©Bruce Berman
May 2010
This is the highway west of Magdalena, New Mexico, heading to Datil and Pie Town. This is a road that Russell Lee traveled many times, I am sure, when he needed to resupply himself for his adventure in Pie Town, 70 miles to the west. He came back down this road, kept going, and got re-stocked in Socorro. In 1937, the road was dirt. Now it’s two lane blacktop. Traffic is sparse. The land does not feel desolate, but it is vast. Today, when heading west up into the mountains it’s not easy to even remember the brutal Interstate or the homogenizing Walmart world you’ve left behind.
U.S.60 in New Mexico is now a paved two lane and in the summer, when this image was made -June 2010- it’s hot! Triple digits. The highway is squishy when you step on it and the heat rushes into the car when you open the door, enveloping you, smothering you. It is that way now and it was, I am sure, that way when Russell Lee tooled his way to Pie Town, 74 years ago.
Hot -or cold- stepping out onto Russell Lee’s Road is an adventure that started for me when I first picked up a camera, with professional intentions, 42 years ago. The first step -this photo- is an embrace.
The adventure has begun.
I have always admired the work of the 1930’s photographers. They had, for me, the right blend of the beauty of image-making and the solidity of purpose of investigating the human condition. In late summer 2009 I -and my colleague Mary Lamonica- received a Rising Star Grant at New Mexico State University,where we both teach in the Journalism/Mass Comm Department. I was eager to get going, but, like Lee, I can’t just start and stop. My photojournalism is the photojournalism of immersion. All during the school year 2009-2010 I was, almost literally, “chomping a the bit.” The problem with that, of course, is that given enough time, one tends to think too much.
I did.
And thinking too much is not a good playbook for making good photojournalism: it requires doing it, learning from what you do, learning from what you shoot, revising from what you shot, honing and shaping and molding. It’s clay, not gray matter.
It takes time. Lots of time.
All of this past year, I kept asking myself, How can I connect with Russell Lee? What will I be looking for out there? Am I looking for what was? What used to be? Will I find the Dust Bowl or will I find the “New West?” Will I find anything? What’s the point? Who needs it?
The day the school year ended -May 12, 2010, I packed up my battered old station wagon, awkwardly stuffed with cameras and crackers, hats and water, memory cards and energy bars, and headed north, toward Russell Lee’s Pie Town, north from my home in El Paso, Texas to west central New Mexico. The search for Russell Lee has begun.
The above image is my first photograph from the first excursion. As I step out of the car I realize, this could be a spot that Lee stepped on. It was a revelation. 74 years ago isn’t so long gone after all. For sure, this is a view that Lee saw because this landscape has changed little since 1936.
When I began this journey, my car developed heating problems. In Elephant Butte the water gauge was, suspiciously, inching up toward the mid level and going north. If you’ve ever had this experience there is only one word that matches it: Panic! Or is the word dread? In an attempt to “fix it,” I purchased a new gas cap in Truth or Consequences (in Lee’s era it was called Hot Springs), filled the radiator with water (not before, as luck would have it, having the wind blow the strut out from my upraised hood and slamming me in the head).
I started up again, but the tension was on. I’ve been here before and it’s not a fun place to be. You inch along, every mile is a hope against hope that the full disaster won’t strike. Break down!
It was hot! 104 degrees and hotter on the road with the engine grinding.
This was the trip’s body blow number one and I am praying it won’t get worse.
Then I had an idea (or was it pure animal reaction): Turn off the air conditioning.
It seems reasonable to me to turn it off. Less stress. I do this, as mentioned, and at first, because it is overheating. I recognize the “fate,” of it all: Without it, I was feeling the same heat, the same climate, the same stress that Lee would have felt, back then, in the 1930’s.
He didn’t have AC then. I don’t have it now.
For the rest of the project -no matter when it ends- I vow to leave the AC off. Let the heat in! Let Lee in.
My first insight into the photography of Russell Lee is to be sweating my…er…seat off!
With the windows rolled down, I can hear the road, the tires, squishy on the hot tar, feel the heat and grit and sweat. I feel more lean and sparse, like these highlands of New Mexico are, and feel more a part of the landscape, part of something, not insulated from it, walled off with closed windows and decades of time separating me from the phantom photographer I am pursuing. I head toward the great U.S. 60, hotter than a hotcake, but fully in synch with the emerging spirit of the project.
It’s taking shape. The road has yielded answers.
I’m reminded that photography is a way of connecting, a way of becoming part of what you have seen, what you have touched. I know Lee must have concluded -or been reminded of- the same things. Lee is my forebearer. I have crossed paths with him for all my 40 years of photographing. He was in El Paso. So was I. He was in Carlsbad. So was I. When I drove out of Chicago the first time, when I was 16 years old, many decades ago, my stop for sleep (in the back of my yellow and white ’55 Chevy Bel Air) was in Tucumcari, on old Route 66. I know Lee had been there. It was only five years later that I picked up a camera with the photo profession in my sights. I was aware of the FSA photographers from the beginning. He’d always been there. Why not Lange? Why not Evans or Rothstein? It was always Lee that I was attracted to and the places I have lived and worked have been Lee-land. On that first trip, when I drove west to New Mexico, when I was a kid, years ago, and slept in that town, I remember waking up the next morning and the first thing I saw was a sign (I had pulled over at the edge of a gas station), and it said, “Gas 29.9.”
