Since we’ve gotten ourselves into this blog business it’s hard not to talk about something other than books. Especially since DH and I both have a particular interest in modern photography. If you’re paying attention to the blog you’ve seen pictures between the posts, for the most part these are my own photographs taken over the past few years, some of them dating back to when I was in college earning my B.F.A in Photography from The Rhode Island School of Design.
The fine folks at Aperture were kind enough to send me a review copy of ‘The New West’, and having just looked through it last night, and then this morning reading the review of two new photography exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and at The Bronx Museum of Arts, I feel like this review might be landing at the right time. The two shows I’ve mentioned cover street photography, (some other things as well), which is my main area of interest, photographically speaking. When I looked at the work of Robert Adams in this reissue I noticed immediately that it had created a strong set of images that I would apply to a type of fiction that I’ve been keen on for many years. The legendary John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art writes a nice opening salvo that reminds me why he loves photography so much. To be honest I was raised on Winogrand, Frank, Friedlander, Cartier-Bresson, the real chestnuts of the modern and post modern photographic world. I’m sure someone out there will argue my theory on post-modern/modern photography and the canon it falls in, but what would be the point?
Robert Adams, for me, with this collection of photographs, has put images to Raymond Carver’s stories, even Richard Ford’s work, maybe even Dan Chaon, and Kevin Canty. These are the silent landscapes that the men and women of these great writers inhabit. These are post-modern writers working in the blue collar world inhabited by people struggling with angry and drunk husbands, unrepentant sorrow, deep regret and inescapably bad habits. Carver especially resonates with his collection Will You Be Quiet Please, and these images fit those stories perfectly. I’ve wondered where the West has gone, the commercial-less landscape free of the culture succubus of a strip mall, where stores and homes were just that, stores and homes, and a gas station attendant cleaned your windows, checked your tires and oil, while you waited nearby like the image taken from Alameda Avenue in Denver, where a car wash is 75 cents and a billboard advertising wine still shows it’s face. These are the hard boiled seventies, the land of Carver. Robert Adams was slithering up and down the Midwest highways looking for shots like this one. Working in black and white, and displaying some of his finest skills in the darkroom, as these prints glow on the page. Perfect grays and browns, light skies, puffy clouds, tonally rich and temperature graded perfectly. These landscapes are empty, the roads vacant, the horizon seems lonely.
The automobile hadn’t grown to pandemic proportions yet and the gas crisis still under the surface in most places. The automobiles shown here are either economical family cars or big boats with fins. On Federal Boulevard in Denver, Adams catches an elderly woman who is walking from a supermarket in the background and underneath the overhang roof of a gas station with her groceries tightly gripped in one hand and her up market purse in the other. The bag looks heavy, like it’s filled with a gallon on scotch, or a sack of bananas, or maybe a pound of flour? She’s wearing a Mrs. Cleaver house dress and her Brillo pad white as a sheet hairdo is one day past a salon visit. There is the shadow of a telephone pole that runs side to side in the foreground that holds this women in lock step and centered in the frame, or impending doom. She’s close enough to make out, but not to close so she could say something to Adams. I wondered what the other people who weren’t speaking in Carver’s stories would look like, for instance if they stopped for gas somewhere in Denver on their way out of town after a night in a whore house, or casino, I suspect they might see this woman who would only give them passing glance.
I imagine walking along with Adams as steps over a hill and sees the housing development ten miles outside of Denver. The neatly spaced boxed ranches, white roofs, manicured lawns, and each driveway has a wood paneled station wagon at it’s owners disposal. These homes have what kind of person living in them? All families, how many kids, and do they all have dogs, cars, dishwashers, drapes, lousy 70′s era art work and interior design plastered on the walls? Are these post-war homes for returning hero’s who still haven’t been disgraced by Vietnam? We’re invited into a Tract House in Colorado Springs, invited in the sense that we can look through the window and see twin paintings of a strange kind of bird on the wall brought to light by a hot white lamp that illuminates the human-free atmosphere. I wonder how long Adams stood outside this home? It’s at night, and only the window and the light within are visible, but did anyone see him? This image is a much a picture frame around domestic suburban ideals.
Finally people do populate these pictures, Sunday School outside Colorado spring, everyone 12-14 people sitting outside a church in folding chairs basked in sunlight, the peak of the building and it’s roof over their heads as the Colorado Rockies hang on the horizon. One woman notices Adam’s, she’s turned her head to get a better look. Then there is the boy alone under the tail end of his camper, he’s wearing sneakers that I had when I was his age and living in Michigan, his jean jacket opened up to reveal his James Dean white t-shirt, and his head sunk down between his shoulder blades as it’s the only part of his body to make it out of the blistering sun underneath the edge of his family camper. What is he waiting for? Dinner or something more exciting to take him away from this boredom?
Where is this landscape now? I say “where” like it was abducted, but I mean, do these places exist in the here and now? What happened to these places Adams took pictures of? I know the answer, they’re littered with the wide variety of retail locations that seem to be everywhere, the strip malls, the mini-marts, the shoe stores, it goes on and on, never mind the malls that have everything under one roof. These new retail locations are only a few minutes from huge six-room homes in suburbs that are only thirty minutes from a train line, or in most cases an eight-lane highway. Today, does the American landscape change from town to town? Is it different in Toms River, NJ than it is in Colorado Springs? If there’s a Starbucks here, what’s the difference where it is? Thirty years ago driving across country taking pictures would yield an incredibly diverse landscape, but now it’s all the same, at least as far as looks are concerned. But then again if you stared out the window of an airplane at 35,000 feet what does American look like now and then? Can we see a change? These places that Adam’s has captured are locked in a time warp, and we’ll never see that kind of space again or that level of brilliantly vacant landscape that still seems untouched and only discovered when Robert Adam’s snapped the shutter of his camera.
-Jason Rice
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