Cotton Worldwide
Reviewed by George Slade, published on Friday, June 11, 2010
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By Christina Kleineidam and Hans Peter Jost. Introduction by Pietra Rivoli.
Lars Muller Publishers, , 2009. Hardbound. 320 pp., Illustrated throughout, 10-1/4x7-3/4".
Cotton Worldwide By Christina Kleineidam and Hans Peter Jost. Introduction by Pietra Rivoli. Published by Lars Muller Publishers, 2009.
Do you know who the third largest cotton producer in the world is (or was, in 2008/2009, according to figures cited in
Cotton Worldwide)? The United States. Do you know which two countries produce over fifty percent of the world's cotton? China and India. Significant cotton industries exist in twelve other countries, ranging from Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan to Brazil, Greece, and Burkino Faso. There's a lot to learn about the fabric you're probably wearing.
With Hans Peter Jost's effectively engaging square images woven into Christina Kleineidam's thorough text, it is impossible to look at this book without contemplating such photo-text masterpieces as Evans and Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or, more pointedly, Lange and Taylor's An American Exodus. This is intended as a compliment to the new book, which is exhaustively comprehensive and surprisingly approachable, due in large part to Jost's photographs, many of which look as though they could have been made in the 1930s, so timeless is the process of hand-gathering bolls.
Cotton Worldwide, by Christina Kleineidam. Published by Lars Muller Publishers, 2009.
Less polemic than expository, Kleineidam and Jost still elicit sympathies toward workers in parts of the world where a $500,000 John Deere cotton picking machine is a mere fantasy. But the entire project probably benefited from keeping agendas under wraps; the team covered so much ground, from major producing countries to micro-economies, that grudges would have been excess baggage.
Cotton Worldwide, by Christina Kleineidam. Published by Lars Muller Publishers, 2009.
Cotton Worldwide, by Christina Kleineidam. Published by Lars Muller Publishers, 2009.
We share a sense of grand discovery and occasional dismay with the Swiss-born Jost and German-born Kleineidam (both now reside in Italy). Cotton is among the most common of products in our material world, and thus perhaps the easiest to overlook. A book like this - a well-tempered, deep, visually captivating survey - is a laudable accomplishment, and an important contribution to cross-cultural history.
—George Slade
George Slade , a longtime contributor to photo-eye, is the programs manager and curator at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University. He continues to post content on his blog, re:photographica.
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