“The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those perceptions govern deeply the whole process of perception.â€
Walter Lippman (1987) quoted in The Hollywood Arab
Still no baby yet so I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to a post I received earlier in the summer from a photographer in Italy who challenged my approach to We English. Notably, my decision to invite the general public to post their own ideas which I could then photograph. Here is their post-
Dear Mr Roberts
As a viewer the idea is really functional. As artist the idea it is a bit vicious. Are you playing smart asking people to help?! Finding by yourself events and situations is the main reason to be a photographer. You will be a translator of others ideas and inputs. Are you a politician of a self-thought photographer? And you receive funding as well! Yes definitively you are a bit of a politician.
Giuseppe Mascia, May 3rd 2008
My reply is loosely based on two interviews I did with Joerg Colberg on his blog Conscientious and Jim Casper on Lens Culture in July 2007 where I discussed my approach to Motherland (published: Chris Boot). A number of points I raised are important in helping to answer Giuseppe’s question, and will be fleshed out slightly here.
There were two main reasons for choosing to travel to Russia for my book project, Motherland. Firstly it was somewhere that had always fascinated me. I studied Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and a number of the courses I took looked at social, cultural and economic issues surrounding Russia and the former Soviet Union. Secondly, while there had been a number of important photo documentaries on Russia in the last decade, many were produced around the time of the fall of Communism, and tended to concentrate on themes surrounding disintegration and decay. I felt that the dialogue was very one sided and that the debate had moved on in recent years but photographic representations hadn’t.
ENCOUNTERING ‘THE OTHER’
Samples of imagery and text used to advertise British overland tourist trips to East Africa.
The problematic notion of representation and the question of how photographs are important to the construction of senses of place very much informed my approach to Motherland. The context for my approach was based on my BA Hons undergraduate dissertation. Published in 1995, my dissertation, entitled Encountering the Other: Representations and Readings of East Africa, was undertaken while traveling on an overland truck from Kenya to Zimbabwe with a group of Western tourists. Using Edward Said’s concepts of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘imagined landscapes’ my paper looked at Western representations of Africa, in particular those associated with the tourist literature advertising overland expeditions.
Ideas of imagined geographies and representation provide the starting point for Said’s discourse of Orientalism where he attempts to map the production and reproduction of myths and imagined geographies in constructing the inferiority of other people and places. Orientalism maps relationships between Occident and Orient. The Orient, Said argues, is contructed as an object for the Western gaze, a representation of ‘the Other’. Said suggests that although all cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures, the preponderance of power has been on the side of the self-contituted Western societies.
Tourist literature referencing the English explorers like Livingstone, Stanley and Speke.
The premise of my paper was that as Western tourists our imagery of Africa is one grounded in a colonial history; the 19th century European tradition of the expedition with adventurers such as Livingstone, Park and Thompson going out to explore and encounter distant and exotic lands. These images have been nurtured and re-enforced by the media and tap into a reservoir of ideas we have regarding colonialism, imperialism and representations of far away, exotic places and peoples. These ideas have also been appropriated by modern tourist companies in advertising ‘real’ African experiences; we, the tourist, are branded as adventurous travellers going out to experience the dark heart of Africa.
A page reproduced from my dissertation. The photograph is captioned: “Our quest for authenticity- Photographing the Masai tribe provided us with a ‘cultural experience.'”
My research concluded that even once East Africa had been encountered, it was very difficult to overcome the representations of place, engrained stereotypes if you like, that the individuals had brought with them. Evidence of which was presented in the photo albums that people produced at the end of the trip. These albums were representative of the way people remembered and ‘experienced’ East Africa, but the problem remains that many merely reproduced exotic images rather than presenting reconsidered and augmented perceptions of East Africa.
MOTHERLAND
Turning to Russia, I had my own preconceptions of this place. As a child, the Soviet Union seemed vast and mysterious. It took up most of the wall map in my geography classroom and was the vital region to capture to win the board game ‘Risk’. There were the glamorous KGB agents up against James Bond, and the Soviet-bashing propaganda of Cold War films like Red Dawn and Rocky IV. I marvelled at the photographs of Yeltsin aloft a tank outside the White House in Moscow on the collapse of the Soviet Union, ushering in a new but uncertain era.
