Making humble work come to life
Humble Work and Mad Wanderings: Street Life in the Machine Age
By Ken Appollo
Nevada City, California: Carl Mautz Publishing, 1997. 108 pp, 61 duotone images
$34.95 plus $3.50 shipping from 228 Commercial Street, Suite 522, Nevada City, CA 95959, USA.
Review by Alex Chis
Humble Work and Mad Wanderings is the result of Ken Appollo's 25 years of collecting "photographs of the working poor in transition — wandering, falling, ascending". The photographs, dating from the 1850s to the early 1900s, concentrate on "the most basic varieties of employment ... individuals who were able to drag, carry or push something onto the street that made them a living".
While the unique images alone make Humble Work and Mad Wanderings essential for anyone interested in social history, photographic historian Ken Appollo illuminates the images with a text that draws on his own personal history in understanding the lives of those depicted.
From his early days tending his grandfather's roadside vegetable stand, to a later life that included panhandling and an arrest in a demonstration in Paris in 1970, he has been a participant in and a witness of street life in the later 20th century.
The images themselves are endlessly fascinating. For one who has seen and read of chimneysweeps and tinkers, for example, in prints, movies, novels and histories, to have them stare out at you as they were in Victorian times is a precious moment.
What is also fascinating is that these images even exist. They are certainly not common. As one who has poured over many old photographs, seeing seemingly endless studio portraits, I can realise the work and dedication that has gone into this project. But the fact that these images were found, dating back in some instances almost 150 years, is also very encouraging.
Records for activists
Since this review is primarily intended for a labour and activist audience, rather than photo historians or academics, I'd like to go over what photography can say to us.
Photography dates from 1839, and by the 1850s there were photographers active in all but the most remote regions of the world, and even they were reached soon after.
Although the studio portrait of serious people (the seriousness enhanced by the long exposure times required and the necessity of keeping still, sometimes with one's neck clamped in place) is the most common image in 19th century photography, the earlier photographers also documented the important events of the day, travelling to wherever something was happening.
This means that it is likely that almost all the social movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries were documented in photographs, from strikes and lockouts to suffrage demonstrations. However, because of the ephemeral nature of many of the movements, as well as of the photograph itself, much of that history has been lost, while much more has been misplaced.
The other obvious fact is that this "humble work" of humble men and women hasn't been the most valued by our society, and much of the history has disappeared into trash bins.
For those who think that social movements of the past are important, both as part of our history and as resources for and teachers of future activists, finding and making available those documents becomes important. I'd like to try to illuminate the possibilities that exist now with two personal anecdotes.
What can be found
A few years ago, while idly leafing through some magazines at an antique dealer's in Berkeley, California, I ran across some typed and mimeographed papers. Looking at them, I discovered they were from the Colored Trainmen of America, from the '20s and '30s, mainly from Texas.
I bought them, took them home, sorted and read them. They were the records of a brakeman and union officer, his copies of grievance proceedings, records of gatherings, minutes of meetings, convention proceedings etc. They were fascinating, and I wondered whether any work had been done on this union.
I took the papers to friends who run a radical bookstore, and they searched their references. There was a reference in a footnote in Philip Foner's Organized Labor and the Black Worker, and the Cornell Labor Archives had two items. That was it.
I had found more than 100 separate documents, with names and dates included, vastly increasing the possibility for real research to be done on this aspect of labour history. (The papers now reside in an academic archive.)
Then, just a few weeks ago, I found and bought five real photo postcards from December 19 and 20, 1934, in Shelbyville, Tennessee. They depict what was obviously some kind of clash in that town. The captions read, "Mob scene on west side square — as Negro is rushed away", "500 troops arrive" and "Court House Ruins".
A tantalising glimpse! I still haven't been able to find out exactly what happened 63 years ago in Shelbyville, but the photographs themselves tell a good story.
Locating what has been found
About a year ago, I ran across Eyewitness at Wounded Knee, a book by Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul and John E. Carter, from the University of Nebraska Press. Here was another eye-opener: actual photographs of the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Having read and heard of this for over 20 years, perhaps the most famous and common historical reference in the Native American rights movement, to realise there were photographs was for a time even disorienting. The images I had in mind were so different from the often horribly banal aspects of the slaughter that it took some time to integrate them. Two itinerant photographers had been at Wounded Knee, and their work had never before been published until this book came out in 1991.
Another image out of our history came to me courtesy of Photographers in Arizona, 1850-1920: A History & Directory by Jeremy Rowe, Carl Mautz Publishing. Paging through this book, filled with striking images, I came across an image of a long line of men, disappearing around a corner, being guarded by other men with rifles.
The caption reads "Sheriff Wheeler's Deputies marching IWW strikers from downtown to the baseball stadium where they were held before being forced out of town during the Bisbee Deportation. Real photo postcard by George Dix, July, 1916." Once again history came to life.
I am sure there are many other images collected in different places. Universities, museums, state historical societies, the AFL-CIO, must have them. There are of course many more pictures of workers as workers, child labourers etc., than of workers, African-Americans, women and others in struggle. Perhaps a directory of those already established archives could be gathered. If people know of archives, they could send the information to me, and I could make it available.
Humble work and wanderings
There are many other images and documents in danger of disappearing. The antique dealer who had the Colored Trainmen papers said there were some photos of the men in the basement, but they've never turned up.
These papers were from the union officer in '20s Texas, who had moved to the Bay Area. When he died, his effects were purchased, and luckily the dealer kept the folder of papers.
Often when people die, the papers and photographs are just thrown away — paper is not thought to have much value, and no-one can recognise anyone in the old photos, so what good are they? I've seen (and occasionally managed to rescue) such documents, while the dealer is carefully saving chipped china. And of course it is true that much of the paper is relatively worthless.
But there can be treasure for the history of "humble work" there too. If our society doesn't value this history, people won't spend much time rescuing it.
It's up to those of us who care about labour and the social movements of today to help rescue what is left from the struggles of our predecessors. Who else will value the precious papers, saved for over 70 years by an old African-American man, who in his youth participated in organising, under the harshest of conditions, a union in rail in the south of the US? What would his photographs have been like?
Ken Appollo, through his sensitivity to those in a life of "humble work and mad wanderings" and his eye for an image, has shown us what is possible. Photography has the ability to capture reality like nothing else, and his collection makes 19th century street life come alive for us once again. When you look into the eyes of those in the photographs — the tinker, the hawker, the rag picker, the organ grinder — you see them as real people, no longer characters.
You see them as your neighbour, as yourself.
[Alex Chis can be contacted: PO Box 2944, Fremont, CA 94536, USA; ph: 510 489 8554; e-mail: