PhotoBook Research: French Broad River, Jeff Rich

For this project, I did research on the photobook French Broad River by Jeff Rich. Rich quite often tackles issues related to water and environmental conservation, and this book most certainly embodies both of those aspects. My favorite quotation from this book is from Regional historian, Wilma Dykeman, “When we turned away from the spring at the edge of the kitchen yard and turned on the faucet in our porcelain sink, we turned off our interest in what came out of the spigot.” This line not only harshly implicates the industries that are the overbearing polluters of our waterways, but the common man who allowed them to exist and persist in their wrong doings.

Every image is displayed on the right side page, coupled with an almost entirely blank page to the left, which has a thin line of text; the name of the piece and where it was shot. By doing this, I believe that Rich was placing a specific importance on every single one of his photographs. By having an almost blank page, he elevates the attention paid to the photograph. Also, there is a huge symbolic significance to the fact that the picture is at our right hand; like our hand, the picture is the dominant force in the book, and thus seen as the most important part.

The book as a whole is filled with mixed images of factories, dams, and mills on the river, but also a great deal of residences and communal lands are sprinkled with in. At first glance the theme seems simple enough: “Factories evil; water good.” However, upon reading the passages in the front and back of the book, it made sense to me. As the quote above said, we are all to blame for the destruction of our waterways. The factories shown in the images appear dark and menacing, and distract from the river they sit on like they don’t belong there; they are clearly the predominant evil. But with the images containing normal townspeople, though the water looks cleaner, they seem just as guilty looking at the camera with remorse and shame almost.

While this book does indeed show the terrible deeds done to the French Broad River Watershed, it is also a positive beacon to what a community can do when they work together. Towards the end of book, it was brought to light that the reason most of the river is now clean and is being cleaned is that all the communities that live on the watershed were fed up their polluted homes and so they joined forces and succeeded in getting numerous laws passed locally and nationally to reduce and/or eliminate the emissions from the plants and mills. So while the people living on the watershed are just as guilty for the past pollution, by rejuvenating the  “life-cycle” or the river, they are also its savior.