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In it he describes the work of a writer.
“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love.
In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
I think this is the work of photographers as well.
Peace,
Ira