Published in 2022 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, in conjunction with an exhibition at the museum (from May 7, 2022 to October 9, 2022. Hardcover (11×11 inches), 120 pages, with 68 black-and-white and 8 color reproductions. Includes essays by April Watson and the artist.
…The combination of America’s vast wide open spaces and its burgeoning car culture came together to make the open-ended cross country automobile trip a mid 20th century cultural rite of passage. And with the arrival of the interstate highways starting in the late 1950s, our collective national wanderlust became even more wide ranging and exploratory. Cameras were of course often faithful companions on these journeys, and plenty of notable photographers across the decades (both foreign and American) have set out on the road to take the pulse of this country, to document its roadside quirks and regional eccentricities, or to artistically search for themselves. Many haven’t known what exactly they were looking for, at least when they started out, but for the most part still found it, with the discoveries, adventures, and interactions along the way generally proving more important than the eventual destinations.
This catalog (and the museum exhibit it accompanies) takes stock of the photographs Jim Dow made on a series of cross country trips in the decade between 1967 and 1977. And while Dow would go on to become well known for his precisely seen color images of vernacular America (and elsewhere), this show turns back to the beginning of his career, when he was still finding his photographic footing.
Dow studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design (graduating in 1965), then returned to RISD to do his MFA in photography with Harry Callahan (graduating in 1968), and later developed a close relationship with Walker Evans, whose work he had come to admire. So when Dow took to the road, shooting in black and white with a large format 8×10 camera, he was still trying to synthesize the influences of Callahan and Evans into a photographic voice he could call his own.
As seen in these pictures, Dow internalized from his two mentors a profound respect for the straightforward visual honesty of a clearly seen photograph. Coming out of the swirling cultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s in America, such a reserved artistic mindset wasn’t at all obvious, but perhaps Dow’s measured stance provided a way to make some sense of the chaotic world around him. These early photographs are filled with the clarity of deliberate patience, of looking slowly at the remnants of American mass culture that were whipping past his windshield and then isolating particular fragments of those vernacular artifacts and symbols that felt representative of a rapidly disappearing slice of national identity. His results are rigorously attentive without layering in either sentimentality or wry irony, essentially taking these found objects at face value and crisply amplifying their legibility; if anything, these photographs are infused with a subtle sense of the open-eyed American optimism that was embedded in the fading 1950s culture of the road at that time.
Proof Sheet for SIGNS reproductions. March, 2022
A few of Dow’s earliest efforts (from the late 1960s), capturing the signage and architectural detail of roadside grocery stores and framework houses, show a clear debt to the sparse frontal framing of Evans, but this approach ultimately gave way to an even tighter compositional eye that largely (with a few exceptions) pulls in closer to its subjects. Dow’s training in graphic design feels like an important driver in the evolution of this style, in that he uses the power of his camera to examine, isolate, and document particularly potent examples of vernacular design (in the form of roadside objects and attractions, the typography of signage, and the cropped down highlights of painted murals), and then once isolated, these observations of design become untethered from their original context, in a sense opening them up to broader interpretation.
If we honor such roadside graphic design with the term art, then what Dow was doing was using his camera to reinterpret the art of other (anonymous) artists, employing various framing techniques to highlight and reconsider the potential meaning and impact of their imagery. Cropping out the context of gas station murals leaves out the reality of grubby, aging stations for the clean futuristic visions of a streamlined age, and other transportation themed images remind us of the positive public safety messages of wearing seatbelts or obeying friendly school crossing guards; even the trailer parks seem inviting when happy swimsuited families are seen playing with beach balls in front of their shiny Airstream trailers.
SIGNS: double pages 48 / 49
The need for nourishment along the road is generally reduced to a simple symbolic message, often writ large – we have something good here worth stopping for. That food specialty might be coffee (supposedly “at its best”), a burger (although the mural is unfinished and looks half eaten), fragrant steamed lobster, or various kinds of soft serve ice cream (typically advertised with an image of the product in bold neon or an extra large sculptural form visible from afar). Quality is also implied by the welcoming image of a chef ready to take your order.
Dow sees similar visual invitations in the amenities offered by motels. Smiling attentive bellhops are ready to attend to unspoken needs, particularly laundry, while accommodations with swimming seem keen to advertise their best features, from heated pools and soaring divers to welcoming arrangements of patio furniture. Some even offer lounges, complete with pool tables and friendly women in shorts, crop tops, and boots.
SIGNS: double pages 52 / 53
Roadside attractions have to work even harder to generate enough attention to merit a pull off the highway, and Dow’s images collect a range of possible entertainments, each representative symbol or graphic element infused with a splash of good time fun. Literal symbols are pumped up with energy, like a bowling pin with a jaunty arrow and a roller skate with wings, while activities like baseball, go karting, and shopping for Western wear are all done with resolutely smiling faces. Dow seems to have had a particular interest in theaters and drive-in movie houses and their eye-catching graphic design, from the Yucca Drive-In’s succulent plant with a neon blossom to the Moonlite Theater and its field of stars motif; as seen in Dow’s notes to the catalog, he actually returned to the Moonlite several times, capturing the signage as it weathered over the years.
Perhaps as a corrective to the rampant commercialism of the American road, religious images and exhortations also seem to dot the landscape. Sculptural praying hands reappear in several large-scale forms, one set perched atop a rocky hill as though reaching to the heavens. Another mural captures a young girl with closed eyes fervently praying, while a heart-shaped road sign reminds us that “Jesus is Coming Soon”. In the event such messages aren’t what we might be looking for, Dow matches an image of carved praying hands with the hand-up sign of a fortune teller, the echo of the hand forms making the gestures almost interchangeable.
While most of Dow’s photographs rely on tight isolation to aim our attention, a few use vignetting (with curved darkened corners) to achieve a related effect, but with a slightly wider view of the setting and surroundings. He uses this approach for some of the larger ice cream forms, as well as a stack of cannonballs and a teepee-shaped bus shelter, but the effect is perhaps most haunting when applied to the back of a concrete dinosaur hotel, the swoop of its long tail curved right inside the telescoping edges of the dark framing.
