“… these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of others still more alien; and they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated towards this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.”
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men // James Agee and Walker Evans
Given the chance, I would take you back to these places myself. But rather than inspecting the desolation, I’d search your eyes squinting in the cloudless sun, watch the sweat drip down your contorted face. I want to see you stand where I have stood, shoulders square to a crumbling building, desperate to make sense of this one among many thousands, entranced until a swift breeze shakes you. I’ll settle now for postcards, snapshots of decline captured in a road trip across the rust belt, but just know that nothing save your own experience could suffice.
I crept along streets across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, peering into the lives of people impacted by decline which began decades before they were born. I sought abandon. I read economic papers flush with explanatory terms in preparation for my trip. Prosperity and decline. Industry and the lack thereof. Line graphs up and down. All were rendered obsolete when I faced the people of the rust belt.
Three days into my trip, I stood near a highway exit overlooking a neighborhood in Pittsburgh. I took some pictures and then heard a distant shouting voice. I didn’t turn my head – nothing was my business when I was the outsider.
“Yo! I’m talking to you.”
I turned. Staring back at me from across the street was a man with a wide-eyed look I still have not forgotten. “What the fuck are you doing taking pictures of the hood?” he asked me. I called back across the street:
“I’m doing a documentary project on post-industrial economic decline in the –”
“Are you from here?”
“No.”
“Then why the fuck are you taking pictures of the hood?” He moved to cross the street.
“I mean I’m just trying to –”
“I think you should get outta here before I fuck you up.”
“Alright, alright, I’m sorry. I’ll leave.” He was right in front of me now. We looked at one another. He just might fuck me up. I turned to leave. He called me a piece of shit. Maybe he was right.
A few days later, I drove to South Bend, Indiana. I walked down South Michigan Street on a particularly sweltering day. At first, I encountered the occasional abandoned building and snapped some pictures, but as I walked further, my camera weighed heavy in my hand. The street held homeless encampments between abandoned homes; the sidewalk was lined with bodies slumped in the midday sun, exhausted, drunk, or high, their possessions next to them in bags or shopping carts. The only businesses that appeared open were liquor and convenience stores, payday loans places, and a plasma “donation” center offering $400 cash to those who slept in tents only hundreds of feet away.
This was the rust belt that I sought, but when faced with it, I could do nothing but put my camera away. I couldn’t bring myself to further the assault on human dignity. There had to be some other way.
Almost pleased with my moral realization, I was approached by a man from across the street. He asked me what I was doing. I fumbled through an answer, adding that I had stopped to pack my camera and turn back. He motioned across the street towards a cluster of tents: “It’s just that my good friend lives in there. I’ve been helping him best I can, trying to get him out so he can get cleaned up and work, and I don’t think he’d appreciate having his picture taken.”
I could walk down any street in the rust belt and point my camera at a dilapidated façade. I might take an artful photo and bring it back to Yale to publish in a magazine. People might scratch their chins at it, even talk about it over dinner. Maybe their hearts will bleed. Mine sure has. But what good does looking do?
After talking to the man in South Bend, I apologized profusely and left in tears. It would seem all that I have given the people of the rust belt is tears. And it would seem all I have given us here is the material for catharsis, an absolution of our complicity through a perverse sort of pity. And what good is this pity for anyone?
I haven’t picked up my camera since my trip through the rust belt. I thought I was helping with my photographs, although I never knew exactly how. At best, I was documenting a reality already understood by my subjects and unable to be understood by my audience. Now I am stuck in a place of half-understanding, between living this reality each day and forever imagining it. Maybe I should be grateful, but all I can muster is disgust.
I spoke to a journalist this summer about the difficulties I faced with my project, thinking he might have some advice. He gave me a look of tired understanding and told me, “Well, you’ve arrived at these problems pretty early in your career. Good luck. I still haven’t figured it out.”
We shared a laugh at that — what good were our tears?