Photography as a witness to small town history (and a gift across generations)

Many photographers want to travel to well known locations and capture iconic images. There is nothing wrong with this, but it is also true that photography can serve as a witness to history and provide value beyond an artistic image (or without an artistic image). And by history I really mean everyday life that seems so ordinary at the moment of capture, yet, when viewed in the distant future, will be a time capsule.

My Aunt in Bay City, Texas, recently sold the long-time family home, and in it were some 500 photographic negatives that my grandfather produced from 1921 - 1943. Some of these were family photos, but many were of the people in Bay City and the events of life in the town. My local camera store scanned 240 of the negatives. In looking at these pictures I see life as it was like 75 - 95 years ago; people long gone, and a way of life long gone. My Aunt, who is 93 years old, is reviewing the photos so as to identify as many people as possible. The pictures are on my photography website and will shortly be made available to the people of Bay City to download, save and print. Posted below are a few photos from my grandfather's collection.

When I first saw the negatives I thought they were, well, ordinary and not very good pictures; at least half of them were out of focus or blurry. But then I remembered that I still had my grandfather's camera. When I pulled it out and stared working with it I realized how hard it would have been to capture a good image using the technology he had. The camera had to be held at waist height. The only "viewfinder" is a 3/4 inch piece of glass added as an optional feature, there is no way to focus except estimate the distance from the subject and slide the lens to the appropriate place, and the exposure is entirely done through guesswork. The maximum shutter speed is 1/50th of a second, which, because it introduces blur, modern photographers avoid unless their cameras have image stabilization. Having spent some time with his 1921 camera (pictured below), I don't think I could have done as well as he did.

The point of all this is to say that photographers today have the ability to leave a body of work that might be valuable to future generations. These need not be iconic photos, they can be simple photos of everyday life and the people in your town.

Bay City, Texas circa 1924

The unit my grandfather commanded in WWI. The legend reads: Victory Parade 1st Division Montabaur Germany 11/16/19.

Women in the Stenography School and their teacher circa 1929 in Bay City, Texas.

Hunting ducks and squirrels was apparently a big thing in the 1920s and 30s (before bag limits were established). The photo archive has shots of people with 80 or so ducks or 40 squirrels adorning their Ford automobiles. Hunter unknown. (My uncles were bootleggers during prohibition and ran alcohol in their Ford Coupe - pronounced Coo-Pay. They covered the bottles with pine saplings, and that explains the unusually high number of pine trees in Bay City today.)

1924 calendar frozen in a block of ice. The photo archive shows the building of the first electric substation on the Gulf Coast. Electricity brought the ability to make ice. Think about it; a way to have ice on the humid and hot Gulf Coast of Texas. The coming of electricity was a momentous advance. My grandfather was president of the electric company, and that must have been an important job in the 1920s and 30s. 

Much of the town turns out to see the arrival of a Ford Trimotor airplane circa 1928. Note that the airplane landed in a field; there was no airport. 

My grandfather's 1921 Kodak Autographic 3A  Model C with coupled rangefinder that took all of these photos with the exception of those from WWI. The original list price was $109, and it was the most expensive Kodak consumer camera produced at the time. In current dollars it would have cost around $1,500. 

Sugarcane aphid: The gathering storm

It is April and the sugarcane aphid is much farther north in the High Plains of Texas far earlier this year than in the past. We were hoping this serious pest of sorghum would arrive in June as it did in 2015, but our overwintering studies during the winter have confirmed that it is only 50 miles south of here. (Last year's post describes this pest.) The aphids may already be here in low numbers, but if not it won't be long before the winged adults arrive.

And so it begins, intensive research on this insect with the goal of helping sorghum growers avoid as much damage as possible so that they can make a profit on the crop. (Or at least not lose so much money; too often 2015 was about losses.) Sorghum production on the Texas High Plains will be down this year, and right now it looks like at least a 50% reduction simply due to the sugarcane aphid. We are entomologists and we practice and promote Integrated Pest Management (IPM). How we deal with sugarcane aphid is a textbook case of IPM; bring every weapon to bear on a problem - first to avoid it and then to control it. We alter planting dates, we encourage beneficial insects (generalist predators) by not using harsh insecticides, we recommend seed treatments so as to go 45 days after planting without damaging infestations, we encourage the use of resistant hybrids, or those thought to be resistant (there has not been enough time to fully evaluate them on the High Plains), we encourage scouting so that treatment decisions are based on actual numbers of insects in the field. And when an insecticide truly is needed, we encourage fast action and follow-up monitoring.

However, this year is equally as bad as last year in terms of funding for the work we need to do. All of the grant funding went to the Gulf Coast, as it has for the last three years since the sugarcane aphid was discovered there. This is in spite of the fact that the aphid is a far more virulent pest on the High Plains where we have hotter days, cooler nights, more intense sunlight and fewer beneficial insects in the system at the start of aphid season. Our treatment thresholds are far lower than those on the Gulf Coast, yet there is no serious funding to figure out the best practices on the High Plains.

So on the High Plains we are once again faced with doing all of our work with reserve funds built up over the last 15 years or so, and the bank account does not have many zeros left and will soon be depleted. My colleagues and I just committed to purchase equal shares to buy an expensive small plot sorghum thresher so that we can take yield data from our plots. We will get a little bit of funding from the companies that sell insecticides that kill sugarcane aphids, but we won't have funding from commodity groups, statewide and federal sources. We don't have money to grow sorghum on the Experiment Station, and we don't have money to drive one or two counties away every week to help each other take data. (It takes may hours to count thousands of sugarcane aphids on leaves. A nine treatment, 4 replication experiment takes 5 people 6 hours to count.) So we will drain our thin accounts to get the work done.

In the end, and probably this year when we have nothing left in the bank, we will have to stop working on the sugarcane aphid problem. For now we will keep going in spite of the difficulties because we know that what we do is important to our sorghum growers. We do good work that matters, and sometimes that is enough, at least for a while until fiscal realities force us to stop.