Playing Farm

An astute reader alerted the PopPhoto.com staff today to a fascinating photo slideshow from the Chicago Tribune Magazine by photojournalist Scott Strazzante. Titled Another Country, the series consists of 29 diptychs made on a Lockport, Illinois, farm owned by Harlow and Jean Cagwin, and the subdivision that was subsequently built on their land. In each diptych, the left image was made during Strazzante's many years documenting the Cagwin farm, and the right is an image of the Grabenhofer family, which lives in the subdivision that sprang up after the Cagwin's sold their farm in 2002.

Besides being strong, insightful work, this photo essay is a perfect example of everything a diptych series can be. These are not diptychs to be trendy or to disguise weak individual images, but to convey that third dimension so difficult to capture in a still image: the passage of time. With the left images dated between 1994 and 2002, and the right ones all from 2007, the change they represent is tangible, made moreso by the fact that these individual changes speak to larger societal shifts. The urbanization that has gone on since the Depression; the loss of small, family-owned farms to huge corporate food producers; the ever widening gulf between the food we eat and the place it came from.

But for me the most poignant contrast between these images is drawn along generational divides. Strazzante has picked out telling similarities between his early and later shots: both families care for their animals, eat big meals together, watch T.V. But in most ways the second images seems to represent a toy version of life on the farm -- a sense that is heightened by the children in the pictures next to those of the aging Cagwins. In one diptych Harlow mows down grass with his huge tractor while one of the Grabenhofer children plays with a toy mower in their manicured lawn. In another the same tractor in a ramshackle barn is juxtaposed with bright plastic farmhouse decorations on a children's cake.

Is it my own bias -- having been raised on a small farm with back-to-the-land ideals -- that makes me see farm life as more real, less plastic, than urban life? I suppose it would be just as easy to view the children in the later pictures as a signal of rejuvenation, of basic human values reborn (albeit reinterpreted). But for me that hope is greatly tempered by the more pressing feeling evoked by this series: that most of us are only "playing" at a connection with the land when we buy our organic vegetables and plant our little yard with flowers, that we have made a children's game out of a way of life that was often hard but at the very least genuine.

~Miki Johnson