It is a wonderful ordinariness that Walter Dean Myers celebrates in One More River to Cross: An African American Photograph Album (Harcourt Brace, $40). Here is a workingman father, his fingers thick and stiff, pulling his brightly dressed young daughter in a small wagon past a blacksmith shop. A minister standing waist-deep in a river gently cradles the shoulder of a new believer about to be baptized. Two handsome women are giggling in the splash of ocean surf.
Here, too, are brass bands, showgirls, a college football team, black-habited nuns, shawled members of a synagogue, medical students studying a cadaver, fishermen gutting their catch, young women with smart smiles, styling fashionable new clothes on a Harlem sidewalk, and small children playing small children games on the rough pavement of a Washington, D.C., alley. And families, many families–often dressed in their best clothes and seated for a studio photograph, embodying pride, hope, love, strength, tenderness and potential.
Myers describes “One More River to Cross” as a sort of family album of black America, but it could be anyone’s family album. Its images, for the most part, are so universal that the book resonates richly across racial lines.
True, there are some pages devoted to prominent U.S. blacks. And there is a six-page section on racism near the middle of the book that includes a photo of a Ku Klux Klan march in Washington and another of a crowd of straight-back whites standing at the foot of a telephone pole from which dangles the body of a lynched black man. (“No matter how we tended to our business, we couldn’t forget what some folks thought about us,” Myers writes. “And the people who hated us because of our color WERE PROUD OF THEIR HATE.”)
But Myers is less interested in the differences between the races than in the everyday experiences that are common to all people.
“The pictures gathered here,” he writes, “show our struggles but also our joy and the sense of communion we experience in family gatherings, in religious services, in music, in holiday celebrations. . . . Here are people being people, unburdened by the historical restrictions of race, defining themselves according to their understanding of who they are.”
Such rejoicing in the ordinary–an excitement at the everyday-ness of life–is a theme that carries through many of the best history and related books this season.
Consider Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840-1900, by Joan Severa (Kent State University Press, $60.) This amazingly thorough examination of clothing styles for each decade in a 70-year period is a social history of how Americans, rich and poor, black and white, rural and urban, made their decisions about what to wear and how to look.
It is also a valuable reference work and a sort of detective story. For each of the 270 photos, Severa, the curator emeritus and costume history consultant for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin Museum, describes with incredible detail the clothing (and hair style) of the subject or subjects. She also uses this information to tease out insights into the social status and background of the sitters.
But, ultimately, the greatest allure of “Dressed for the Photographer” is its collection of faces–of people, so stiffly, smilingly, jauntily, touchingly human–from the past.
Another slice of extraordinary ordinariness can be found in Citizens of the World–Meyrin, photographs by Nicolas Faure and text by Andre Klopmann (Scalo, distributed by D.A.P., $49.95). Meyrin is a Swiss city of 20,000, among whom more than 100 nationalities are counted. In Faure, Meyrin had a photographer who was captivated by such diversity. His book is itself captivating–a collection of photographs of more than 70 families, representing more than 70 nationalities, shot in homey living-room comfort.
An uglier side to the everyday is documented in The Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese, by Philip P. Choy, Lorraine Dong and Marlon K. Hom (University of Washington Press, $24.95). Here are political cartoons and other illustrations from the 1800s that serve to dehumanize and demonize the Chinese who had immigrated to the U.S. “The selection offers the reader an opportunity to . . . experience the hostility and tension during the Chinese exclusion era. It also reveals the racist atmosphere of the 19th century, a legacy we have yet to resolve in 20th century America,” the authors note.
It is a physical ordinariness that is captured in A Simple and Vital Design: The Story of the Indiana Post Office Murals, by John C. Carlisle, photographs by Darryl Jones (Indiana Historical Society, $24.95), and in The Last Steam Railroad in America, photographs by O. Winston Link, text by Thomas H. Garver (Abrams, $49.50).
The 36 post office murals, recorded in all their yellowing dignity in Jones’ photos, are remnants of the thousands that Depression-era artists painted under a 1930s government program. Part of American life for more than half a century, these murals embody the thoughtful exuberance and self-reliant optimism of a time of national emergency and national community.
Winston Link photographed Norfolk and Western Railway steam trains in the mid-1950s. As this line–the last of its kind–was in the process of switching from steam to diesel, Link lovingly caught the evocative power and beauty of the once-ubiquitous steam-powered trains. Often, on the edges of his photos, he included slices of mid-1950s American life. Among Link’s lustrous black-and-white images there are two dozen startlingly attractive color photographs.
Similarly startling are the images in There Once Was a War: The Collected Color Photography of World War II, edited by Jeffrey Ethell (Viking Studio Books, $29.95). This was a conflict that generated millions of black-and-white photographs, many of which have risen to the status of art and emblem. But here are glimpses of the way the Second World War actually looked on the battlefield and behind the lines. The color is often crude–too vibrant or not vibrant enough–and some of the shots are stagey to the extreme. But, like a suddenly discovered door into the past, these photos give a valuable new insight into that era.
Insights into everyday lives–albeit in extraordinary circumstances–also can be found in two books based on facsmile reproductions: A Wartime Log, by Art and Lee Beltrone (Howell Press, $34.95), and The Young Churchill: The Early Years of Winston Churchill, by his granddaughter Celia Sandys (Dutton, $27.95).
The Beltrones’ book features reproductions of notes, poems, pinups, watercolors, cartoons, portraits and daydreams (a cigarette ad, for example, and menus from famous restaurants) with which American prisoners of war filled up blank Wartime Log books that were distributed to them by the YMCA. While there are a few reminders of the danger of prison life, such as the drawing of a pool of blood on the floor of one barracks, most of the entries are the doodlings–more or less artistic–of lonely, idle, cooped up young men.
Also lonely was the young Winston Churchill, a bright but delicate boy from what we would now call a dysfunctional family who was exiled to boarding school by his parents at age 8 and remained away from home for much of the rest of his childhood.
In his letters to “My dear Papa” and “Darling Mummy,” the boy who would become a Great Man exhibits the intelligence, curiosity, fear of failure, desire for affection and, above all, zest for life that would mark him later. Yet, as enjoyable and touching as these letters are, one gets the sense that they made little impression on the two people he most wanted to reach.