Spending time with these images and letting their weathered desires and encouragements wash over me, it became clear that Dow wasn’t simply a visual collector of notable graphic design artifacts or regional oddities. His photographs sharpen our view of their modest American messages, allowing us to see their stereotypes, cliches, and motivations more directly and authentically. While many of Dow’s finds are losing (and now almost certainly have lost) their battles with time, he sees them respectfully, not so much with sepia toned nostalgia for a bygone age, but more with the discerning appreciation of a fellow designer who can readily acknowledge the successes in the work of a colleague. Even in their most romanticized and now-dated forms, many of the design choices seem almost essential or eternal, and Dow’s isolations bring us closer to the clarity of that original thinking. As a map of the “American roadscape”, Dow’s early images smartly pick out fragments of vanishing communication and then deliver their messages to us with pleasingly subtle ambiguity. He’s asked us to look, and to look again, seeing both the elegant surface simplicity and the potential for rich complexity.
…A group show containing a total of 20 black-and-white and color photographs, framed in black and matted/unmatted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space. The show represents a subset of works from the 2018 exhibition Congruencias at FOLA in Buenos Aires (Argentina)/
Comments/Context: It’s often a tricky thing for artists to openly acknowledge their influences. While it may be the case that certain predecessors proved to be important in an artist’s development, no artist wants to fall too closely into line with his or her forerunners, if only to ensure that their own artistic voice isn’t inadvertently undermined or drowned out. So the explicit nest of connections that binds together the four photographers in this tightly gathered group show is unusual – the influences, repetitions, and homages are readily apparent, knitting the voices into a brocade of common reverence for crisply seen vernacular interiors.
While the Argentinian photographer Fernando Paillet is the oldest of the four photographers included here, the web of connections initially starts with Walker Evans. Evans’ understated realism was rooted in a deep interest in vernacular America, and his deadpan eye for documenting its structures, advertising, and architecture found ordered resonance in the seemingly ordinary. His landmark photobook American Photographs became a touchstone for Jim Dow as he began his own career in photography, so much so that Dow ended up printing for Evans at the end of Evans’ life. Dow went on to teach photography at the School of the MFA, Boston/Tufts, where Guillermo Srodek-Hart was one of his students, and later his assistant. Srodek-Hart is from Argentina, and his work has drawn him back to that country, where he has documented its own vernacular storefronts and historical surfaces. This interest led him back to Paillet, who had made similar pictures in Argentina (in a reverently deadpan style not unlike Evans’) nearly a century earlier. And so the aesthetic connections and interests between these four come full circle.
Since all of these photographers share pieces of a similar vantage point, the show opts for pairings and comparisons of like subject matter that end up being quite literal, even across decades of time. Dow and Evans both look at seed store interiors, photo studio displays, beds, and barbershops, while Srodek-Hart and Paillet pair up on bakeries, pharmacy interiors, and general stores. Dow and Srodek-Hart provide the bridge between the two, with images behind the gallery desk (in essence, between the two sides of the show and the two nations) that both document overstuffed, densely packed markets.
When seen as direct back and forth comparisons between like imagery, the passing of time becomes more visible, at least in terms of the nuances of how functional spaces are organized and used, and how things both change and remain the same. The seeds move from burlap sacks to wooden drawers and paper packages, the studio portraits evolve from rigidly formal to a dense collage of individuality, and the barber shop now has a TV and a flood of fancy hair products, but the spaces and displays remain quite similar. The bakeries seem the least changed by time, with both versions centered on an ancient hearth with long peels ready for moving loaves in and out. Two pictures from Srodek-Hart get out of this visual lock step, offering us dense visions of bicycle repair tools and a crowd of horse pictures at a cafe, moving further toward the nostalgic eccentricities of vernacular spaces rather than their eternal commonalities.
Since all four photographers worked (or work) with large format cameras, there is a sense of arranged formality to all of these compositions, almost regardless of the specific maker. And while the cacophony of colors and textures was often a seductive visual draw for these photographers, they show a universal sense of understated respect for their subjects. They each find honor in the most humble of commercial enterprises, documenting vanishing traditions with unvarnished clear-eyed vision. So while the connections between the artists are largely invisible and their own motivations are subtly different, the artistic dialogue between the four is unmistakable, reinforcing a compelling sense of common cause across time.
A symbol of America since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the diner remains a recurring motif in visual culture, from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks to Twin Peaks, hinting at loneliness, desire and longing. Words by Louise Benson
Sticky floors, formica table tops and colourful stools lined up along the counter; bottles of ketchup, and the scent of the deep fat fryer. The American diner is a space so familiar as to have become part of a collective mythology, immediately recognizable regardless of where exactly it happens to be located. The warm, greasy embrace of the diner is where filling, well-priced food is served up and regular customers convene and rub shoulders with newcomers.
A symbol of America since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the rise of the diner as a national icon is due in no small part to its place in visual culture. From Twin Peaks to Seinfeld, When Harry Met Sally to Coffee and Cigarettes, it has played an enduring part in cinema and television over the decades.
It was Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks that offered one of the earliest and most memorable depictions of a Manhattan diner in 1942. The glow of the warm light within, with just three of the stools at the central counter taken, came to evoke a particular feeling of urban isolation. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates once described the painting as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”.
Shown at night, the incessant glow of the artificial lights outside the diner and within emphasize the strange conditions of the city, where so many people are able to live at close quarters without ever actually meeting. Olivia Laing describes it in The Lonely City as an urban aquarium and a glass cell, writing “Is the diner a refuge for the isolated, a place of succor, or does it serve to illustrate the disconnection that proliferates in cities? The painting’s brilliance derives from its instability, its refusal to commit.”…
(William) Eggleston’s images share an affinity with Hopper’s in their engagement with the complex relationship between exterior and interior space. In Eggleston’s case, this means highlighting the contrast between cheerful diner and the often bleak landscape around them. His chromed diners sometimes sit as satellites in a wider desert landscape, with little but the wide-open road and electricity pylons for company.
There is surely nothing more evocative of the diner experience than sitting snugly in a booth, looking out of the window to the world outside. It is therefore little surprise that windows (or the light that they cast) feature frequently in Eggleston’s images of the diner—at once a barrier and a portal, from inside to outside, as exemplified by Hopper in Nighthawks…
…For Jim Dow, it is the layers of history built up over time in spaces like the diner that he looks to document, whether in his photographs of long-running restaurants, cafes, corner shops, sports stadiums, private clubs or even courthouses. The diner has been a recurring subject throughout his forty-year career, often shot on a wide-angle lens so as to contextualize the chromed stools and hand-painted signs.
