"Sunset Burning Cane" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
March 1, 2011
By Claire Sykes
Flames shoot up from the sugarcane fields, burning off the crop’s leaves and punching the sky with thunderclouds of smoke. Only the useful part of the plant, the stalk, remains. The fiery light glints off the lens of Debbie Fleming Caffery’s camera as it seizes the fall-harvest scene.
For over three decades, she has been taking pictures of these southern Louisiana acres—with their blazing fields, hunched-over workers singing hymns, mill machinery grinding the night and sugar-loaded barges floating down the bayou. It’s a place I’ve never been to. But when I look at her silver gelatin print of that field on fire, I can almost smell the sweet burning.
In all of Debbie’s photos—from those of the sugarcane fields to Katrina-ravaged churches to prostitutes in Mexico—there’s more feeling than fact, more mystery than materiality. It’s why, for years, I’ve been drawn to her work, following her photographs mainly through her books. The emotional aesthetic that she articulates in her images is driven not only by her interest in and empathy for her subjects, but also the personal connections and relationships she’s built with them over long periods of time.
Last winter from Santa Fe, New Mexico, her home for many years before returning to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana in late 2010, Debbie talked to me about her life and her art—and what matters most to her.
"Fabiola" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
Claire Sykes: What was it like growing up in New Iberia, Louisiana in the 50s?
Debbie Fleming Caffery: I had a really interesting family. They were all French-Cajuns, with a little Spanish blood. The Acadians have such a rich heritage, coming from France then to Canada and finally Louisiana. My great-grandmother, who lived with my grandmother, spoke primarily French. Every day after school, I walked to my grandmother’s house. I was always around a lot of really strong women, a lot of great storytellers.
CS: Your photos of sugarcane workers—found in your books, Carry Me Home [Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990] and The Shadows [Twin Palms, 2002] (which also includes those of Mexico and of your children)—show the sweat and toil of the hardscrabble life of people just trying to get by. What’s the draw for you?
DFC: I’m interested in people’s stories, and their lives, particularly from people who’ve had difficult lives and how they’ve managed to make it through such hard times. I grew up across the bayou from a sugar mill. During the harvest, my brothers and I would watch the sugar being loaded onto barges in the bayou, and I’d worry that the men would fall into the water. The bayou to me then was this menacing, dark place full of snakes’ nests along the banks. And the smells from the sugar mill were so intense, the noise so haunting.
My grandfather would take me to the mills and fields when I was child. We’d drive through the fields of burning cane with people working extremely hard. Growing up, I saw the struggles of African Americans, especially during the harvest, which often was the only time they worked in the sugar industry, facing hard times surviving the rest of the year. I witnessed a lot of heartache and poverty, and heard unbelievable stories of injustices, struggles and survival in the African American community.
"Praying" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
As soon as I took a photography class, at the Rice University Media Center around 1972, I set out to document the workers during harvesting. One day, I walked into a field, introduced myself and asked the workers for permission to photograph them working. I would return to Houston and print the photographs and give the workers copies. As a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, in 1974 I received a work-study grant to return home and photograph the sugar can harvesting.
CS: After getting your BFA from there, I know you returned to Louisiana and, while raising three children, continued to photograph in the fields and mills. You also met someone named Polly Joseph. Tell me about her.
DFC: For a few months in 1984, I’d drive a couple of hours from my home along the Mississippi River by New Rhodes, and I passed a cabin that seemed to have someone living in it, but I wasn’t sure. I was attracted to the neat arrangement on the front porch—a sofa made of branches, a rocking chair with no rockers and a mailbox. Then I noticed an elderly woman crossing the front yard. She was so beautiful and majestic that she took my breath away. I stopped to talk to her and she invited me into her home.
"Polly's Baby Shoes" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
CS: And you’ve told me that that was the start of a deep friendship that lasted until her death, in 1996. What was it about Polly for you?
DFC: Polly was an intense person who grew up in intense times. Her whole life was difficult, but she was full of love and affection. Because I had so much experience growing up with people like Polly, I felt this natural attraction to her, this affinity. I visited her often, and we’d talk about the weather, flowers, her chickens, love. And sometimes we wouldn’t talk at all. But she rarely mentioned her husband who abandoned her or her son who drowned in the Mississippi. She lived without running water because it reminded her of the river that took her son. She was extremely afraid of running water.
CS: In one of your photos of Polly in your book of photos of her, Polly [Twin Palms, 2004], called “Polly Snapping Fingers,” her face is blurred in movement, with the cabin’s dark interior stabbed by a blade of sunlight—aimed right to her heart. I find this image sort of premonitory, given how she died.
