Farmer Donald Stokes teaching English as a second language to Haitian migrant farmworkers, Newton Grove, NC 1987.
A few days ago I received a phone call from a young Ph.D student in History at Duke University. Ayanna was Haitian-American from New York and as part of a personal project was researching Haitian migrant farmworkers in eastern North Carolina. She found this image of mine in the archive at the Duke Library where much of my work is housed. We talked at some length about the picture, my work, her studies and research. The call left me heartened.
When I first started making photographs seriously I viewed the medium as a tool for social change. I wanted my pictures to make a difference in the world in the manner of Timothy O’Sullivan, Lewis Hine, and W. Eugene Smith. I wanted to picture the human condition and have those pictures elicit change.
The sheer omnipresence of photographs in this day in time makes that goal near impossible. One rarely sees images like Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl that helped change public opinion about the Viet Nam War and certainly altered that young woman’s life. Or, W. Eugene Smith’s story about Maude Callen, a Black nurse midwife in South Carolina in the 1950s in Life Magazine that helped Callen build the clinic she dreamed of.
I’ve been fortunate as a photographer. My work with non-profits and philanthropic foundations has offered me the opportunity to document the human condition. I worked with the Rural Advancement Fund for a number of years, both on staff and as a freelancer, and one of my jobs was to photograph small struggling family farmers in the two Carolinas. I want to believe some of those pictures made a difference in someone’s life.
Photography is largely about memory. Pictures stimulate our minds and inform us of the textures and gestures of life, the way things were, and how people acted. They remind us of who we were and where we were at that time. Sometimes they cause us to think differently, to open our minds, to educate us about new ways to view the world.
Yet, still, I often wonder how much of a difference a photograph can make.
And then a call from Ayanna, expressing her interest in this picture made thirty-five years earlier, her questions and curiosity, and me understanding the picture has moved her.
And I think, Perhaps this the definition of social change?