Unlike Eggleston, Dow zooms out rather than in, offering a clear-eyed portrait that allows the viewer to make their own judgement on these spaces. His images are not tinged with nostalgia; instead, they reveal the increasingly anachronistic aesthetic and function of the diner in an age of faceless chain restaurants and online food deliveries. While these diners are rooted in a sense of the local, with individual flair to be found in everything from the tiling to the menu design, Dow’s wider shots of their exteriors show them once again as lone beacons amidst a harsh, fast-changing landscape.
Just last month, the New York Times ran an article with the headline, “New York’s Vanishing Diners”, and it has long been a source of contention amongst locals and tourists alike that these historic, community-focused eateries—cheap, cheerful and usually family-run—should be forced out by the relentless tide of big business and real estate developments.
An early influence on Dow was Walker Evans’s seminal book American Photographs (1938); he recalls the appeal of Evans’s “razor sharp, infinitely detailed, small images of town architecture and people. What stood out was a palpable feeling of loss…pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative.” This sense of loss and longing is inevitably embedded in Dow’s own photographs of disappearing diners, entwined as they are with the changing face of America, complete with peeling paint, scuffed seats and faded signs.
But beyond the all-American fantasy of the diner, this is an eating model that has its roots in the diasporic heritage that the United States itself is built upon. From Greek to Italian, Mexican to German, the diner is constructed from a patchwork of culinary influences, and a rich social history of convivial dining.
Dow’s photographs of diners, cafes and other long-running eateries in cities across the world reflect this international influence. Whether in Buenos Aires or London, he finds common ground in their shared motifs: the gingham tablecloth, the glow of the neon sign outside, or the bottomless pot of coffee warming on the counter…
……Even if the diner itself is a dying breed, the image of the diner still holds strong, upholding a partly fictionalized vision of America—as portrayed by everyone from Raymond Carver to Martin Scorsese. Straddling fantasy and reality, loneliness and desire, the diner represents a refuge from the world outside—even just for the time it takes to a nurse a cup of hot coffee and a slice of pie. A legacy that has lasted into the present day, the future of the diner might be uncertain but its wide-ranging influence on popular culture and beyond remains unswayed.
The exhibition is called Congruences and is formed by four photographers from different times and places. The first one was a dandy. He was born in 1903 and studied at the best schools in Saint Louis. He traveled to France to study literature at the Sorbonne after graduating in literature at the Philips Academy in Massachusetts. His dream was to be a writer, but shortly he understood that he had another destiny. Therefore, he devoted himself to photography after returning to the United States. Later, Walker Evans found himself in Alabama, with his camera on his hands, in front of a starved family. It was the 1930s and Roy Striker, director of the Farm Security Administration, had convened him with a selected group of photographers including Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, and Gordon Parks to document the effects of the Economy depression that assaulted the United States back then.
The social condition in The United States could not be worse. Walker Evans went through Alabama and entered into impoverished homes with his fashion brand clothes and shoes that he liked so much. His task was to leave a testimony of the time. However, he did much more than that: he printed an indelible mark on American photography with his pictures. In the early images he took in the 1920s, Evans had already shown signs of a new vision. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the human in his work expanded his gaze and turned Evans into the primary reference of modernity in American photography.
During a trip to Cuba in 1932, the social concerns coated his aesthetic interests. He later passed it along to a group of photographers who proposed a fine arts photography supported by direct shots and deprived of euphemisms. Since then until his street portraits in the 1950s, his formal images of the 70s and his last records of street signs made before his death in 1975, Evans worked to turn the page to American photography with an unappealable revolutionary aesthetic force. There is a photo by Evans at the MOMA that is emblematic in this sense: two black people’s arms holding two light dishes while in line to order food.
The picture is hugely evocative of the social moment and, at the same time; the composition has an extraordinary power from an aesthetic point of view. Perhaps that is one of the photographs that display more explicitly the exact balance between the aesthetics and the documentary that the great photographs of all time have.
That image, along with a street scene in Mississippi and the portrait of a woman named Allie Mae Burroughs who bites her lip in a gesture of shame that overwhelms – both present in this show – could be understood almost like a triptych, summarizing the declaration of principles of this extraordinary photographer.
Many years before Evans, in Argentina, Fernando Paillet, born in 1880, had put himself in the task of portraying his native town Esperanza, recording its activities and social events. Paillet gradually formed one of the most compact collections of photographs that exist in South America with unusual energy and passion – especially taking into account the size and weight of the equipment used back then.
He elevated the terrain of art with images that if taken by another hand would have resulted on nothing more than a record of daily events of the settlers who arrived in Argentina at the beginning of the century. Paillet’s gaze is far from Evans’s in time and space. However, both have one thing in common: obsession with the power that an artistic eye can have when employed in an unfiltered manner.
Today, in 2018, history brings back the distant and congruent mirror that these two photographers form in this event, but multiplied. The event happens at the Latin American Photo Library (FoLA), thanks to the show convened by Gastón Deleau, the director of the space. Deleau crosses the gaze of Fernando Paillet and Walker Evans with those of two younger photographers: Jim Dow and Guillermo Srodek-Hart; the former, the printer of Evans himself, the latter, Dow’s pupil. Dow – an excellent photographer strangely unknown in Argentina despite having visited it seventeen times to photograph it – explains how he took home a box with Walker Evans’s first fifty 20 x 25 cm negatives. That later he printed as copies for a show of Evan’s work in 1971 at the MOMA.
Consequently, Srodek-Hart tells us how he met Dow.
It all began when Srodek-Hart, disappointed with the art school that he attended in Boston had decided to go to Europe. Fate caused him to stumble upon Jim Dow at the school’s staircase one day. Jim, knowing about Srodek-Hart’s disappointment, invited him to one of his classes. Srodek-Hart abandoned the idea of leaving the school right after he finished Dow’s class and he immediately enrolled in all of the classes that Dow was teaching. Not long after, Dow’s home and his family would become Srodek-Hart’s second home. From then on, the teacher and the pupil consolidated their friendship. Later, they went to many trips across the United States together, during which Srodek-Hart assisted Dow and photographed together. One of the peculiarities that unite them is that they both use large format cameras for their work, just like Paillet and Evans did. However, when you ask them what the exhibition Congruences is about, none of them doubt that what consolidates this show is not only the similarities of techniques and styles but also the almost familiar relationship that unites them and allowed them to work with enormous freedom on this project, without outside limitations of any kind.
