A hard-luck story from a hard-luck place, Richard Street’s “Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust” takes us to Huron, the poorest town in California. Direct on-camera flash lends a Weegee-like aesthetic to desperate scenes of migrant men running afoul
A hard-luck story from a hard-luck place, Richard Street’s “Knife Fight City and the Kingdom of Dust” takes us to Huron, the poorest town in California. Direct on-camera flash lends a Weegee-like aesthetic to desperate scenes of migrant men running afoul of the law, or a rival gang, or their own worst impulses. See a close overhead shot of EMTs resuscitating one field hand overdosing on black tar heroin, or of a different field hand being dragged kicking and screaming into a drunk tank by a police sergeant, the hand-to-hand human contact forming a perverse visual counterpoint of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But Street aligns himself more pointedly with the empathetic tradition of Dorothea Lange, following immigrant agricultural workers after their workday to a lonely gully wilderness where they eke out an existence on the bank of a ditch, tending to their hand-built homes of cardboard and corrugated metal under a California sun. —Thomas Patterson
