Cotton: A 50 Year Pictorial History; The Photographs of Harris Barnes
Harris Barnes Brandon, MS: True Exposures Publishing, Inc., 2002. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Format is approximately 12 inches by 9.25 inches. 142, [2] pages. Illustrations (most in color). Inscribed by the author/photographer on the fep. Inscription reads To The Beane Family Hurry back to Cotton Country! Harris Barnes Christmas 2003. Ink notation inside front cover. DJ has some wear, soiling, tears and chips. Harris Barnes of Clarksdale, Mississippi, spent more than 50-years as a farmer and an agricultural photojournalist. In 2002, he published his first Book, "Cotton, A 50-year Pictorial History." Barnes, of Clarksdale and a 1941 graduate of MSU, said he can recall, in most instances, the circumstances surrounding every ag-related picture he snapped. He remembered that his interest in photography was kindled by a peer while Barnes was working as a Delta farm manager following military duty in World War II. He never received formal photography training. “I really got into cameras only wanting to photograph my children,” he confessed. Eventually he turned his camera’s lens to his surrounding environment: fields of cotton. After freelancing part-time as an ag photographer, beginning in 1970, Barnes turned to the profession full-time, while eventually also becoming an ag journalist. While relocating to South Carolina, Barnes helped lead the Southeast Farm Press. That experience, he said, helped educate him on other kinds of crops outside of the Delta, such as tobacco. In 1980, Barnes became a full-time freelance photographer, gaining assignments across the country from various agricultural chemical and equipment companies, etc. He has assembled many of his pictures into books. A good photographer is a loving hunter in search of gracious, giving prey. Each beckons the other, the two together as agreeable as one. For the plentitude of the outer rows, he tosses the boll aside. No other crop, he says, has its own intrinsic beauty. Barnes has captured much of the beauty and all of the passions in 50 years of photography. His images are a gallery of the fondly familiar — the calendar picture and the front-cover scene. For the painstaking artistry, they are also the easily grabbed of commercials and advertisement.
He has collected 350 of his photographs in a 144-page Cotton: A 50 Year Pictorial History: The Photographs of Harris Barnes. The book is printed in a 9- by 12-inch format that permits full display of photographs that have been chosen from thousands he has taken.
His portfolio portrays cotton in different places through changing times, the old and the new, the nostalgic alongside brash innovation. Here a laborer wrestles to dump a heavy sack of cotton on a trailer that still looks a lot like a wagon. There, in another picture, a multi-row mechanical cotton picker easily spills onto right place a huge mesh basket of seed cotton. The people who prepare the land, plant and till it, protect and harvest its growth, are all a part of it. Another time, a farmer is on his mule-drawn disk, his children gathered round, as if on a day for taking pictures. The photo and another of a double-shovel at work are in contrast with a glossy likeness of a modern tractor-pulled eight-row cultivator. Barnes' portraiture of cotton, its beauty and its busyness, is a travelogue of the Cotton Belt. In the Delta it is often framed by cypress brakes, bayous, and lingering sharecropper cabins. In the Tennessee Valley, it may be terraced rows on a red clay hillside and, in South Carolina, a green lawn blooming white and pink in front of a Piedmont ante-bellum mansion. Now one of the most sought-after freelance photographers of the cotton industry, his career as a photographer and agricultural journalist began without remarkable ambition. Born in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1918, the son of Coahoma County agent Harris Barnes Sr., he graduated with honors in agricultural administration from what is now Mississippi State University and served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. His photo-journalism career began in the 1960s, unexpectedly, while he was working for King and Anderson. . In 1980, however, Barnes decided to try to become a freelance photographer and writer. He had all the right contacts with farm editors and with public relations staffs, and over the years his photography equipment had evolved from the “little Rollie” to three Swedish-manufactured Hasselblads. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Cotton, Farming, Photojournalism, Planting, Seedling, Cultivation, Crop Rotation, Herbicides, Irrigation, Skip Row, Insect Control, Defoliation, Gins, Bales, Land Preparation, Hoes, Mechanical Picking
[Book #85277]
Price: $275.00