A lot has changed.
And in some ways nothing.
For a career, now, he has always been here, just ahead of me, already having done his thing and having moved on. Perhaps I am just the “clean-up,” hitter.
Mostly, for me, until now, he has been in El Paso. I put my thirty years in there, did it deeper and harder, I think, and so, there, at least, I always felt, “Yeah, yeah, but you’re on my turf.”
Out here, In New Mexico, I know I am on his.
The trip goes on. I am finally on the road with Russell Lee. As the first days go on, I get into a rhythm, a mode, a method, and I start to gather images and they spark ideas which spark more images. The process has begun. I know this is how Lee worked, too: just get out there and you’ll figure something out. That’s what I tell the students at the university where I teach. “The answer is in the work, the doing of the work, not in your head.” I am starting to find some answers about Lee and about me. In fact, out here, alone, no game plan, this might be the only place I can be and really be myself.
I’m free and I just know, as I tool down this stretch of U.S. 60, heading west out of Magdalena, at sun down, Lee felt the same thing. He’s just up that road, ahead of me, and I am trying to catch up, meet up, find what I’ve been trailing.
I drive along this highway, the AC off and the windows open, and the sweat constantly wet on my neck and back and I know Lee is right there. I turn off the cell phone. Maybe now I can get to work on this project that has been brewing in my head for almost a year (or has it been almost forty years, since I first became aware of the FSA shooters?). It’s hot and it’s vast and I’m unreachable. I’m a photographer again (during this transition year into teaching photography I have sometimes wondered) and I can feel not only the road and the sky and the distant mountains and the people one meets along the way, but I also feel, my mind turning off, as the road unwinds, snapping to a straight line on the gauge, finally not busy, and I feel the spirits of photographer’s long gone, feel the history of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, purely, deeply, gratefully,I feel, again.
Isn’t that the way that most photographer’s work? Engage, See and then, only then, in the process of doing it, allow yourself to feel.
Lee drove a 1930’s era Ford, probably never going more than 50 mph. My Honda goes no faster, I think. At least it shouldn’t (I’m afraid to even try it!).
I never go over 55 mph on U.S. 60 on this trip. People pass me in giant pick ups, with a roar. “What’s wrong with him,” they must think. That would seem like a violation of our times, to slow down. It’s some unwritten rule, the rule of distraction in our new un-wired age.
I have my own rule, again: The Rule For Poking Around In The Past.
Somehow, in my head, I have it that if I go too fast, I’ll miss Lee, and it’s becoming more clear to me as I go that somewhere on this trip what this trip, for me, is really all about, is that I want to find him, find Lee, catch up with him, finally, meet him somehow, have a conversation, or, at least, come to an understanding.
We need to talk.
Finally.
This project and this trip were not conceived to be a literal “Russell Lee Was Here,” exploration. Rather, it was the journey and photos of Lee that gave myself and my colleague an excuse to get out into America and see what’s there right now. That’s what we’re doing. What is amazing, and future posts will, I think, back up this idea, is that the places along U.S. 60, along Russell Lee’s Road, pretty much look the same now as they were then. The lives and struggles of the people who live along this highway are different now, but, also, a lot the same. People are near their margins, financially, now as they were then. In a different way, yes, but there’s anxiety still, as there was then. You hear it in the dining room of the High Country Lodge in Magdalena, where the local cast of characters meet every morning, the ranchers intermingling with the ex-pat doctors, the almost-miners mixing with the old cowboys (real ones), the place that the old boys -and girls- get together every morning and talk. You can hear it through their laughter and jokes. Underneath it there is real concern about the future, a questioning of what we–Americans–are, and what we might become.
It is the same now as it was then.
There’s an edge again. These are not the “Good Times,” these are the times that test thinking people’s hearts and soul. Something is wrong “out there,” and everyone is hoping it won’t come and bite them in the rear.
What’s coming?
The difference between now and then, it seems, is that many people who live in the rural lands have had prosperity. People have equity now, a little bit of a reserve, much as they did for a little while after the crash of ’29. They have things: ATV’s and extra trucks, cell phones and TV’s. They have a piece of paper that says that they own or will own the property they live on. The murmur, the great buzz that I hear expressed, on these mornings around he seeming convivial table, more than once, is the fear of losing that equity and getting to “zero,” because these are not people any more than their grandfathers were, who want anyone giving them anything.
They fear a crash.
The fear does not seem unfounded.
As the Russell Lee Road (RLR) project goes on over the next few years, we will see how this era of Recession plays out, how it affects the land and the people, how we recover from it, or not, and how people continue on, out here, along the great U.S. 60
It is probable that the “look,” of the land will endure and stay the same.
It’s the feel that’s on this land that I am chasing and I know, for sure, that there was a photographer out here 74 years ago, who was chasing the same intangible.
He found pieces of it and made his images.
I am finding some more.
It’s possible he and I will be finding them together.