DFC: Polly was superstitious. She lived on a curve in the road, and whenever she heard cars driving by she’d help them get around the corner by snapping her fingers.
"Polly Snapping Fingers" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
CS: When did you stop taking pictures of Polly?
DFC: I stopped photographing Polly when she was put in a nursing home. She was very confused. She called me Eloise. She died when she slipped in a whirlpool bath. Since then, I’m always drawn to go back to where her house was. It had been torn down and all that’s left is an empty lot that is sometimes a soybean field. I feel peace when I go there because is was so wonderful to visit her. And I always find something of hers—a piece of material from a dress that I’d photographed her in. I visited there recently and the dirt had just been plowed up and it had rained and I found 11 buttons, a spool, bent spoons and forks.
"Polly's Hand" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
CS: The rural South’s strong ties to the earth for sustenance and to religious tradition for the spiritual are what initially attracted you to Mexico, in 1990. I’ve read that you were always searching “for the darkest, most mysterious places I could find.” Some of those were brothels in Mexico. How did you start photographing them?
DFC: The second or third time I was there, a friend and I were walking in a village and we found a church beside a cemetery, with a golden crucifix near the entrance. I said I wanted to come back and photograph it at night, something my friend wasn’t too keen on. But we came back that night, and while I was photographing, a jeep full of men suddenly came barreling down the path in the graveyard. My friend wanted to get out of there, but I told her to just ignore them and sing. And out of the jeep jumps the most handsome guy I had ever seen in my life. He turned out to be the village priest. We quickly became friends, and he renovated an outbuilding on church grounds for me to rent during my visits. Down the street was a cantina, and upstairs in it was a room for women and their clients.
"Nexicolis" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
"Cocodrilo Bar" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
CS: I find these photos of Mexican brothels, in your book The Spirit & The Flesh [Radius Books, 2009], disturbing and depressing, but also beautiful. They push me past the obvious subject matter of the women’s occupation and toward their utter strength, faith and grace in the face of economic hardship and raw human desire.
DFC: There is an air of secrecy, sadness and loneliness in the brothel.
"Smoking Torso" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
"Prostitute Shoulders Face" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
"Lucy" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
CS: Your People magazine assignment to photograph survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the possessions they rescued took you to another very dark place.
DFC: Katrina happened when I was finishing up the brothel work. I’d never photographed any kind of weather disaster before, and here it was happening in my own state. When I began assignment, I was sent to the River Center Shelter where the evacuees were being brought to from the Superdome or highways of New Orleans. I was paralyzed photographically by the traumatized people and the terror they had gone through. I wanted to comfort them and help them, instead of photograph. After a few days I began to photograph, as the evacuees became anxious to tell of their terrifying experiences.
CS: I know that over the next two years, thanks to a fellowship from the Soros Foundation, you continued to photograph the people that once lived in the Seventh and Lower Ninth Wards, as well as what was left of the churches in the these neighborhoods, and the landscape of devastation.
DFC: Now I’m photographing the old churches along the Bayou Teche, here in Louisiana. They’re starting to disappear because so few people are going to church—you may see ten people, at the most. Some of these are family churches, and the communities are trying to save them as historical buildings.
CS: And you’re still taking pictures of sugarcane country, too.
DFC: You could say it’s an obsession. I have been photographing the mills and the few burning fields. I am interested in the changing (industrial) landscape of the mills and am starting to edit the work for a book project. For the past 33 years, I’ve missed only a few harvestings. I understand the weather better every year, so my images, especially of the skies, just seem to get more dramatic. The whole environment is always changing. There’s something new every year.
CS: How so?
DFC: Now, modernization of cane cutters has replaced most field workers. There are fewer fires in the fields because of environmental reasons. The new expensive cane cutters cut so well, burning cane is not necessary.
CS: There also aren’t people singing hymns in the fields anymore, you’ve told me, because the mills’ sophisticated machinery means there are fewer people out there working. Those who are, are mainly Mexican migrants.
DFC: My images now are mostly landscapes. And because I understand the weather better every year, the ones especially of the skies just seem to get more dramatic. I am recording oral histories of the elderly former sugarcane workers, as this generation is dying out.
CS: What fuels your devotion to your work?
DFC: I keep finding more stories to tell, and more interesting people. It never ends.
"Primping" (Photo and copyright Debbie Fleming Caffery)
Debbie Fleming Caffery (Photo copyright by Debbie Fleming Caffery)
Text © Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.
My profile on Debbie appears in the May 2010 issue of Photographer’s Forum magazine.