I’d only been to Russia once before, passing through in 1994 to visit my wife, Sarah, who was studying there. We decided that now would be a fascinating time to return, fifteen years after the fall of Communism. After researching the project for 18 months, we left London in July 2004 and spent the next 12 months travelling over 75,000km from the federation’s Far East, through Siberia to the Northern Caucasus, the Altai Mountains and along the Volga River. We finished in Moscow in July 2005.
Cover of Motherland, published by Chris Boot Ltd, March 2007
The resulting book is meant as a visual statement about the nature of contemporary Russia. It is my attempt to try and move beyond ‘imaginative geographies’ where the fantasies and preconceptions of the photographer are prevalent in the images to a representation of Russia that does not deny the problematic veracity of pictorial representation. Motherland responded to these questions successfully, in my own judgement, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the fact that I spent a continuous year in Russia allowed for a sustained and in depth engagement with the landscapes and people that I came across. While I travelled extensively and did not, as it were, conduct visual ‘fieldwork’ in a single location, the duration of my engagement enabled a spontaneity – I could respond to diverse events and situations, and was neither constrained nor driven by the specific agenda or timeframe of a photojournalistic assignment or news agenda. My preconceptions and expectations about place, for example, were altered the more time I spent there. If, inevitably, a visitor or traveller can only acquire a partial understanding, one that remains ultimately more that of an outsider than an insider, the grasp acquired by a questioning and persistent onlooker will nevertheless be richer and deeper than that of a more transient visitor.
I was constantly conscious about shedding my preconceptions and instead to be led by what I saw and experienced. If I had gone to Russia with the intention of documenting poverty, I would have looked for it – and found it. Instead I wanted to be as open as possible to new ideas and be surprised and challenged by what I found.
Map of Russia showing where we were each of the 52 weeks of the year.
It was very important that not all of the trip was planned. While I had a framework for the journey, I deliberately left at least half of the itinerary to spontaneity, thereby increasing the chance for my own stereotypes to be challenged and opening up new avenues of exploration that I could otherwise have overlooked. By staying in peoples’ houses, rather than just hotels, I was able to find people and places that I would never have otherwise come across. In some ways enabling me to become an insider rather than just a tourist.
One of the greatest challenges was being able to submerge yourself in some of the larger cities, notably in Siberia, when you often only had a few days. How do you really get a sense of a particular place in a short period of time? You turn up, you book into a hotel, and then how do you integrate yourself into the local society? It’s very difficult. One way I overcame this was by using homestays (sourced from the Hospitality Club website) where I sourced local families to stay with. Instead of just being overwhelmed by a place on arrival, I was immediately experiencing it from a local viewpoint. People introduced me to their friends and took me to places that I would never have found from a guidebook, or from our own research.
In Omsk we stayed with a University professor who gave me a tour of his University and took me to the All Russia Ballroom Dance Contest, which his daughter was competing in (which led to the portrait of Nikita and Rufina); in Rostov-on-Don I stayed with a local journalist who gave me a tour of the Cossack military base (which led to a portrait of a Cossack soldier on horseback); in Yekaterinburg I stayed with Sergei who took me for a banya with his son Kostya (which led to the image of them bathing naked in the lake); while in Kamchatka I spent five days trekking through the wilderness on horseback with Paval and Sasha.
To participate in the everyday rites of Russian life and society, to be an involved guest and a friend, as well as an observer and witness, turned out to be tremendously enlightening. On the other hand, the sheer magnitude of the country and the unusually large distances I covered allowed for a greater sense of conceptual and aesthetic comparison, of visual diversity and the cultivation of knowledge and photographic memory. Distance and time, therefore, ensured a naturally more rounded representation of people and place and a recognition of the complexity of my subject.
