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	5.14.03 A couple of weeks ago, I found hidden in my bookshelves at home a book entitled ?Missouri: Faces and Places?, copyright 1977. It?s a statewide snapshot of Missouri?s cities, buildings, and their inhabitants: panoramic views of downtown St. Louis and Kansas City, close-ups of steely-faced fire department officers in Poplar Bluff, a photograph of a tobacco farm near Weston (a small town on the Kansas/Missouri border between St. Joseph and Kansas City). As an historical record, the pictures are interesting in that they provide a select glimpse of a place that is unmistakable to anyone from Missouri, though at the same time somehow unreal and distant ? kind of like trying to imagine a world in which getting money for Friday night actually involved a trip to the bank. But the mental tension brought about by the images in the book isn?t what really interested me. It was the introductory chapter, where the author sets up the significance of the photographic journey for us: ?Missouri can be seen best, perhaps, in the faces of its people: faces that show all man knows; faces that show, like Missouri bluffs, the carving of the winds and the journey of the rivers; faces that read like time and place. The beauty of it all is open for everyone to see. Nothing here is beyond our vision. Nothing in the universe is beyond that vision.? Come again? If I understand this correctly, we are given to understand that viewing the experience of Missourians through photographs is roughly equivalent to beholding the beauty that exists everywhere in the timeless universe. Glimpsing the wrinkled face of an old farmer in Cole County is akin to seeing the rippled landscape of rivers and inlets in central Missouri. You watch people buying carnations in downtown St. Louis, and you have witnessed the ageless search for simple forms of beauty throughout the world. Man with ax on pile of wood? Great performer in timeless struggle for balance within nature. A girl on a swing: ?We see more, somehow, in the eyes of children and in the eyes of those who have walked the circle of their lives and come back to that place of beginnings where we allow ourselves the simple joy of being.? You get the picture. Isn?t there something odd about all this? I mean, doesn?t the author make just a little too much of a guy on a stack of wood? Doesn?t a girl on a swing represent a little less than the return to an original state of being? Doesn?t it seem to stretch the limits of literary ascription to tack on such significance to a collection of photographs that could be left to speak for themselves? Maybe not. Maybe I?m underestimating the power of imagery. Maybe it?s important to point out the inextricable link between the features of people and places and the creations of Father Time and Mother Nature. Maybe I?m just too literally minded. But I don?t think so. In fact, what strikes me most in paging through this book is not only how simultaneously accessible and distant the images are, but how eerily quaint the thoughts of the author are, as well. It?s not really that he is wrong, but that his ideas seem to appeal to notions that are out of reach to contemporary sensibilities about who we are and what we want to be. In a society that focuses more on matters involving political, technological, and cultural change and less on the humanistic question of the common qualities of humankind, the ascription of universal characteristics to a girl on a swing no longer seems insightful. Quirky may be a good word. Escapist may be better. Wrinkles as rivulets? Okay, but what is that meant to imply? That we should lionize crinkly old men as visual pathways to eternal wisdom, even if they happen to pine for the good ole? days when blacks knew their place? That timeless hermits and back-to-nature communes in the Ozarks are to be held in higher esteem than the societies from which they chose to divest themselves? More to the point, are we to assume that the bond shared between man and the universe stands in stark contrast to the man?s social relations ? as if there were nothing in the latter worth taking pride in? Is it better to just stay away from society when seeking the good in people? No. Given their oft-reported failings and less-mentioned successes, societal structures provide the potential antithesis to our supposedly universal human qualities: an ever-evolving search for material and intellectual improvement. References to the infinite characteristics of humankind make no room for such a capacity: in nature, there is no change. Worse yet, in an escapist mentality that longs for nature (or at least celebrates it), change is not even given a chance. And that?s too bad. In my mind, we should hope for more from ourselves.
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