CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/1/2024

A poetic manifesto on labor inequity from George Saunders and Joshua Lutz

Featured image is from Orange Blossom Trail, a hybrid book weaving together photographs by Joshua Lutz and stories by noted American writer George Saunders. Addressing labor conditions along a stretch of big-box highway running between Georgia and Miami, it’s a poetic meditation on industrialization, inequity and humanity. “High shutter speeds hide road workers’ faces in shadow,” Walker Mimms writes in The New York Times. “Corporate storefronts and commercial vans appear without ceremony, as if snapped from a camera phone. Commuters wait for a bus, reduced and sad, while a sign for ‘Mighty Wings’ floats mockingly above them.⁠ Though not without dignity—see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges—his photos lack any social agenda. They find an unlikely manifesto in the three previously published texts by George Saunders, our Chekhov of suburban realism, threaded through the book.…”⁠