The Tobacco Farmer
Yunnan China 2005
I made the driver stop when I saw this man and his family drying their tobacco crop. The tobacco leaves were tied to long poles and were hung in a barn. Never mind if the barn was a room in their home. Everyone was working from Grandma to grammar school kids.
I asked this stoic patriarch to pose for me holding his harvest. He did so with the dignity that a lifetime of hard work brings to a person. I have the feeling, in a situation like this, that he, or someone like him, thinks we, the photographers, are silly.
I’m reading “The Killing Wind” by Tan Hecheng. It’s about the massacres that occurred during China’s Cultural Revolution. I’ve read snippets about the horrors perpetrated during that time in other books and am curious to know more about how and why societies go amok.