Against the Grain by Mark Maio

Photographer Mark Maio devoted more than three decades to create the images that document the last years of a tough-minded gang of Great Lakes union men that celled themselves Scoopers. They operated in groups of eighteen, referred to as gangs, and their primary responsibility was to unload large grain-hauling vessels from the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first. The first of the scoopers touched the edge of American history, for many were the very same Irish immigrants who dug the Erie Canal (1817-25), some as indentured servants.

Anthony Bannon, a Royal Photographic Society medalist in history and criticism, wrote an accompanying essay in six chapters, a story about the 107 photographs drawn out of the thousands that Maio exposed during decades the artist committed to making a book he called Against the Grain. His book is about the grain shovelers and their union, among the first on the Lakes, the Grain Shovelers Union 109. The book begins, however, with grain farmers in Kansas.

Maio’s purpose was to collect the elements necessary to record a story crucial to the unification of a united states called America, a brand new economic powerhouse in the world. “The Breadbasket harbor of Buffalo”, said the world, pointing to the entry way to the Erie Canal and thereby connection to the Atlantic Ocean. “The Bread Breadbasket territory,” the world added, seeing the harvest of grain in Kansas, becoming a state of the union in 1861, the 34th, and by the Missouri Compromise, free.

Dr. Bannon identified the historic transactions that fueled the nation’s economy, both saloons and breakfast tables - moving grain as a commodity from farm to distant market - a profoundly effective commerce along a Great Grain Route, the equal of the international pathways for profit in previous centuries, among them those developed for the silk, salt, and tea markets.

Bannon was the longest serving director of George Eastman House, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester NY, an important city on the Erie Canal, and before that he was the second director of the largest artist’s archive, the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY, dedicated to the American watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield, whose work often depicts activities in the Buffalo harbor, dominated by the scoopers. When the scoopers went on strike in 1899, they halted commerce on the Lakes. But they called themselves “scoopers” in large part because their work was a remarkably unique, a signature pattern of movement, thus a choreography Maio’s photographs detail as artful, dangerous, and singular, a kind of shoveling deep in the holds of schooners and lake steamers.

“The story line of the scoopers traces an epic’s rise, heroes developed from unexpected origins, gaining stature through hard work, family values, and civic loyalty,” Bannon wrote. “Some scoopers had dug the Ere Canal (1817-1825), or were the descendants of the diggers, and some had dug clear to the Buffalo harbor, terminus of the Canal…” Some, Bannon continued, were willing to trade their freedom to escape famine in Ireland in hopes of opportunity in a new country, hard won. Those who survived to the canal’s end, just 12 years after Buffalo had been burned to the ground in the War of 1812, would live to see their children achieve solvency, even leadership at the Niagara Frontier.

Maio’s photographs interpret the powerful dignity of labor and the strength of community that such labor created – both at the work’s origin in the fields of the harvested crop and during its passage to distribution, shoveled to its industry in mills and thus to table. “Maio’s photographs in Against the Grain are like the overture in musical theater anticipating several voices, structures, and tempi…And then there were the men, laborers, the scoopers, working simply at first with shovels and brooms, pitching and sweeping the grain,” Bannon wrote. “From the first, this was choreographed, each man knowing the moves of the next, keeping the flow, staying out of the way, making it work. And eventually, the ships became bigger and deeper, commanding blocks ad tackle and winches and ropes and pullies and giants shovels that moved the grain…”

Maio’s coverage of the Grain Route began with the Joel Nelson family, descendants of Swedish immigrants, who were early settlers in Marquette, a city of 500 in the middle of the state that is in the middle of the United States, a region celebrated as this nation’s home on the range, where grain fields stretch to the horizon and are harvested in a dance between massive combines followed by bin trucks that transfer the grain for shipment from Duluth on Lake Superior through to Buffalo’s Scoopers, who off-load on Lake Erie at the beginning of the Erie Canal and a major railroad hub to eventual destinations in both domestic and European ports.

The book’s design by Dolores Lusitana follows this weave of pictures and word, mediated by Maio’s description of the scoopers’ remarkable handling, rhythms not unfamiliar to Lusitana, who works with other celebrated stage and image artists, notably the singer/songwriter Paul Simon, on whose staff she served for more than 30 years, orchestrating the look and logistics of concerts, tours, and publications. The best of any photographs by anyone, said Brooks Jensen, “go beyond visual excellence by invoking our other senses.” Jensen is the founding editor and publisher of Lenswork magazine, a leading journal of photography since 1993. Writing in the foreword of Against the Grain, he continued: “Maio’s images are visually compelling as well as seducing us into an aural imagination…There is within each image a depth of experience that should not be missed.” The founder of the renowned media studies department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Dr Richard Blau, formerly an American studies professor in Buffalo, reviewed Against the Grain. He considered the book “a small classic of American Studies.”

About Maio’s photographs, he wrote: “You can look at them for a very long time, sinking into their silence…there.”

About the story: “Bannon provides the context, ranging across time, from pre-history to the present, focusing on Maio’s work through a multiple of lenses.” About the book’s writing and photography: “(James) Agee and (Walker) Evans come to mind.”

Mark Maio: Against the Grain is published by Fall Line Press, Atlanta and New York, and is personally edited by Fall Line’s founder, Bill Boling, with Harry Wyman, Fall Line’s managing editor. Fall Line is an independent, international fine art press, focused on photography, particularly with artists from its region, since 2007. Maio is based in Atlanta, though often works as an artist and workshop instructor from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and globally as an ophthalmic inventor, employing lens technology to enhance vision and detect disease.