Just as the Greek classicism or the Hellenic Neoclassicism’s gaze moved to the Italian Renaissance in 1500 and to the Baroque in 1600 respectively, the gazes of these four photographers, with works that are distant in time and space, seem to be crossed by the same obsession of loyalty to the world. In that way, the photographs are in conversation with each other on the same wall in FoLA. For instance, the barbershops documented in black and white by Paillet at the beginning of the twentieth century, dialog with current flashing colored ones, photographed by Srodek-Hart. And, on another wall, the monochromatic vintage pictures of garages documented by Evans, with the service stations portrayed by Dow later, with an almost unreal palette of colors. In this manner, the show becomes a big fresh kaleidoscopic that contrasts and, at the same time, unifies the gazes.
The four authors seem to declare that direct photography is the basis of any serious documentation that tries to talk about the world. The simple and profound truth that these images express seems to repeat again and again that a curator is not necessary to understand art. And just by standing in front of any picture in Fola, the viewer understands the reason why four places that are photographed thousands of miles away from each other and at different times speak about the same: the truth. This show refutes the pirouettes of many art curators who try to pass what is striking as important, the false as the real and the shallow as the deep. Besides, this exhibition speaks about a photographic gaze that is capable of showing hidden aspects of reality, almost without touching it. As well as, to display the most explicit side of the world and its most hidden part in the same image. Moreover, to put the truth in front of our eyes, but always do it with art.
This show does not spare volume; it contains 130 copies extraordinarily printed by Federico Brea. Each photo presents values that encourage the heart. These values can be summed up in this love for the truth in a dyed Argentinian time with extreme hypocrisy. As well as, values that overlap lies, half-truths and a provoked confusion that touches both social and artistic terrains. It is a merit that makes this exhibition a guiding light for the younger generation of photographers.
Cultures, past and present, merged in a photography exhibition
“Congruences” displays the work of Walker Evans, Jim Dow, Fernando Paillet and Guillermo Srodek-Hart.
Nearly a century of photography with surprising reference points.
The exhibition Congruences, in the Latin American Photo Library (FoLA), is like a Matryoshka, the Russian dolls that when revealed, one is more beautiful than the other, until reaching the last, the smallest, which does not, therefore, cease to be special. Within the macro, the exhibition has multiple exhibitions inside itself, one smaller than the other. Just like the Matryoshkas, a game in which deception is essential: what you see is not what you believe.
Gastón Deleau, the director of FoLA, explains to Infobae Cultura: “Congruences is a project that involves a frontal vision of four different generations of photographers, throughout almost 100 years of photography in 130 images. In this context, we worked from the legacy of two historical photographers, such as Fernando Paillet, the father of Argentine photography, and the American photographer Walker Evans. Also, Jim Dow (US), who printed for Evans, and Guillermo Srodek Hart (Argentina), are part of the show; both lovers of the works of Evans and Paillet.”
The individual work of each one of the members of the eminent quartet is an exhibition of its own, which is the first doll. As a group show, different glances and approaches cohabit. However, they converge, talk, and defy the viewer from Jim Dow’s thesis: “Photography without context breaks the boundaries of what we believe as valid or of what we think we know.”
The photographs in the exhibition are organized by what they have in common. Buildings of great architectural cut or houses lost in the forest or the plain. Churches and little chapels, old hairdresser salons or barber shops, as they say in the US. Other themes are photos take in Latin American countries, pharmacies, carriages, and equestrian statues. Dry cleaners, blacksmith’s shops, bakery ovens, shoe stores, poolrooms, bars and more. Each author makes his contribution to each theme and altogether gift each other. The show does not only display almost a century of history, but also an experience where borders, time and everything we think we know, disappear. Another Matryoshka. (Recommendation: Look at the images before the references).
In addition, at the end of the gallery, the viewer will be able to see 14 photos of Paillet for the first time. The photos have been recently founded and have an incredible history.
The genesis of a thesis that became a show
Dow, who has visited Argentina 16 times, tells Infobae Culture how unwittingly this exhibition began in the late 60 when he saw Evans’s work for the first time:
“I found a book of Walker Evans, and I knew that that was what I wanted to do. I had the privilege of working with him at the age of 28. Between 1968 and 1984, I traveled, every time I could, inside the US and photographed establishments such as barber shops, bars, and billboards, among others. In 1984, I had the opportunity to come to Argentina to photograph stadiums; I did not know Spanish at the time, it was like being in a bubble. The experience of not understanding anything in a foreign country is frightening. However, it helped me to focus on the senses, and I noticed for the first time that it was not so different from the US. Then I was fortunate enough to start traveling inside Argentina; I went to Mendoza, Corrientes and other provinces. In these provinces, I said to myself ‘ this is like a reflection of the US ‘, the patterns of construction, something about its history, and the people beyond the language. I started to read more about the country, and I could not stop coming to look for more and more things in which we agree without knowing it. ” That was his time, Eureka!
On the other hand, Srodek Hart adds: “I was a student of Jim at Tufts University in Boston. One of the concepts he repeated in his classes of History of Photography was ‘ Decontextualizing what you see generates confusion.’ Later, I became his assistant, and the first trip we did together was to North Dakota, a place where nobody goes to; the flights are as expensive as making an international trip. Before leaving Boston, he said ‘ you will not be able to believe the similarities between North Dakota and Argentina.’ We were driving, and it was just like that: the landscapes, the lost service stations, and the animals. I lived it in my flesh to attest to it. That motivation can now be seen in the photos, you see one thing, and you think it is another. “
“The show is a great lesson about prejudice when you think you know everything and you never see the story behind it. The photo encourages you to presume, prejudge, the show breaks with that ego, it is truly an art of deception, “adds Srodek Hart to Infobae culture.
Moreover, Dow, as he points to a picture, adds: “New Orleans is a very crazy place. Certain areas are similar to Buenos Aires, the same humid climate, in the plain, surrounded by the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, the same as this city, which is between the river of La Plata and the Paraná. The personality of the people, the way people spend time together, you would be surprised. This picture, for example, could be somewhere away from this city. We visited places like Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas and we were wondering, “but where are we exactly?”
