A Family Farm Album: The Photographs of Frank Sadorus
Work and leisure coexist in the benevolent, fertile landscape captured by Frank Sadorus, an amateur photographer who documented his life on a farm in eastern Illinois from 1908 until 1912, just after his father died. Neoimpressionist Georges Seurat, who was actually working some 30 years earlier, also portrayed scenes of work and leisure but quite differently.
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Sadorus methodically studied the Kodak manuals–also on display in this deftly curated exhibit–he received in the mail. And his compositions are by the book: consider the graceful close-ups of plants covered in ice after a storm. Using such formulas produced what art theorists once classified as the beautiful, as opposed to the sublime: the effect is pastoral, domestic, and orderly, perfect for conveying the stability of preindustrial agricultural life. Like the British painter Constable, Sadorus created landscapes in which a progression of objects leads the eye from the foreground through the middle ground to the background. Despite the formulas, his images have a gravity, fullness, and depth of feeling that in hindsight hint at the losses to come. Two photographs of the harvesting and binding of wheat hauntingly preserve the grace of working the land: the wheat lends texture and pattern to the foreground; in the middle ground are two men, two horses, and two mules whose flanks are modeled by the light as they pull the binder across a field; behind is a hazy sky. Other photos document the slaughtering of pigs and hauling of manure.
The sense of stability that informs these landscapes turned out to be illusory. After the farm was sold, Sadorus lived for a while in a small house in town–but soon he was committed to the Kankakee mental asylum, where he lived until his death in 1934, at the age of 54. He never took another photograph. He’d opposed the sale of the farm, and a medical report cited “excessive worry” as his pathology. The loss of the farm ended an era begun by the photographer’s great-grandfather, who’d arrived as the area’s first settler in 1824. Much later the glass-plate negatives and a few of Sadorus’s prints were found in an abandoned house and given to a local photographer, Raymond Bial, who printed all 350, then chose 66 for a 1983 book, Upon a Quiet Landscape.
Seurat’s studies of men relaxing on the banks of the river at Asnieres show factories in the background, their smoking chimneys creating atmospheric effects. A large painting, Bathing Place, Asnieres, is reproduced here, but Seurat’s numerous small compositional studies for the work are more compelling. They show oddly reflective boys bare to the waist, their shoulders slumped. A fully clothed man gazes out at the river abstractedly, as if his thoughts were churning and he could hardly take in the view. In earlier works Seurat painted young women tending crops, and in three he showed men breaking stones–a job at the very bottom of the work ladder.
These exhibits seem simple–amateur photographs of Illinois farmland and Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, a painting we know almost too well. Yet both have complex, sobering undercurrents. Sadorus captures the integration of work and play in rural existence, a way of life about to disappear even for him, while Seurat catches the moment when labor and leisure separate, marking the beginning of contemporary life.
