She was crazed by the disgrace.Ī cynic would say, and a cynic would have a point, that you could troll through almost any old newspaper over a similar period and compile a comparable list of horrors. The 80-year-old mother of an imprisoned man threw herself in front of a train and was cut into three pieces. The malignant diphtheria epidemic in Louis Valley, La Crosse County, proved fatal to all the children in Martin Molloy’s family, five in number. The 60-year-old wife of a farmer in Jackson, Washington County, killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears. Poverty and no work caused August Schultz of Appleton to shoot himself in the head while sitting in his little home with his wife and five children. She was from Chippewa County and had lost her husband and was destitute. cable or photograph in Life magazine are enough and poetic comment is impossible.” “Wisconsin Death Trip” reads like a catalog of such events: suicides, arson, derangements, houses thought to be haunted, aquatic beasts that carry farm animals shrieking into rivers, poisonings, ax murders, families wiped out by diphtheria, bankruptcies, early deaths, religious mania, incest, howling wild men from the woods, people found to have been buried alive.Ī few selections give a sense of the book’s tonalities:Ī woman was recently found wandering about the streets of Eau Claire with a dead baby in her arms. “There are events which arouse such simple and obvious emotions,” W.H. Some of the subjects are dead babies in tiny caskets. The photos are grave because few people thought it appropriate to smile.
Photography was cumbersome then, and a formal occasion. Some of the images are portraits others show barber shops or timber camps or horses or clusters of musicians. He juxtaposed them with short, contemporaneous news items from a Black River Falls newspaper, The Badger State Banner, as well as documents and quotations from other sources, including the writings of Hamlin Garland and Glenway Wescott. Lesy chose around 140 of Van Schaick’s photographs and arranged them by theme. He saw in them gravid documents “created at the secret heart of this culture.” But when Lesy began to sort through them, they spoke to him. Van Schaick didn’t think of himself as an artist. (It became his doctoral thesis at Rutgers.) At the Wisconsin Historical Society, he chanced upon thousands of photographs taken between 18 by Charles Van Schaick, a photographer in Black River Falls. The book began its life at the University of Wisconsin, where Lesy was studying for a master’s degree. It has never been, as the fissures in American life deepen, more relevant. It is a haunting backdoor into history and a raw experiment in feeling. Lesy’s unclassifiable book earns its portentous title, and its tone has influenced many disparate works of art. “ Wisconsin Death Trip” is 50 years old this year, and it’s an anniversary worth heeding. Nearly every person in it looks as if they are about to be struck by lightning. Lesy’s method was to blend workaday photographs with horrific local news items that point, page by page, toward spiritual catastrophe.
The book is a portrait of Black River Falls, Wis., at the turn of the 20th century.
It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. Michael Lesy’s 1973 book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason.
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