Paillet and Evans: two styles, one passion
In the mid-1930s, when Walker Evans traveled the dry roads of Alabama, USA, to photograph the effects of the Great Depression, the Argentinean Fernando Paillet was already recognized in his hometown, Esperanza, Santa Fe. He was known as the photographer who captured the customs, landscapes, social events and buildings of the country’s first agricultural colony, which was booming at the time.
If you think about what both artists have in common, it may be difficult to understand in advance why they both share an exhibition. On the one hand, Evans was a city photographer who studied in Paris. He had an innovative, disruptive spirit, attentive to the technological innovations of his time. He also developed different bodies of work, ranging from European trends to photojournalism; but always with a personal stamp that made him a reference in history. On the other hand, Paillet left his town to learn photography in Santa Fe and then returned. He was not recognized in his time-not long after-and he was devoted exclusively to that historical moment, in that little corner of the planet, to the point of considering himself as “the photographer who documented The Gringo Pampas. “
However, from Dow’s thesis, everything makes sense and is reinforced with his and Srodek Hart’s images.
“Evans became a photographer at a time when there was great experimentation. From the young Horacio Coppola, Man Ray, the Bauhaus movement, the Russian constructivism, all of them were discovering the unity between technology and art. Evans went through that period, but what happened was that he realized what was happening in his country at the time: the uprising of fascism, an interventionist government taking over, as it was the New Deal in the US or Perón in Argentina. While he had been cautious not to make any political remarks in his work, he did it during the 30’s. Later, he went back to what he did before, like that series of work as if he was a spy on the subway [Evans photographed hundreds of passengers with a covert camera, something that nobody had done until then.] Walker was a technology lover, and if he were still alive, he would have loved drones.”
“Evans’s pictures were taken in the middle of the Great Depression, a horrible moment. At the same time, Argentina expanded, in this case with the first or second generation of immigrants who came with nothing. When I did the pictures, it was after the Vietnam War, and the attitude of the people had changed. Many of the places that I captured began to disappear for different reasons, such as international capitalism,” says Dow.
Regarding Paillet, Srodek Hart says: “Paillet had a clear idea, he wanted to portray the person inside the establishment because that was the whole story. It was a historic moment in which Esperanza was the most important agricultural colony in Argentina, and it was the example to follow. He felt that he was part of that energy and in a few weeks, in February of 1922, he made all the series of interiors that are in the show.” He also adds: “Paillet was an extreme controller. In the documentary that we will release at the show, a lady tells that he photographed her as a bride when she got married at 19.” He spent an hour to take the picture. She adds that he was a possessed man, achieving great shots, with very long exposures, in which people came out rarely in motion.
However, there is a difference in each photographer’s approach, which goes beyond the fact that some photos are in black and white and others in color. Both Evans and Paillet argued that people were an essential part of the photographed object. While, Dow and Srodek Hart choose to leave the people aside, forcing the imagination to reveal the photographs from the details produced by human intervention.
“In my photos I don’t seek to draw attention to myself as an artist, I feel more like a cataloger, an archivist, a collector. We are more concerned about preserving something that is about to disappear. Paillet was worried about showing something that was expanding, saying ‘These people are successful ‘ and Evans, something that was dying. That is what is interesting. Photos that seem similar on the surface, but the idea of each of them is different,” says Dow. And Srodek Hart adds: “Jim and I are not interested in the person in flesh and blood, but in capturing what is the person through the place.”
Evans is known as the “Photographer of the Signs”, for his ability to turn signals into expressions of the life of a place.
The last Matrioshka: The Lost photos of Paillet
Dow and Srodek Hart took two years to make the final selection for the exhibition. They looked into personal and foreign files, traveled to Esperanza, visited museums, dialogued with historians. When everything was over, Srodek Hart received a call, which revealed a fascinating story.
“Paillet died in the absolute misery, poor, forgotten, deaf and ended up being ‘ the town’s freak ‘. When he died, they found two boxes with his work under the stage of the Canto Society in Esperanza with three thousand negatives in glass plates. An emulsion is added to these plates, which gives the image to the photo.
“Since Paillet had no heirs, a photographer chose and kept 300 plates randomly, The School of Agronomy received the other 2700 as a donation for use in their laboratories, and they erased the emulsion. Those plates were saved from that process, although they were on the erasure line. They ended up in the hands of Hector Gallego García, who had a dance place. He heard that dance floors in Spain used a psychedelic effect to make the environment more fun. The effect was made out of sandwiching water and oil between two pieces of glass, that when heated, with a light behind it, they began to rotate and generate the effect. Somehow, the Galician Garcia got these glass plates, and he used some for this purpose.”
Fate wanted that during the search of Paillet’s materials, a young woman from Esperanza, who lived in Buenos Aires, got to meet Dow and Srodek Hart. In turn, the week when the woman met the photographers was the same week when she was receiving her mother from Esperanza, who goes to the city once a year.
“The mother heard that she was talking on the phone with a friend telling her that a gringo and an Argentinean had been looking for photos of Paillet for an exhibition.” When the phone call ended, the mother says, ‘Paillet? There are stacked boxes with that name, in the laundry room, which belonged to your father. ” His father was the Galician García. So in that way, 14 photos came out of oblivion to become the corollary of the show, the survivors, the last Matryoshka or, as Srodek Hart says, “The icing on the cake.”
* Congruences
FoLa, Godoy Cruz 2626, 1st floor, CABA
Open every day, except Wednesdays, from 12.00pm to 8.00pm
Esperanza, 1967. Fernando Paillet takes his usual drink at a club in the small city of Esperanza, Santa Fe. He will die soon after, at 87 years old, covered with newspapers in absolute poverty. Without children, he will leave 3000 plates of glass that record the life of the agricultural settlers, a valuable photographic treasure that will not be recognized as art until several decades later. Only 300 pieces will be rescued, and the rest will be sent to a laboratory, where they will be cleaned to be used under a microscope. Those 2700 images will disappear forever.
New York, 1967. Walker Evans takes his usual drink at the Century Association, a private club frequented by artists and writers. He will die eight years later, consecrated as a legend of American documentary photography. Without children, he will leave a briefcase full of unpaid bills and an invaluable archive to be acquired in 1994 by the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of New York.
Boston, 2001. Tired of the American culture, the young photographer Guillermo Srodek-Hart goes down the staircase of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to request a transfer to a European university. He bumps into Jim Dow, a teacher who is wearing a Boca T-shirt, who has traveled several times to Argentina, worked with Evans and admires Paillet. He invites Hart to participate in one of his classes, which will change his life.
