April 26, 2007

Photojournalist Cathy Phillips emulates one of the subjects of her recent book collaboration, ‘Women of the Harvest.’ The chicken, she says, is her daughter's.

By Virgil Hervey

Although she tends a small backyard flock and has a dog as big as a Shetland pony, local photojournalist Cathy Phillips disavows any special affinity for farming. The chickens are her daughter’s, she said in a recent interview. And while she admitted that she did grow up in a small town just west of Dayton, she was careful to point out, “We lived in town.” So Women of the Harvest: Inspiring Stories of Contemporary Farmers (Voyageur Press, 2007), a book about women farmers that she collaborated on with writer Holly Bollinger and local writer Susan Gartner, was purely a professional gig.

But while Phillips had no prior farming experience, she found the subjects of her photographs to be fascinating. Working on Women of the Harvest last summer, she got to travel all over the country meeting 17 different women, who were “all wonderful in different ways,” she said. With some of them, she spent several days, with others, little more than an hour, shooting photographs of them in their chosen environment. They were ranchers, farmers, vintners and even a clam farmer.

Several of them still stand out in her mind, such as Emma Jean Cervantes of La Mesa, N.M., the “queen of the chile peppers,” who took over the family farm and grew it into the largest chile pepper processing plant in the United States. While warm and friendly, Cervantes was ever the businesswoman, dragging Phillips along to a fundraiser for Arizona Governor Bill Richardson.

Then there was Nancy Wilson, who made a success of a bed-and-breakfast on her working cattle ranch in Fossil, Ore. In what Phillips described as a “wild ride,” Wilson and her husband Phil drove Phillips up a winding, narrow, cliffside road in their pickup to the peak of a mountain for a sunset picnic. At the top they told her stories of cougars and rattlesnakes. “You guys are crazy,” Phillips remembers telling them.

“I felt like I knew them all my life,” she said.

According to the book, more and more women are choosing farming as their way of life. In the foreword, author/farmer Mary Jane Butters wrote, “Today, women are the fastest growing group of people buying and operating small farms. While the number of American farms has dropped 14 percent in the last 25 years, the number of farms run by women has increased by 86 percent! At this rate, some predict that within another 10 years, women may own as much as 75 percent of the farmland in the United States.”

Contributing three stories and collaborating on a fourth, Gartner stepped in at the “eleventh hour” to insure that the book got finished by its deadline. She had one week in August in which to complete her work. Phillips was amazed at the way Gartner was able to throw herself into the project, she said.

“Susan worked till late at night every night for a week,” Phillips said. “We couldn’t have done it without her.

Of getting to see the women she wrote about only in Phillips’ photographs, Gartner felt at a disadvantage in trying to describe them. “I didn’t have the sounds and smells and the lay of the land,” she said. However, in order to immerse herself in the experience, she did research at Young’s Jersey Dairy.

Phillips’ first inkling that photojournalism might be for her came when she was attending a summer photography workshop in Maine, she said. She had graduated six years ago from the Ohio Institute of Photography and worked as a studio photog-rapher, but found the hours long and the pay low. While the pay as a photojournalist isn’t much better, she finds the work much more rewarding At the workshop, Phillips’ instructor told her she had a talent for photojournalism after seeing an assignment she completed on blueberry pickers.

Phillips has lived in Yellow Springs with her daughter, Nadia, for eight years. Among other things, she has been a business partner with Jonathan Brown in the building of a Home, Inc. house on the corner of Dayton and High Streets. Her previously published photojournalism is Ertl Toy Tractors (2004), a book she did in collaboration with another Yellow Springer, Patrick Ertel, publisher of Antique Power magazine.

“I had the best time of my life doing this book,” Phillips said.

Lauren Heaton, associate editor of the Yellow Springs News, also contributed two stories to the book.

Women of the Harvest is available at local bookstores.

Contact:vhervey@ysnews.com