Changing Works: Visions of a Lost Agriculture

by Douglas Harper

The work of Douglas Harper has for two decades documented worlds in eclipse. A glimpse into the life of dairy farmers in upstate New York on the cusp of technological change, Changing Works is no exception. With photographs and interviews with farmers, Harper brings into view a social world altered by machines and stuns us with gorgeous visions of rural times past. As a member of this community, Harper relates compelling stories about families and their dairies that reveal how the advent of industrialized labor changed the way farmers structure their work and organize their lives. His new book charts the transformation of American farming from small dairies based on animal power and cooperative work to industrialized agriculture.

Changing Works combines Harper's pictures with classic images by photographers such as Gordon Parks, Sol Libsohn, and Charlotte Brooks-men and women whose work during the 1940s documented the mechanization and automation of agricultural practices. Part social history and part analysis of the drive to mass production, Changing Works examines how we farmed a half century ago versus how we do today through pictures new and old and through discussions with elderly farmers who witnessed the makeover. Ultimately, Harper challenges timely ecological and social questions about contemporary agriculture. He shows us how the dissolution of cooperative dairy farming has diminished the safety of the practice, degraded the way we relate to our natural environment, and splintered the once tight-knit communities of rural farmers. Mindful, then, of the advantages of preindustrial agriculture, and heeding the alarming spread of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease, Changing Works harks back to the benefits of an older system.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2001

Reviews

[Megan K · Rating 5 out of 5]

an absolutely beautiful look at rural New York agricultural life, beginning with a generation that is slowly starting to leave this plane. The pictures are magnificent, the conversations poignent. Harper does an excellent job of not romanticizing agricultural life in the North Country, but at the same time succeeds in capturing some of its virtues, which we may have forgotten as technology has replaced our horses, and a very few men replaced our work crews. This book was very much the closest I could get to sitting down to a conversation with my grandmother, great aunts and uncles, and the world they spent their lives working in.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful photographs and narrations by farmers about life pre-1940's when tractors came into use and the neighborly ways of helping others out stopped, and farmers became more part of the commodity system, reluctantly. And they became more isolated. And had to adapt, get bigger, or get out. Only now is there room for smaller agriculture, and are those big ways being questioned.

[Thomas Mackie]

Many farmers in the north will see their grandparents in this. My inlaws are very different from this sample group in New York. Harper make too much of technology as the leader in soicial changes on the farm.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.