PURSGLOVE: STRUGGLES WITH LIVELIHOOD
Guy W. Saldanha
On view at the Salt Gallery in Portland, Maine
From March 7 to May 2, 2003

By Laurie Meunier Graves

I must admit to having a special fondness for photojournalism. Somehow, the combination of photographs and text provides a nearly perfect balance between the written word and the visual. Often, a narrative emerges and with it a moment of illumination. The subject matter can vary, of course, but it frequently centers on issues of class and race, which is probably one of the reasons why I like photojournalism as well as I do.

At the Salt Gallery, which is part of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, there is an exhibition that captures the best of photojournalism. Pursglove: Struggles With Livelihood examines various kinds of hard, physical labor and the people who do this work. The large, black and white photos are crisp and clear with an intensity of focus, and the accompanying text tells who the people are and what they do for work. In addition, we learn how the jobs have changed over the years and also how many of them are vanishing.

According to the Gallery’s handout, “Pursglove is an ancient nickname of late Latin and Saxon origin…The purs and glove described a man of land and influence…Pursglove came to America in the nineteenth century and settled in the Appalachian Valleys of coal and steel…The Pursglove Coal Company traded shares, cooperated with a virtual trust and became the landloard of a town whose community of labor encountered the plight and promise of a new livelihood…[This exhibit] is a latterday tale of industrial America. It is the story of an inheritance that sustains and perpetuates our course of life, inevitably exhausting the land and diminishing the labor.”

Then, the photographs take us on a tour around the country. We start in the Pacific Northwest and see Butch and the Douglas Fir 2, a photograph of a huge tree—seven feet in diameter—being felled. We wince as we watch the death of this beautiful, old tree even as we acknowledge that we use wood and lumber every single day. To complicate matters further, we learn that this job could bring death to Butch as well. “Old growth trees felled in thick stands can brush and snap large adjacent limbs and leave them dangling above timber cutters…[these limbs] are called ‘widow makers.’”

From the Pacific Northwest, it’s on to other forms of hard, dangerous jobs that require skill and sharp concentration. We see men and women working on oilrigs, quarrying limestone, and unloading bushels of wheat at a dock. As I stared at the lean arms and the grimy faces of the workers, I couldn’t help but think that these people do our dirty work for us, and unless there’s some sort of catastrophe, we hardly ever give them a thought. We just take for granted all that they do. If we think about them at all, it is usually in terms of the companies for which they work and the resulting pollution. While companies should certainly take responsibility for whatever pollution they cause, it is good to be reminded of the people who work so hard to produce materials that we all use.

Coal mines, of course, are a prominent part of this exhibit. What can we say about coal? At one time, it fueled the industrial revolution, and we are still dependent on it. The photographs remind us that working in the mines is dirty, hard, cramped, and hazardous. In C. J.  Shoveling Coal, we see the muscles bulging on C. J.’s arms. One of the placards reads: “Listening closely you may hear methane gas escaping through cracks in the coal, like embers hissing in a fireplace.” That’s one way of putting it; I can think of another way.

The slaughterhouses are even worse. It is not easy to look at the scenes of slaughtering and hanging, yet people do this all day long so that we can eat meat, wear shoes, and carry pocketbooks.

It is almost a relief to move inside to the few factories still left in New England and see scenes of older women cutting, sewing, and weaving. But it only takes a few minutes of looking at these photographs to realize that these jobs, many of which pay by the piece, are far from easy. It takes a strong constitution to be able to stitch as quickly as possible while still being accurate and to do this for eight hours a day.

This exhibit raises issues that are often contradictory. It shows people laboring at difficult and often dangerous work while at the same time noting the passing of many of these jobs. These jobs are hard, but they provide a living. What will these people do if the jobs go away? The exhibit also shows the price and ugliness of consumption. Even sugar processing looks unpleasant and dirty.

As a culture, the United States values consumption and work, and to some extent, there is nothing wrong with this. People, after all, cannot live without using resources, and they do need to work. But what happens when too many resources are consumed? What happens when machines can produce far more than it is humanly possible to use? What happens when the work goes away? It is time to start thinking about these questions, and this fine exhibit at Salt Gallery is an excellent place to begin.

 

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