On the photos that represent a unique American story, and the photographer
who does as well.
In 1936, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project
sent photographer Noel Vincentini to take
pictures of the Shaker villages in New York and Massachusetts. One of the
Federal Art Project’s principal goals—most famously exemplified by the Southern
journey that became Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men—was to document and help preserve unique
communities and cultures across the United States, and the Shaker villages,
the populations of which had dwindled substantially by this period, represented
a perfect candidate for such efforts. Vincentini took more than 200
black and white photographs of the villages and their inhabitants, and as
part of the WPA’s Index of
American Design they were displayed in libraries and department stores
around the country, bringing these complex communities to widespread national
audiences.
As I discovered when I visited Hancock
Shaker Village in Pittsfield, the story of the Shakers combines the ideal
and the real in ways that feel distinctly and powerfully American. On the one
hand, the rule in Shaker communities was that all members would be entirely
celibate, dedicating themselves solely to God and to the daily
practices and customs through which they embodied that faith; it’s hard to
think of a more utopian goal, given that if achieved it would literally
threaten the community’s future existence. Yet on the other hand, and due in
part to the population struggles produced by that rule, the community at
Hancock Village (like, I would imagine, all Shaker communities) consistently
employed outside laborers, non-Shaker young men whose presence represented a
necessary but very complicated contrast to the Shakers’ coherent community and
worldview. Vincentini’s photos include both Shakers and outside laborers,
documenting the distinct work and worlds of these two communities yet also,
inevitably, their overlapping and interconnected, and I would argue very
American, shared presence within the Shaker villages.
If Vincentini’s photos thus captured a complicated American history, so too
did his
life—uncertain as many of its details are, in part because his name was
sometimes spelled “Vicentini”—represent an equally multi-part American story. Apparently
(most of these facts are, again, uncertain) a 1923 immigrant from Trinidad, the
son of a Trinidadian father and a French mother, Vincentini then shows up on the
1930 census in New York City, working as a “manufacturer of cameras”; he
subsequently went to work for the WPA from 1935 until 1942, when he enlisted in
the Army and served in World War II (becoming a sergeant). Little else is known
of him until his 1963 death—but given those first two decades in America, it’s
hard to imagine he didn’t have an eventful last two. And honestly, it’s hard
for me to imagine anything more American than a French Trinidadian immigrant photographing
the multiple sides to Shaker villages for a WPA project that would showcase
these communal images in Depression-era department stores, y’know?
Next Berkshire story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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