Harry Smith's Map

Regarding ‘Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith’, edited by Carol Bove, Dan Byers, Rani Singh, and Elisabeth Sussman (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University / Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024), catalogue of the exhibition of the same name, which, curated by those named above, opened at the Whitney in 2023 in New York and closed this December 1 in Cambridge. I was part of an advisory board for the show, and was lucky to be able to contribute a chapter to the catalogue, which is here below.

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In Wisconsin Death Trip, James Marsh’s 1999 film version of Michael Lesy’s 1973 book—both of them gothic documentaries about the economic, physical, civic, moral devastation brought about by the forgotten great depression of the 1890s as it played out in the small Wisconsin farming town of Black River Falls—one Porter Ross has laid in wait for his wife outside a local roadhouse. “The pictures you are about to see,” Lesy had written in the first sentence of his introduction to a study drawn from the archives of one Charles Van Schaick, the town photographer, “are of people who were once actually alive,” the word “actually” skewing the obviousness of the statement, opening it into its real subject, which is death. The pictures you are about to see are of people who were once actually dead, the sentence, and the book, and the film, whisper from behind their chronicle of childhood epidemics, arson, vandalism, crop failures, foreclosures, suicides, bankruptcies, child murders, domestic murders, stranger murders, business murders, and madness. It throws you off. You are in a world where nothing holds, where what you see seems at once real and not, a recorded incident and a bad joke.