“There’s a quote from the artist Kerry James Marshall, who says: ‘history is a competitive event.’ Some teams win, others lose. So, I think Evans won,” Dow and Srodek-Hart say when as they prepare to give a ‘rematch’ to the forgotten Paillet. Congruences, the exhibition that will open Thursday at 7 pm in FOLA, includes 134 photographs produced by the four photographers, mentors and students united for much more than an aesthetic.
Soccer was what brought Dow to Argentina in 1984. He worked for Polaroid, and they asked him where he would like to travel. Open to the challenges, he came to Buenos Aires without knowing any Spanish and visited several provinces. He felt at home in a country of immigrants like his, which even had “similar landscapes.” He is still ashamed to remember that, as a newcomer, he referred to people from the States as “Americans.” “I am also an American,” was the cold answer.
“Travelling makes you wiser and more understanding,” Dow says today. “I know every state of the United States, and the more I traveled Argentina, the more I realized that even though our stories are different, we are twin countries in many respects.”
According to Dow, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth it was common in in Italy for families to flip coins or draw straws to see where they would try luck. “The one who won traveled to Buenos Aires and the one who lost, to New York,” he says. The family would divide, and the side who had the most success in their adopted country would send money to their relatives to come to them. America was not a very stable country back then, and now it isn’t again. My apologies for Trump, he is just horrible.”
Dow was an art student doubting his future in late 1960, while Paillet agonized in Esperanza. Until one day when he entered a smoke-filled bar near Yale University, where the professors smoked and toasted martinis before noon. “Among them, there was an older man, who seemed different. He was charming; I could not stop listening to him. Then I told a friend: ‘ I met a guy; I think his name is Walter Evans. Do you know who he is?’”
His friend showed him American Photographs, the catalog of the retrospective that the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) had dedicated to Evans in 1938. It was the first individual exhibition given by the museum to a photographer, who was then only 35 years old. “That defined everything,” Dow says today.
Shortly after that first meeting and after graduation Dow worked for two years with Evans, making prints in the production of a retrospective that MoMA did for Evans in 1971. Congruences include several photographs that were part of that exhibition.
Meanwhile, in Esperanza, Paillet’s legacy ran the risk of disappearing altogether. In advance of his time, Paillet had used very sophisticated techniques to make a record of his community. For him, the art pieces were those that he then painted on. His dream was to have a museum in which there was a room dedicated to his “photo-paintings” and another dedicated to his “historical documents.”
Santa Fe Prov. Argentina c. 1922
Those who saved the 300 glass plates had the same appreciation that the artist did. But recently several more plates were discovered forgotten in a corner of the laundry in a home in Esperanza only a few months ago. They were saved by chance: The owner of a dance club needed pieces like those to make special effects with oil, water, and heat, as it was fashionable in Spain decades ago.
Srodek-Hart was in charge of scanning and recovering Paillet’s plates for the exhibition Congruences.”If you get plates like these, of more than one hundred years, to preserve them, the last place where you would do it is in a box, stacked one on top of the other, in the most humid place of a house,” observes Srodek-Hart. “But they survived,” he adds. They have spots, mold, and traces of emulsion and a sticker that they put in order to identify them.”
Fate finally wanted Paillet to have his rematch.
Decades come and go, as do photographic styles, but straightforward images of vernacular architecture never seem to lose their ability to draw us in. Whether the pictures show us busy urban storefronts, homey rural diners, hand painted signage, or the soft glow of neon, they remind us of the everyday fabric of our own lives. And when they are seen across a wider arc of history, they show us just how much our functional, domestic routines have been changing. Regardless of the city or country they might depict, pictures like these capture for posterity the visual quirks and recognizable details of local culture, bottling the uniqueness of regional specialties and commercial innovation.
Without much effort, we can recall plenty of master photographers who have turned their cameras to such subjects. Eugène Atget showed us the storefronts and street vendors of early 1900s Paris, Berenice Abbott brought us closer to the sidewalks of 1930s New York, Walker Evans steeped us in the elemental wooden lines and painted advertisements of small town America, and William Christenberry took the long view of local barns and warehouses in the rural South.
This particular vernacular show picks up that common line of photographic thinking, taking a thematic cross section of Jim Dow’s five decade photographic career and pulling out notable images of bars and restaurants, largely in America but also in far flung locales from Mexico to the United Kingdom. His crisp pictures (consistently made from large format 8×10 negatives) bring us into intimate dialogue with humble taco trucks, coffee trailers, neighborhood fish & chips joints, butcher shops, candy stores, and even a snow cone hut, each a uniquely stylized manifestation of what the locals (and the proprietors) want.
Dow’s photographs are really like portraits of places, where the shopkeepers and customers have been swept away, leaving behind the visual communication of the physical space. Even when these eateries and watering holes are populated with eccentric decorating touches, Dow never treats them with anything but full respect. Doug’s Bar uses shotguns and rifles as décor, with cases of beer stacked and ready nearby (what could be better than the combination of guns and booze?) At the Old School Bar & BBQ, vintage 45s are nailed in a stripe near the ceiling, and the bar at the quietly posh Leash Club is surrounded by painted portraits of regal hounds. Farther afield, the ceiling of the dining room at the Restaurant El Arroyo (in Mexico) is draped with colorful cut paper decorations, while Southward’s Sweet Shop in the UK offers a hopelessly dense display of attractive candies.
When night falls, Dow’s eye for the nuances of color gets even better. A flash lit coffee cart in Uruguay feels perkily inviting in its cotton candy pastel pink paint, while a taco truck in east LA uses a strip of green neon to draw customers in. At other establishments, pastel blue balances with fire engine red, and humming white blares from the windows. And the neon Dairy Queen sign in North Carolina sits amid the blackness of the sky like a red planet, the soft-serve cone in the logo like a rocket ship blasting into space.
What makes these pictures so engrossing is their deep sense of place – we can immediately understand that these bars and restaurants occupy a particular spot in the lives of the locals, and that their quirky details give them the character that brings people back. The red leather stools at the Four Aces Diner in New Hampshire and the blue and white checkerboard tile at the Colonia de Caroyua butcher shop in Argentina feel like landmarks, and Dow’s well-made photographs celebrate these details with patient curiosity and understated reverence.
