“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.”
— James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men“
I find that quote, from the preface of Agee’s and photographer Walker Evan‘s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” not only speaks to me as a journalist, but also encapsulates what got me into archaeology. Words are important. Pictures are important. Video and sound are important. But they’re representation of the stuff of life; they aren’t surrogate stuff.
Sometimes people have a hard time seeing the connection between the two fields I studied, journalism and anthropology, but for me it’s so obvious. The connection between journalism and archaeology even more so.
I spent a summer in a series of holes in the ground carefully scraping away at the earth for little chunks of ephemera, which would shed light on that little parcel of land we had disturbed and painstakingly charted and mapped, which in turn would tell us a little more about the property as a whole, and the street it was on and village it was in, and so forth.
We used what tools we had, plus historical documents, dating techniques and whathaveyou. The goal was to tell as complete a story as possible, but nobody was under the illusion we’d ever tell a whole story, or even a half a story with absolute certainty.
But we had the benefit of the stuff: hand-wrought nails, ceramic sherds and pipe stems. They tell you things no document could, especially about a time where not everyone could write. It was our mantra that archaeology is among the most democratic of studies, because we pick historical garbage, and everyone throws shit out.
Though it had been written to appear before their chronicle of the lives of white sharecropper families in the Depression-era south, Agees lament – that the book did not, could not, represent more than a sliver of the lives they so painstakingly documented – it remains as true as ever. Words alone could not tell of the sharecroppers’ plight – even Evans’ acclaimed photos were not enough, leaving Agee wishing he could share the stuff, too.
It enforces in my mind the notion that every story needs to be told with whatever means are available.
That’s why I’d argue that embracing all the tools that are available to a storyteller – indiscriminately – is not just a luxury the modern journalist has, it’s a responsibility. It’s not about saving your job or the industry; It’s about telling as whole a story as possible.
It also doesn’t hurt if you’re willing to get down in the dirt – both figuratively and literally – and dig for stuff.
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