Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp: Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue

By Dolores Flamiano

Two mid-century Life photo essays reveal the power of editorial selection to lie—or reveal truth. This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures: The Photography Issue. "Mieth and Smith shared a belief that photography could bring social change. They viewed Pat Clark and Maude Callen as heroic healers whose stories would inspire racial understanding. Both photographers shot powerful images of the most visceral human experiences: birth, death, sexuality, and disease." Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the original photos by Mieth and Smith are available in the print version only.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807882474

Dolores Flamiano

Dolores Flamiano is Associate Professor and Ruth D. Bridgeforth Professor in the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University. She is working on a book about Hansel Mieth and social reform photojournalism.

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Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp

Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith

by Dolores Flamiano

The notoriously self-critical W. Eugene Smith considered Nurse Midwife his most successful essay. He later wrote about Maude Callen (here with a patient, 1951): Tears cut deeply and hot through me. No story could translate justly the life depth of this wonderful, patient, directional woman who is my subject— and I love her, do love her with a respect I hold for almost no one. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright 1940, 1951 Life Inc. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

In 1940, Life photographer Hansel Mieth traveled to Hell Hole Swamp, an impoverished and predominantly African American community in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, where she photographed doctors, nurses, midwives, and patients in a remote rural clinic. The published photo-essay, Birth Control: South Carolina Uses It for Public Health (1940), combined two of Mieth’s passions: medical progress and race relations. She had envisioned the story as a profile of Pat Clark, the African American nurse who was her guide and became her friend. But when she saw how the editors selected, laid out, and captioned her photographs, she was appalled: There was the picture of Pat delivering the baby, but it showed her back and it could have been any nurse. All the pictures with feeling had been carefully culled out and only the ones kept in that showed in statistical order the job the State of South Carolina was doing. How it had found a way to control its runaway Negro population through control of disease. As a working-class immigrant woman, Mieth often felt like an outsider at Life, but this assignment revealed the depth of her isolation and filled her with anger and guilt: "They are cutting the heart out of everything I do. I am sick of it. I am sick of the whole damned job . . . They can shove their rotten magazine . . . Those people in hell-hole swamp [sic] are real people . . . I had promised that I would stand up for them. And now this. Now I’m nothing but white shit to them."¹

Eleven years later, W. Eugene Smith traveled to the same place on a similar assignment for Life, but his 1951 photo-essay Nurse Midwife told a very different story. Most of his photographs feature Maude Callen, an African American Episcopal missionary nurse who ran a clinic in her Pineville, South Carolina, home, where patients sometimes arrived in the middle of the night after traveling by oxcart on unpaved roads. Nurse Midwife made Callen famous and generated $27,000 in contributions for the construction of a modern clinic, where she worked until her retirement