ART REVIEW : Photographs of Hope in Troubled Times

The women in their shapeless print dresses stand with arms crossed or slung akimbo. A man bends over to dig aimlessly in the dirt and children linger in a wary clump. A torn bed sheet flaps on a clothesline. It was 1939 in Canal Point, Fla., and the living wasn’t easy.

“We ain’t never lived like hogs before but we sure does now,” one of these Missouri migrants told Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott.

A latecomer to the corps of FSA photographers documenting the hardscrabble existence of poor rural folk, 29-year-old Wolcott was assigned to concentrate on positive views that might soften a curmudgeonly congressman’s heart toward Roosevelt’s social programs. But she interpreted that dictum in a flexible, independent way.

Photographs spanning Wolcott’s career--at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to June 19--testify to her abiding fascination with odd moments in the lives of ordinary people, her gift for locating telling details and her endlessly sympathetic eye.

While fellow FSA photographer Dorothea Lange is best remembered for her monumental dramatic images of poverty and despair, Wolcott (previously a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin) had a lighter touch. Often centering on the experiences of children, her prints combine a disarming casualness (sometimes an extra foot or arm strays into the frame) with a storytelling, action-oriented sense of composition.

Dwarfed by looming gravel-heaped freight cars, a blond child in a pale, drooping dress trudges down a dirt path in West Virginia, her tiny body bending away from the heavy pail she carries.

Corpulent tobacco farmers with holes in their socks and hats parked on their faces or chests nap before an auction in Durham, N.C.

Exuberant, smartly dressed black teen-agers jitterbug in a juke joint in Clarksdale, Miss.

Two elderly matrons in hats and frocks, perched on the running boards of a car, picnic at the beach while a younger woman stands at a distance and looks irritably out to sea.

Outfitted for a day at the races (striped jacket, cigar, posy in the buttonhole), three beefy guys hold a confab at Hialeah Park, Fla.

A black hand reaches through a wicket for a pay envelope doled out by prim, white male cashiers in Mileston, Miss.

Barefoot children carrying lunch pails and umbrellas troop over a dry, sun-dappled creek bed to their one-room school.

To a jaded ‘80s eye, these scenes sometimes look too clean-scrubbed or cinematically lively to be true slices of life. But Wolcott’s mission was to bring back encouraging signs of life from a wide spectrum of social situations during some of the most discouraging days the country had known.

After her three years with the FSA, Wolcott found her photographic subjects closer to home. She would sneak up on her children, who sometimes played outdoors in the nude, to snap idyllic images of golden summers.

In the late ‘50s, when her husband Lee was in the Foreign Service, Wolcott journeyed with him to Iran, Pakistan, Egypt and India. But most of the photographs she took in family planning clinics and elsewhere, sometimes in color, have a disappointingly generic, UNICEF brochure look.

Scenes of hippie life in Mendocino dominate the last group of photographs, with just a glimpse of the simple, storytelling kind of images Wolcott does best, like the shot of suntanned oil-slick legs of a vacationer with a book and two sucked-dry drinking glasses amid bristling cactus.

Wolcott still picks up a camera from time to time. Last year she shot an amusingly modest “self-portrait”: a straw hat leaning on a washbowl. But the portrait that sticks in the mind is the one someone took of her as a vivacious young woman, wriggling under a barbed-wire fence in the snow with a light meter clutched in the crook of one arm.

Also on view at the museum through May 22 is a massive exhibit of Persian textiles from the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., with the go-for-the-gut title “Woven From the Heart, Spun From the Soul.”

The patterns in these articles of clothing and fabric swatches--some from the 16th Century and in fragmentary form--are as colorful and detailed as Persian miniature paintings, although necessarily repetitive and symmetrical in design. Oddly enough, however, the paintings are only glancingly alluded to in the extensive didactic material accompanying the exhibit.

Persian poetry (which embroidered verbally on the flower and bird imagery in these fabrics), Persian gardens (rows of beds separated by water channels, easily adapted into a textile design), Persian weaving methods, Persian commercial activities (trade with the West resulting in the incorporation of imagery from Dutch and English herbals), Persian dress and household goods--all are discussed in ample detail.

In fact, the scholarly authors of the catalogue press for the acceptance of surviving textiles as primary Iranian source materials for historians, cultural anthropologists and economists.

Textiles were used at court and sold in the bazaars in the resplendent Safavid capital in Isfahan and they were also staples of the poorest nomadic household. For 400 years textiles represented a major Iranian commodity, equivalent to the oil wells of a later era. Only in the late 19th Century did manufacturing decline, ceding to international trade shifts and the growth of a new kingpin industry: Persian carpets.

Which is all well and good, but as far as the viewer’s roving eye is concerned, the chief pleasures of the exhibit lie in the variously intense and muted patterns of the intricate silk weavings on which enchanted gardens bloom.