Synopsis:
Photographs taken over a forty-year period depict farm life in a rural Illinois community and are accompanied by interviews with individual farmers
From Booklist:
In 1954, Life sent Lieberman to Scales Mound, Illinois, to photograph a young woman, Janet Hammer, who had won a sewing contest. He found the community so engaging that--over the 40 years chronicled here--it became his refuge; he himself lives on a farm there now. Lieberman's early sequences seem, if inadvertently, quite nostalgic; the vintage tractors weren't vintage then, and everyone seemed genuinely happy with quilting bees, ice cream socials, and courting on the square. Later years, particularly the 1970s, are more jarring, with scenes of farm auctions and grim-looking creditors. Neighbors is something of a sequel to Lieberman's Farm Boy (1974), a tribute to father and son, Willis Hammer Sr. and Jr.--and it's a sad sequel. The father died in 1977. His son, 49, died in 1990, telling his daughter, "It ain't so bad to die." The panel taken by the barn--beginning with young Willis' mother measuring his height, followed by the bright-eyed young man about to be a husband, followed by the mature man whose paunch has grown and whose face is etched not only with weather but with trouble--tells the story. Still, there's the Muchow family, whose farm was auctioned off early in their marriage but who moved onto a rental, and, in 1992, were finally able to purchase it. Sad and hopeful black-and-white photographs completely immersed in their subject. John Mort
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