Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy

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Description

“In 1973, James Baker Hall photographed these scenes and events of a Kentucky tobacco harvest. We look at them now with a sort of wonder, and with some be apologetic about, realizing that at the same time as our work used to be going on, powerful forces were at play that would change the scene and make “history” of those lived days, that have been enriched for us then by their resemblance to earlier days and to days that presumably were to follow.”―Wendell Berry, from the book

An insightful meditation on the shifting nature of humans’ relationships with the land and with every other, Berry’s essay laments the economic, political, and societal changes that have endlessly altered Kentucky’s rich agricultural traditions. Berry also adds a deeply personal perspective to Hall’s eloquent visual testimony.

With a farm of his own nearby, Berry used to be a longtime friend and neighbor of the families shown in Hall’s pictures and took part in their work swapping. Along with detailing the repetitive, strenuous labor involved in harvesting a tobacco crop, he relates memories of stories told, laughs shared, meals savored, and brief moments of rest and refreshment well earned.

Hall’s striking photographs illuminate the characters and events that Berry describes. Right through the 1973 harvest, he photographed the rows stretching toward the horizon at the same time as laborers cut a tobacco crop, one plant at a time, until the last row used to be cut, hauled, and housed in the barn. These photographs powerfully convey the physical experiences of a Kentucky tobacco harvest: the heat of the sun, the dirt, and the people hard at work.

James Baker Hall, former Kentucky Poet Laureate, is the creator of many books, including The Total Light Process and Yates Paul, His Grand Fights, His Tootings.

Wendell Berry is a poet, a novelist, a farmer, a conservationist, and a former professor of English. His books include The Unsettling of The us: Culture and Agriculture, Jayber Crow, Two More Stories of the Port William Membership, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition, and Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work.

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