It was always my intention to combine both landscapes and portraits in the book. I used landscape photographs to provide panoramic overviews of the country, images that help to provide a sense of context, evoking peoples in their diverse habitats and surroundings. I was interested in making detailed pictures that the viewer could read, like a map, and find different cultural and social references in. Where possible, I tried not to crop out any significant details from the landscape I photographed.
These landscapes I countered with portraits that are fixed in a narrow moment of time and space and which take you in to the landscapes and provide a much more intimate experience. Most of my subjects were stopped and photographed in the environments where I came across them. I attempted to select as large a cross-section of people as possible, from all walks of life. The portraits were taken before engaging in conversation with the individual so I could remain as detached as possible and their expression appear deadpan. What becomes of greater importance are the details in the image; the clothes they are wearing and the landscapes they inhabit. The portraits are almost an anthropological study. As formal and static in nature as they are – I still think there is often an intimate connection between myself and the subject.
In producing a balanced portrayal it was important not to gloss over the cracks of modern day Russia. The Chechen Republic is still a profoundly emotive issue in Russian society and it would have been wrong to ignore or ‘sensor’ pictures from this region.. At the same time, I have included two very differing images in the book from Chechnya. While one shows the main outdoor market in Grozny in front of heavily shelled apartment blocks (in some ways a more typical image we’re used to seeing), the second shows a group of well-dressed Chechen women and their children in a part of Grozny that has been reconstructed. The latter is a surprising image in terms of our visual references, which have been dominated by negative photographic imagery. It was important that I showed both sides of the story.
Of course my view is still only a representation of Russia, “a construction that is contingent, partial and unfinished.†Duncan & Ley, 1993 (Place, Culture, Representation pub Routledge) and one which reflects my own set of ideas and biography. However, the book will now stand alongside many other bodies of work about Russia and, hopefully, form part of a wider photographic debate about contemporary Russia.
More recently I decided to create a website for the book and have a guest book page where people can leave comments about the work in a public forum. Here I am most interested in receiving feedback from a wider audience, particularly Russians themselves, where people can discuss how they perceive my representations of Russia.
Screengrab of the guest book page on Motherlandbook.com
WE ENGLISH
Turning to my England project, I won’t discuss much about the background to the work, which you can read on the blog here, instead look at why I decided to request ideas from the general public.
I had plenty of ideas about what I wanted to photograph for this project. Two boxes full in fact. At one point I employed a researcher to help me sift through the piles of cuttings, tourist brochures, books and leaflets I’d amassed. However, this is the point, these were my ideas. My representations of England. What I was interested in also discovering, were other people’s ideas about England; gaining a sense of their perceptions of this place, rather than just photographing my own.
Box of cuttings gathered during research for We English.
In all I received about 250 ideas from the general public. Ideas which, in themselves, provide an interesting snapshot of England in 2008. They illustrate what’s important to people and explore their own ideas on the notion of Englishness. They also enabled me to get a broader spectrum of coverage across themes and geographical locations and helped to find subject matter, especially on the local level, that could otherwise elude me. Rather than just photograph yet another Cheese Rolling Festival, a now cliched tradition, I wanted to find out what else happens in England that may not be part of the national conciousness.
In the end, I only probably used about 10% of the ideas provided. However, I’m considering printing them as an appendix to book, unedited, to sit alongside my own photographic representation of England.
One of the things I noticed most after returning to England after a year in Russia were the seasons. In Russia we experienced either winter or summer, and very little in between.
Here’s a short poem by the English poet, painter, and printmaker, William Blake, in celebration of Autumn!
To Autumn
by William Blake (from Poetical Sketches, 1783)
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain’d
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
“The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.
“The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.”
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.
I’ve been looking at Geoffrey Grigson’s book Britain Observed; the Landscape Through Artist’s Eyes (Phaidon Press, 1975) where he examines some seventy artists from Rubens to Victor Pasmore and looks at how they have reacted to the landscapes of England, Scotland and Wales. His approach is emotional rather than art-historical and the result is what he calls ‘a book of art and a book of places’.