…What follows is photography as art rather than journalism-cum-art. People and place often divide: Axel Hütte’s elegantly shot modernist housing estates are unpopulated, as are Jim Dow’s shops and pie-and-mash cafés. Bruce Gilden’s close-ups of the faces of West Midlanders and Essex dwellers, meanwhile, are shorn of context, as are Rineke Dijkstra’s shots of young girls made-up for nights out in Liverpool. The show is more hit-and-miss here: the works of Hütte and Dow have an admirable, slow-burning poetic force; Dijkstra and Gilden pack a visual punch yet their works feel thin after the initial impact…
Full review… https://www.standard.co.uk/going-out/strange-and-familiar-exhibtion-review-a3203906.html
In the early 2000s, the American photographer Jim Dow began photographing the food trucks he encountered on his travels through Argentina and Mexico. Years later, his efforts have been collected in a show spanning numerous countries, focusing on a single subject—street food—to bring to light the cultural import of an often-overlooked institution.
Dow focuses on a single banal structure as an entrance into broader themes. For nearly 50 years he has photographed buildings central to national identity in the United States and abroad: BBQ joints, sports stadiums, and court houses among them. “I’ve always been interested in the ways that people organize the spaces they occupy,” he recently told Artsy. On choosing his subjects, he says “you look at something and you just get chills; you know you’re in the right place.” His eye has garnered him significant praise throughout the and mystery and sadness hidden beneath the surface of everyday objects and landscapes.”
For “Taco Trucks, Taquerias, and Carritos,” Dow photographed the trucks of native Spanish speakers, eschewing the hipper food trucks that have recently become popular (especially in the U.S.) and focusing on local joints in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and California. The trucks, often bathed in streetlamp light, are sometimes hooked up to clandestine generators through dense networks of wires; in some, the tires have fallen flat, rendering the trucks no longer trucks in the strictest sense of the word.
Dow says the series partially grew out of another photographic project he undertook in which he sat similar structures in Buenos Aires and Mexico City (bathroom entrances, for example) side by side. “People here think everything below the border is the same thing,” he says. “I’m really committed to trying to parse those differences out.” He adds, “it’s a really visually compelling, subtle way to talk about assimilation, migration. Being at home in a culture and not being at home.”
“Jim Dow: Taco Trucks, Taquerias, and Carritos” is on view at Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, Jul. 10–Sep. 12, 2015.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-south-korean-collector-jaemyung-noh-set-art-fair
…Photographer Jim Dow lovingly documents the vernacular. His show at Robert Klein @ Ars Libri spotlights American taco trucks and their prototypes, Mexican taquerías and South American carritos.
While we can make generalizations about these vendors — in the United States, they’re mobile; elsewhere, they stay in place — it’s their idiosyncrasies that charm. “Pyramid Carrito Selling French Fries, Costanera, Parana, Entre Rios Province, Argentina,” for instance, is a wacky tent with spotlights at its tip and round foldout windows. The logo: fries spilling from a toppled pyramid.
But Dow has an eye for more than the enchanting detail. “Rear of Closed Carrito, Colonia del Sacramento, Department of Colonia, Uruguay” nearly pictures a modernist sculpture, a glistening metal polygon corrugated in a fanlike pattern. And it’s the haunting, violet light in “Taco Truck in Front of Check Cashing Office, Los Angeles, CA” that catches the eye: the reflection, no doubt, of an illuminated sign at the check cashing office, eerily bathing a tree and the white food truck beside it.
Full article is behind a paywall…https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/07/28/four-current-shows-offer-energy-and-enchantment/kakXkegrUdxU2nZNbP6kPO/story.html
Jim Dow’s lush color photos, shot with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, capture a bygone America. The photos, up at Robert Klein Gallery, are from Dow’s 2011 book “American Studies.’’ Many of them were taken 30 or more years ago, but even then, he was after nostalgia. Not simply nostalgia’s romance, its persistence.
Viewers will recognize two local landmarks that aren’t going anywhere soon: Fenway Park, stretched out luxuriantly in a panoramic triptych shot in 1982, and “Town Diner, Route 16, Watertown, MA, 1979.’’ Both have changed. Fenway Park has added levels of seating and more. The Town Diner is now the Deluxe Town Diner. Looking at these images, you get the strange sensation that time is both moving and standing still.
A lot of what Dow conveys is archetypically American — ballparks, diners, gas stations. Many feature design elements that have been recycled through the decades. But the neon signs that hover over the establishments in “Orleans Burger Joint at Night, New Orleans, LA, 1980’’ and “Dairy Queen at Night, US 6, Iowa City, Iowa, 1988’’ speak to a particular era that was already fading in the 1980s. Dow’s photos, while nostalgic, really ask larger questions about how Americans see America, and what we cling to, and what we let go.
Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about the increased layering and boundary breaking going on in contemporary photography and trying to make sense of what it all might mean. What is clear is that when an artist begins with a photographic document and then adds in elements of conceptual theory, performance, staging, purpose-built construction and other sometimes obtuse ideas, something more complex is undeniably generated; what I have been struggling with is whether this increase in scope is giving us “better” or more durably memorable pictures in any definable way. It seems that we are quickly evolving away from many of the basic tenets that have formed the basis of the medium since its inception, and that in doing so, we may be inadvertently misplacing some of the core principles that gave us some of our most beloved images.
Jim Dow’s photographs of vernacular America are a passionate defense of the old school idea of storytelling in photography, a manifesto for a return to the value of direct visual connection to the richness of place and time. Starting with any one of the pictures in this tight retrospective, it is possible to jump off into an open ended, uniquely American short story. His works capture disappearing fragments of our collective cultural personality, bypassing easy nostalgia for a more nuanced look at who we are and who we have wanted to be, offering a slice of the unadorned optimism that led us to build these barber shops, burger joints, baseball stadiums, and barbecue shacks.
Dow’s vision of America is a undeniably a descendant of Walker Evans, whose love of the idiosyncrasies of commercial signage and roadside advertising have spawned many who have traveled a similar photographic road. But Dow’s connection to these folk art subjects is less formal and rigid than his mentor’s, opting for forgotten icons that go beyond strict compositional purity to examples of quirky uniqueness and understated humor, delivered with an affectionate eye for a people constantly reinventing themselves. Using a large format camera, he has gathered brimming scenes which reward longer looking and offer unexpected and often unpretentiously poetic discoveries.
