Sweet Earth

In the 1840s in New England, a “lost generation” of youths refused to follow their fathers down to the banks and cotton merchant houses of Boston. They grew their hair long, read Schiller and other German Romantics and went to the woods to play their flutes. They took vows of poverty and retreated to garrets to write poetry. Occasionally one of them would go to the wharves in Boston hoping to catch a ship to India to learn Sanskrit.

I first read of these North Country bohemians in Van Wyck Brook’s The Flowering of New England, an intellectual and literary history of the “ancien” region of the United States, to use Calvin Trillin's description. The parallels between the transcendental past and my 1960s present are striking.

Years later, while traveling and making the pictures that would become American Prospects, I went to Aroostook County, Maine, to photograph the potato harvest. In the back of my mind, I was hoping to pay a visit to Helen and Scott Nearing, whose book Living the Good Life was a bible to the 1960s back-to-the-land movement. After years of homesteading in Vermont, they now lived on the rocky coast of Maine. Scott was ninety-nine years old and out back chopping wood when I went up and knocked on the door. His handshake was firm. I showed him the pictures I had made and he didn't like them– he found them too critical. “Picture an ideal world and photograph that,” were his exact words.

Eleven years later I begin to take his advice. I was traveling and photographing for On This Site, a study of violence in America. At first I thought I would balance those dystopic pictures with photographs of truly utopian places. But while balance may work in dividing a chocolate bar between two children, it doesn't necessarily do so in art. I decided to keep On This Site a book about violence. Nevertheless I continued to make pictures of ideal communities. The process provided relief from documenting places stained by what had occurred there.