There’s an interesting chapter called Landscape journeys where Grigson studies J.M.Turner’s sketchbooks to get an understanding of how the artist worked. He writes-
“Summer, especially early summer, when the light was more vigorous and there was less chance of rain and cold, was the time for such professional expeditions, for finding and sketching views, for building up a stock of drawings of every chance thing, every mass of trees or movement of water of deployment of clouds or waddling ducks, which might come into the finished pieces to be worked up, through autumn and winter, for patrons for the exhibitions, for the aquatint publishers.”
There’s a particularly revealing section where Grigson highlights the importance of Turner’s patrons to his summer itinerary-
“The way to sales and livelihood was not to wander off and please yourself. The painter worked in neighbourhoods which attracted the well-to-do summer ‘tourists’ and their families, he sketched the ruined abbeys, the waterfalls, the harbour, the rocking stone they might like to remember and admire again in a drawing-room portfolio of watercolours…..the expedition had to be planned carefully and carried out economically. There were orders to be arranged ahead of travel, there were patrons to be visited en route for new orders or in search of payment for views already ‘taken’ and delivered.”
Several of Turner’s early sketchbooks show how the artists worked out his itineraries, listing his mileage, and placing beforehand the castles, churches, the abbeys, the bridges and so on, which might be worth sketching.
From a sketchbook of 1974, Turner then ninetten years old:
Derby; near which is Dale Abbey.
Nottingham, 3 Churches, St. Mary, Gothic, a large Castle, romantic situated. In the Market Place, one end   Justice, the other a Cross supported by 4 Doric Columns. A Bridge of 19 arches.
Linton, a mile from N., a Abbey.
At Southill or Southwell is a Collegiate Church. There is remains a Battlement Tower of a Castle N.
Newark, a Bridge, a Gothic Church and Castle.
At Stamford, R. of a Castle.
At Crowland a triangular Bridge, pure Gothic. Great part of the Abbey still remains the Steeple, with the West isle, with carv’d Figure.
Peterborough Cathedral.
A large number of Turner’s sketchbooks (nearly 300) were bequest to the Tate after his death. You can see extensive samples of them on the Tate’s website here. (See the screenshot above).
You can read two previous blog posts I’ve made about Turner here and here.
Posted in INSPIRATION | Comments Off on TURNER’S SKETCHBOOKS
“Sitting comfortably, I open my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life.” So begins Keiller’s video take of a “peripatetic study of the problem of England” conducted by the deadpan Robinson and his long-suffering mate. A mysterious advertising agency has tasked Robinson with investigating the ‘problem of England’. He and the narrator embark on a series of seven journeys across England, inspired by Daniel Defoe‘s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, based on Defoe’s travels as a spy in the 1720s. Paul Scofield narrates a series of illuminating snippets of information as the itinerant camera focuses on one provincial backwater after another.
Guardian writer Robert Clark describes the film as “like being lucky enough to get stuck on a train next to somebody’s utterly erudite and slightly potty grandfather. If you sometimes get fed up with the state of England, watch this. It won’t change a thing, other than cheering you up no end.”
Another film I watched recently was Gallivant (1996) by filmmaker Andrew Kötting. Gallivant is a 6,000-mile journey zig-zagging around the coast of Britain, which is both an experimental travelogue and an intensely personal story. Kötting begins the journey to bring Gladys, his 85-year old grandmother, and Eden, his 7-year old daughter, together. Gladys’s stamina is limited, and Eden has Joubert’s syndrome: she’s not expected to live to adulthood. Both are fragile, and the journey is an opportunity which may not be repeated.
This road trip film is part homage to the unsung eccentrics who make up our national identity, and part tribute to the bonds of family. It’s a tender film, definitely worth watching.
One of the wonderful things about the road trip are the random scenes that one comes across. Those unexpected moments and chance encounters which create a lasting impression or, one hopes, a lasting photograph. Two spectacular examples of this would be Joel Sternfeld’s ‘Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington’ (1979) and ‘McLean, Virgina’ (1978), both from American Prospects (discussed below).
There’s an interesting article by Liz Jobey on The Guardian website called ‘Photographer Joel Sternfeld: close encounters’, from October 17 2008, which you can read here.
