These pictures have also amplified memories of the Dust Bowl in comparison with other droughts.
Government relief programs used photographs of the environmental devastation and mass exodus to drum up continued support for their funding efforts. Four major drought events, combined with economic depression, drove farmers and farmworkers from the Plains states during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl remains, as the National Drought Mitigation Center puts it, “the drought of record” in the United States. One drought, though, has scratched its way into the visual memory of most Americans. Climatologists describe drought as a slow-moving disaster, and less-than-average moisture is not only hard to show in a single image, but it’s also kind of boring compared with the drama of the flood. Another reason is that there’s no singular moment of action for the artist to focus on. That’s one reason drought is difficult to capture in pictures. It was always that way.” Out of sight, out of mind, says the water as it rushes in to rewrite the past. As John Steinbeck wrote in the opening pages of East of Eden, “It never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. Crops are revived, and the trees leaf out exuberantly. The return of normal water levels erases the evidence of former scarcity. In local history museums and archives and even at flea markets, I have seen thousands of pictures of people paddling down streets in canoes, past islands of peaked roofs and rafts of floating furniture.īy comparison, the history of drought-which has shaped humanity just as floods have-is nearly invisible. The sudden, uncanny catastrophe of flood also made a spectacular subject for photographers in the 20th century.
#The white pages california full
Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks are full of drawings of rivers, rains, and roiling waters. The Japanese artist Hokusai depicted water in all forms and seasons in his wood-block prints. Water is an alluring subject for the artist. Sometimes people memorialize these marks, carving into stone and labeling the lines with dates, like a child’s growth chart drawn on a door frame.įloods have also been depicted widely in sketches, engravings, and paintings, as well as more recently in photographs. Recent inundation is easy to see in high-water marks, which trace the edges of the tide with soil and seed deposits. But rather than planning for dry conditions that, because of climate change, are likely to become far more frequent and deadly, Americans seem incapable of even remembering them.Īround the world, the landscape itself records our long history of floods. The dearth of drought imagery hints at, and contributes to, a historical amnesia. In much of the West, water is in short supply even under normal years. The gap in the visual record is particularly striking during a summer when parts of nearly every state are experiencing abnormally dry conditions. Only a couple dozen photographs showed drought in California. But when I looked for corresponding evidence of drought, the archives turned up very little. In state museums and California-based archives, I uncovered a veritable deluge of flood pictures-more than 7,000 of them depicting that state alone. Drought and flood might seem to be two sides of the same coin, but the former is far less documented than the latter is. Where and when was it taken? Who were these stoic women? In searching for them, I found something surprising: a trend in visual culture that reaches far beyond the borders of California. As a photo historian, my first move was to try to identify the image. They are attended by a little boy, and all four of them are floating casually down a residential street. Sifting through a box of old photos recently, I turned over an early-20th-century postcard to find three women in a rowboat, wearing long dresses and neat updos. I did discover high water at a local flea market, though. Hillsides of flame-orange pine trees killed by beetle infestations foretell long and intense fire seasons. The effects of such conditions are visibly apocalyptic: piebald street trees, empty orchards, horizontal stripes etched on the shoreline of lakes and reservoirs. The region is currently in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls a “severe drought.” During the past decade, California has experienced two periods of “exceptional drought,” the agency’s highest drought ranking. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area 10 years ago, I bought a pair of rain boots.
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