What is most surprising about the Tindals, at least to me, is their thoughtful awareness not only of their own lives and choices but of the larger political context that to a considerable extent determines their condition. This understanding is not within photography’s power to make manifest, but it is central to Emmet’s purpose, which is to show these people as neither dry instances nor broken victims but, instead, as fully human beings.
For that reason, his description of them is not only imagistic but textual. I think it’s important to note that Emmet considers this book, as a whole, to be (as he says, quietly and in passing, in his preface) “a work of literature.” Though that is still not a claim we’re accustomed to hearing for a book so involved with photographs, there are certainly precedents for it — in addition to the Agee-Evans collaboration, we have the image-text works of the team of Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, Wright Morris and quite a few others. It strikes me as a reasonable assertion in this case, for Emmet is surely a storyteller.
He lays no claim to being a major stylist; his is a blunt, clean prose, spare as the lean lives he describes. Unlike Agee’s, his writing is only rarely poeticized; but it has the resonance and authority of experience in its tones. The language of his characters is rendered straightforwardly; Emmet’s own accounts and observations are thoughtful, understated, yet clearly grounded not only in research but in his own time spent living with his protagonists.
Of this involvement Emmet says, “The major issues of migrant life — such as its effect on the lives of children — do not reveal themselves quickly. You need more material to tell the full story. So I had to learn to see this as a long-term project, like what I imagine to be the process of sitting down to write a novel. Hemingway,” he continues, “saw his experience as a journalist as preparation for his fiction. But he knew the difference: a true narrative takes time. So this isn’t photojournalism in the usual sense; I watched myself cross over into something that I have no other word for but literature.”
The resonant tone of this book as a whole is a result of that “crossing over,” Emmet’s decision to commit himself to his sense of the story’s internal time frame. It creates a context of credibility, giving his version of this North American saga a weight and value it could otherwise not achieve. And I think the images and text are of a piece, integral — that, in mood, tone, and awareness they complement and enhance each other, living up to L. H.’s requirement that the tale be told “true blue.”
In my opinion, this book serves its subjects well. I’m speaking of both its subjects: the specific people whose lives it describes, and the migrant-labor caste they represent. The individuals are served by being treated as such; they are given their own names and voices, the chance to tell their stories and make their case, the opportunity to present themselves to a culture that chooses not to see them. The caste of which they’re part (and the snarl of issues implicated in that caste’s situation) is served through Emmet’s persistent integration of the particular and the general — his subtle but determined contextualizing of one family’s story within a broader social/political/economic frame, and his simultaneous insistence that the overview not neglect the specific human consequence of institutional forces.