In her article, Jobey comments on these two pictures- “The first shows an elephant collapsed in the middle of a suburban highway with a truck, a small group of onlookers and the sheriff in attendance. The other depicts a farmer’s market, with a stack of orange pumpkins out front; in the background a house is on fire with flames pouring from its roof. The flames are exactly the same shade of orange as the pumpkins. A customer standing casually at the market with a pumpkin under one arm turns out to be a fireman, bagging a pumpkin or two while his colleagues tackle the blaze. In the present photographic climate, such pictures might have been assumed to be fictions, but in Sternfeld’s case they were repayment for his diligence; chance encounters in the strange and disturbing reality of American life.”
I’m putting myself on the line a bit here but, while not having quite the same fortune as Sternfeld, I did enjoy a series of chance encounters during the journey which resulted in some interesting pictures. In one case, while driving to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, we passed by the Avebury Stone Circle. On turning the corner of the road we were confronted with a very surreal scene: about a dozen men and women performing Amerta Movement on and around the rocks that make up the stone circle. I nearly crashed the motorhome on seeing it and after gaining my composure, pulled over and dashed out with my camera to try and capture the scene.
Here is one of the frames I took (unfortunately the size of reproduction here doesn’t do it justice) –
The photograph shows a number of people doing a series of Amerta moves around the stones, while others lay in the grass with their legs in the air. There is a ring of clothes and bags to the left of the picture. The exercices were part of a ‘Human Nature Ritual Art’ workshop being led by Suprapto Suyodarmo, from Indonesia, who created the Amerta Movement. He also features in the background of the photograph.
Amerta Movement is the original name of specific type of work with body based on natural movement and meditation. He takes advantages from simple elements of movement like: sitting, swimming, walking and recumbent posture. He uses two forms of meditation. One of them it is so called Sumarah, based on relaxation of body, mind and emotions, undergoing to movement and intuition of body. The second it is Vipasana during which man is concentrated over thoughts, emotions and impressions flowing from his inside. This is a type of deeper and more conscious meditation.
Forgive this self indulgence, but I’ve just been sent some photographs from my Dad taken while he joined us in the Lake District back in September. It’s not often you get to see yourself in action. Here are a few of them….
For ‘Roadtrip’ the artists found a carousel of slides, mostly of empty landscapes, that originally belonged to George’s grandfather. His grandfather, whom he had never met, had traveled across Canada to meet with a doctor in New York for the cancer that he was dying from. The slides are projected onto a screen, while out of two audio speakers a conversation between the artists can be heard discussing the order and reason for the slides, trying to discover the mystery behind the images.
And of course we should also look at the work by some contemporary American photographers who have been inspired by Frank, Sternfeld and Shore. Here are three series by photographers Alec Soth, Amy Stein and William Lamson, that deserve a mention.
“The title, Sleeping by the Mississippi, alludes to the recurrence of beds, a symbol found throughout Soth’s work. As he makes his way South along the Mississippi River, Soth show us the bed used by a young Charles Lindberg, photographed at his childhood home in Little Falls, Minnesota. We see the Reverend and Margaret’s bedroom, plastered with snapshots, in Vicksburg, and Sunshine, a smug grin on her face, leaning back on what appears to be a hotel bed in Memphis. If anything at all, this is a group of images about place and their inhabitants. There is no story, per se, but rather a series of unconnected dots, placed before the viewer humbly and unapologetically. Soth’s working method is meticulous and methodical, as dictated by the 8×10″ view camera he uses, and this reflects an inner methodology based in quiet, steady human relationships, abundantly evident here.”
See the full series of photographs on Alec’s website here.
“Beginning with the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as certainty collapsed and faith eroded during the second term of the Bush administration. The images in this series live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through “the journey,” my photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted.” Amy Stein, 2008
You can see the full series of photographs here and a map of Amy’s journey here.
