IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: Roi had to restrain himself on art because after the birth of the twins he was at Foster and Kleiser, billboard advertising. Because they knew that I had a camera and was a photographer, they asked him to do billboards. You know, to go out and photograph them. He did very good shots. And all I could see of it was from Twin Peaks. He would tell me in what direction the light was. I guessed at the exposure. He did it on 4 x 7 film and he did a darned good job. He took it downtown to a place for development. One day he came home and said, "You know, there's a new girl at Marshios now, and she comes halfway across the counter." Guess who that was. Dorthea [sic] Lange. And we became acquainted with Dorthea Lange. He then introduced Dorthea to Maynard Dixon, who was also at Foster and Kleiser. This is the way artists had to earn a living. It was just problematical what they did on the side, but they all did something, you know. - Oral history interview with Imogen Cunningham, 1975 June 9
The twins, Padraic and Rondal Partridge, were born in 1917. As a child, Rondal Partridge spent time in Dorothea and Maynard's household. He later became Lange's assistant for her photography work with the New Deal's Farm Security Administration.
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| Dorothea Lange by Rondal Partridge |
Of particular interest to me is a series of photos Lange (and Partridge) took along U.S. highway 99 in California. She described the project in a "general caption":
The billboards along highway 99 that Dorothea Lange photographed - along with a much later one by Ron Partridge - make up the visual backbone of my pop-up book, Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading. Not surprisingly many of those billboards bore the Foster and Kleiser logo. The company was the largest billboard company in California. Three of Lange's photos that I featured in Marx's Fetters were of billboards for the National Association of Manufacturer's "American Way" propaganda campaign.
The N.A.M. had been the most ardent opponent of the 8-hour day and vigorously promoted the so-called lump-of-labor fallacy myth to discredit advocates of shorter hours and "educate the educators" in the nation's college economics departments. It stands to reason that they should take credit for the world's shortest working hours once the stock market crash and Great Depression had forcibly reduced hours.
Ron Partridge had also photographed the "World's Shortest Hours" billboard mounted on the side of a dilapidated pipe and plumbing supply shop that also bore the legend, "We Buy Junk." The "World's Highest Standard of Living" billboard was made famous by Margaret Bourke-White's LIFE magazine photo of African-American Ohio River flood survivors lined up for relief supplies in Louisville, KY. A few years past a quarter of a century after Lange's highway 99 billboard photos, Ron Partridge photographed a "New Chevy" billboard looming over piles of wrecked cars in Emeryville, California. Again the Foster and Kleiser logo appears discreetly just below the car's image.
It seems to me that this image is a companion to two others by Partridge, "Pave it and Paint it Green" and "El Camino Real, Palo Alto." For about four years my family lived on Tioga Court in Palo Alto, just a short bike ride from El Camino. The rubber stamp shop is probably the one I got a one-day job cleaning up along with my buddy and next door neighbor, Carl Coffee.
Perhaps it is not possible to fit into American life. American Life is a billboard; individual life in the U.S. includes something nameless that takes place in the weeds behind it. - Harold Rosenberg
Back to Dorothea Lange and highway 99 in the 1930s, there are 14 images in the Library of Congress collection of "Billboard along U.S. 99 behind which three destitute families of migrants are camped. Kern County, California" or "possibly related" to it. In my book, I fused two of the "possibly-related" images to show both the front and back of the billboard at the same time. The billboard company was Foster and Kleiser.
The images in Marx's Fetters do not illustrate Marx's text. Instead they allude to a complementary narrative of conspicuous consumption, progressive obsolescence, and "keeping the consumer dissatisfied" as the 20th century counterpart to Marx's 19th century analysis of capital's inevitable tendency to overproduction. In the weeds behind the prosperity boasting billboards are - literally - destitute families, junk shops, eroded landscapes, and auto wrecking yards.
In lieu of a theoretical essay to accompany the images, I will offer a reading list. The first two are satirical pieces by Kenneth Burke, the next two are affirmations of the wasteful practices Burke satirizes in his two essays. The two affirmative essays could be read as satire, which is to say they are cynical affirmations. The last three links are to my thoughts from early 2022 about Herbert Marcuse's, Thorstein Veblen's, and Georg Simmel's theoretical reflections on reification, consumerism, and planned obsolescence. The Marcuse post contains a hint about the connection between the Marx text in my pop-up book and planned obsolescence.
Waste - The Future of Prosperity 1930
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