“In September of 2004, while I was driving around America working on a project called Encounter, I began photographing myself in the landscape as a means of activating the photographic process when no other subjects presented themselves. This artistic exercise opened the door to a new way of making work that completely changed my photographic practice. I went from being an observer, trained by my interest in the American landscape photographers of the last half century, to a photographic collaborator, physically engaging with the landscape as a form of creative play. The series consists of images in which I am either performing an activity dictated in part by the location, or attempting to become part of the scene by assuming an inanimate form. In both cases, I conceal my face to emphasize the physicality of my body and its relationship to the landscape. Although this project began as an exercise, the playfulness, experimentation and sense of humor that emerged from it has come to represent the new way that I approach my work.”
You must see William’s new video work particular ‘Sublunar’. It’s wonderful.
I’m quickly running out of time before the imminent arrival of my second child (due next week) so my series on the road trip in photography is going to be much briefer than I’d originally envisioned.
In this second post I’m going to look at the work of three photographers who have each produced hugely significant photographic documents while using the road trip as a vehicle for exploring American society. The photographers are Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore. In a future post, I’ll turn to the work of some European photographers who have explored their own homelands via road trips. I’m afraid that most of the text that follows has been taken from the publishing blurb. Apologies, but it’s lack of time!
Robert Frank- The Americans
“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eig ht states in an old used car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genuis, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.†Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans
Robert Frank made this seminal body of work after leaving his native Switzerland, heading out on an extended road trip across the United States. First published in 1959, this book, one of the most famous and influential photography books ever published, consists of a series of photographs taken by Frank on a trip through America between 1955 and 1956 – pictures of normal people, everyday scenes, lunch counters, bus depots and cars, and the strangely familiar faces of people we don’t quite know but have seen somewhere. As Kerouac writes in his introduction, Frank’s photographs had “sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America.” The slightly offset angles and the blurred focus of many of the photographs suggest the nervousness and dislocation of the people they capture. Frank dispels any romantic notions of the lingering pioneer spirit of America by presenting a landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise.
The Americans has just been re-released, published by Steidl, and Joel Sternfeld was on hand at Steidl’s Gottingen press to witness the process along with Robert Frank. On writing of the experience in PLUK magazine (Summer 2008) Sternfeld comments: “When I was first becoming a photographer in the late sixties his book The Americans was already a landmark – that’s much too weak a word but what other term should you use for a body of work that changed the course of the river of photography forever? I would look at it before I went to sleep and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again.â€
Sternfeld goes on to write: “He [Frank] has come to Europe to receive a prize in Spain but the real agenda was to see if the Switzerland of his childhood would be the right place for his final days. Surprisingly, it failed in that regard. Robert wanted to go home: to America…..He spoke of his desire to return to America, of what a good country it was that it had given him his chance…..I thought about ‘home’ and its power, and about an idea I have that many of the great practitioners photograph their ‘home’ landscapes. I had excluded Frank from my thesis because America was not his home. But now it was. A phrase ‘I did not choose this place but now I am of it’ came to mind.â€
Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects
Since publication of The Americans, many photographers have made personal journeys to take the cultural and political temperature of the United States, but none has done so with more conviction than Joel Sternfeld.
Supported, as Frank had been, by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sternfeld set off cross-country in 1978, driving a camper van. His quest, he says, was that “of someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological and disturbing America.” The photographs that resulted would become his first, now classic book, American Prospects.
American Prospects is an exploration of the landscape as simultaneously idyllic and dystopian, reflecting on the changing states of American society. Over eight years, Sternfeld crossed the American continent in a camper van taking images of what he saw, which included the most familiar and the unexpected. The impact of this body of work continues to resonate through contemporary artistic, filmmaking and photographic practice.
Sternfeld’s angle in his photographs is that of a local. Yet his home appears to have many different facets. On the one hand, there’s the America in which he spent a sheltered youth and whose stories he heard and, on the other hand, there’s the America which he got to know on his trips after 1978: monotonous, overly technological, confusing, bizarre. On his journeys, he lost his faith in an ideal world, but he did not abandon his sense of humor and sarcasm – both are always present in his photographs.
While Sternfeld tends to shoot pictures of common people in common settings, he always manages to uncover extraordinary motifs in those ordinary scenes. His prosaic still lifes capture the irony and strangeness of everyday America in the form of monumental images. A good example is the bizarre shot of the collapsed elephant on a country road in Washington State. Are we witnessing staged reality here? We are not, since nothing is staged in Sternfeld’s shots, nothing manipulated – he just keeps showing up in the right place at the right time.
Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places
“Until I was twenty-three I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan. In 1972 I set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window.” Stephen Shore, 1982
Shore is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, best known for his photographs of vernacular America taken in the early 1970s two bodies of work entitled American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. These projects paved the way for future photographers of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ such as Martin Parr, Thomas Struth, and Nan Goldin.
On July 3, 1973, Stephen Shore set out on the road again. This road trip marked an important point in his career, as he was coming to the tail end of American Surfaces and embarking on a body of work that is known as Uncommon Places, which was published by Aperture in 1982.
Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore’s images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.
Quoting Thomas Weski, in Stephen Shore: Photographs, 1973-1993, “Although Shore’s photos also present the status quo in the America of the 1970s, they are not documentary photographs of the type produced for the police, or for architects or archaeologists. Photos of that type are produced according to set rules, so that they can later be evaluated on a scientific basis. Shore uses the stylistic methods of documentary photography, but his images are the results of a subjective vision. He therefore stands in the tradition of the photographers who shaped this apparently objective style of personal photography: Eugene Atget with his photos of Paris at the turn of the century, and Walker Evans with his photos of America at the end of the 1920s. Like those two photographers, Shore also works in series. The individual shots are placed in a sequence, in a visually complex system of references, and the cumulative effect of the photographs allows them to be viewed at several different levels.”
Shore has also just published the aptly named book A Road Trip Journal, which documents a month-long journal he kept in June 1973. In a deadpan, unemotional style, Shore’s journal itemizes where he stayed, what he ate, which television programs he watched, what photographs he took, how many miles he drove, and how many postcards he distributed on each day of his trip. The journal also includes postcards of the towns where he stayed as well as some of his own photographs alongside hotel, restaurant, and gas station receipts.
You can read an in-depth interview with Shore on Seesaw magazine here.
I managed to get to Birmingham earlier this week to see the Knight of the Camera exhibition featuring the work of Sir Benjamin Stone.
The exhibition is staged outside in Centenary Square and was designed and built by Standard 8, a company who specialise in large-scale outdoor exhibitions (previous displays include projects for Oxfam, Reuters and Tom Stoddart’s iWitness). It was a pretty miserable day and probably not the best weather to be viewing the photographs in, however, an enjoyable excursion none the less.
Although I was most interested in Stone’s photographic record of customs and festivals, it was interesting to see his series of Parliamentary photographs. As Pete James and Elizabeth Edwards identify in the introduction to the book A Record of England, Stone’s approach to the Houses of Parliament has an ethnographic quality. Illustrated, for example, in this portrait of Corporal Laxon.
Stone’s Parliamentary Diary (June 4 1908) notes: “Lunch at the House of Commons with Captain Wandsop who came with his servant Dyak from Borneo in native costume.” Whilst there is a sense of negotiation and arrangment to many of Ston’es portraits, Corporal Laxon, a former ‘Dyak Head Hunter’ and member of the Borneo Native Police, was reduced to the kind of typological representation adopted in anthropolocial studies, pictured front and side profile in both native and western dress.
There was also a panel which looked at Stone’s legacy and included the work of Tony Ray Jones, Daniel Meadows, Homer Sykes, Matthew Murray (whose work I’ve not come across before), David Moore and ongoing work by Anna Fox.
I’m Interested to see how Anna’s work develops. Called ‘Back to the Village’ it observes the uniquely English rituals that take place in the picturesque villages of Hampshire. Citing Sir Benjamin Stone as an influence, Anna is creating a collection of photographs documenting the customs – such as nativity plays, Halloween festivities and Guy Fawkes Night – that take place in thee villages. I can only find a couple of images on her website at the moment, including the one below.