Dow is also clearly a product of his times, particularly in the context of 1970s color photography, where color became another tool in the visual toolbox: bright neon sizzles and pops in the darkness, a cloverleaf-shaped donut counter swirls in attention grabbing orange, and rainbows of paint jump off a seasonal sno-cone hut announcing a parade of available flavors. And who wouldn’t wish for a warm summer night to swing by the local Dairy Queen to stand in the enveloping buzz of the yellow glow emanating from inside? His drive-ins, gas stations, and even sober court houses remind us of how a photograph can be a portal to somewhere else, giving us just enough clues and details to spark our imagination.
I think it is fair to say that some might see Dow’s work as a kind of throwback to a now historic style of photographic picture making. But what struck me most about this show was less that vernacular America continues to be a revealing subject, but that what I have been missing of late in my relentless gallery wanderings is that sense of a photograph as a familiar and relevant place to get lost in, a venue for finding some connection to what brings us together. Some may scoff at such a sappy and simple conclusion, but this show was a strong reminder for me that photographs can still be a celebration of our collective story, even when there are no people in them.
Longer ago than I care to admit, I made my one and only visit to North Dakota. I blew through Fargo and Bismarck, headed for the Badlands and Montana. The interstate was only two lanes then, there were almost no cars, and the speed limit was optional. Made sense to me, since there was absolutely no reason to slow down. Or so I thought. I wish I’d had Jim Dow in the car with me. North Dakota was where he made some of his best early photographs, and I have a pretty good idea how it would have gone: “Hey, did you see that motel? Pull over! It’s a beautiful sign. The people that run this joint really want us to stop.” Probably we’d have wound up in a place like the Terrace Lounge in Carrington, and Dow’s eye would have lit on the wall mural of a dance hall from a bygone time, with a woman in a red dress. “Open your eyes, man, it may not be the Sistine Chapel but it’s pretty great.” Dow brings his unique American travelogue to the Janet Borden Gallery (through July 29) in an exhibition titled American Studies, and though it may not be obvious from the cover image (Arthur Bryant’s Bar-b-q, Kansas City MO., 2002), we can see clearly what has separated Dow from his contemporaries and made him the essential traveling companion. Like Stephen Shore, Len Jenshel, Mitch Epstein, William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, and others who have rendered America in color, Dow has an insatiable appetite for the vernacular, from french fries to phone booths. But Dow seems always willing to linger a bit longer. He’s never ironic or distant and, as Borden points out, “He is patient, often using exposures of 15 minutes. His photographs release their information slowly.” Dow himself suggests, “Perhaps because I grew up without a television, I’m not just watching. I’m looking.”
Dow’s meditation on America has lasted four decades and yielded the newly published American Studies (powerHouse Books). He lingers, of course, because he loves, and what he loves is passing away. It goes beyond nostalgia for fading murals and pink lunch counters to a reverence for every manifestation of what has been made by hand, with care and imagination. His America beautifies beyond all entrepreneurial necessity, expends labor for no corporate reward, seeks ecstasy in motel neon (and not just motel romance) and paints a trail-tested cowboy on the wall of a tire store. It expresses itself. Which brings us to that sandwich and fries in the cover image. Yes, the sandwich is made with Wonder bread, a symbol of the cultural homogenization Dow deplores, but look at the size of it, and that mountain of fries! They didn’t come out of any frozen food case. Whoever ran Arthur Bryant’s decided that if people wanted to eat, he was darn well going to feed them. “Barbecue is one of the few things that changes from place to place,” adds Dow. “It has personality that hasn’t been squashed.” Pull over, Jim. What say we stop here?
© Lyle Rexer, July 1, 2011
There is a temptation to describe Jim Dow as a latter-day Walker Evans, even though most of Dow’s work is in color. As did Evans, Dow records the varied shapes and surfaces of vernacular culture — architecture, signage, interiors — relying on the rendering power of the 8×10 view camera. As with Evans, Dow’s photographs are largely empty of souls. But while Evans insisted to the point of arrogance that his work, despite its descriptive nature, was the highest art, Dow has no such pretension. His images are artful, to be sure, but they are less about the artist and more about the people who create the things depicted. Despite their precisionism, they are far more human than Evans’s pictures.
Yet the totality of Dow’s new monograph, Marking the Land: Jim Dow in North Dakota, makes it clear that the photographer’s images are not judgment-free records of weathered roadside attractions. The best of them quietly critique our attitudes toward the particular landscapes we inhabit. As in this coffee-shop interior (which seems quaint in the instant before its grotesqueness registers), nature is more often conquered than abided, its creatures made harmless. In Dow’s outdoor images, signs and sculpture of buffalo stand in benignly for the real thing, once nearly wiped off the Plains. (By our count there’s only one live animal in the book, a distant, ironic cow.) Yet Dow’s timeworn building facades have a plainness that suits the prairie’s nondescript topography and camouflages the dense decor of their interiors, which are crammed full as if to nullify the starkness of North Dakota’s great outdoors.
Dow started this project in the 1980s and finished it after a two-decade hiatus during which social and meteorological forces altered the state’s landscape. Had the common art he loves been washed away, or its makers moved to more populous ground, you wouldn’t know it from these photos.
The medium of photography has been especially ravenous this past half century. The swelling of the photograph from its key mechanisms of description to include those of performance, appropriation, and construction has not weakened its ability to speak with sincerity. As the contemporary population is ever adoring of information (and the nature of its dispersal), the interest to communicate and re-examine has become if nothing else, a physical need and a compulsion. Imagine the trauma of a single week where you read no news and saw no images.
Photography is asked, so it speaks; not only in description, but also in definition. We only know certain things because we have seen them: what John F. Kennedy (still alive, gleaming teeth) looks like, the details of the Grand Canyon at sunset, the particular shade of green that the Statue of Liberty expresses. Without the groundwork of the photograph, what poor citizens we would make in this America!
Regarding the medium’s power to describe precisely yet actively communicate, Jim Dow has been photographing elements from the vernacular landscape for several decades. Stating that he uses photography “to try to record the manifestations of human ingenuity and spirit still remaining in our country’s everyday landscape,” his series of work include those on American baseball stadiums, barbeque joints, corner shops in Britain, and most recently, a book on North Dakota. Dow collects and edits the colloquial details which are in themselves, acts of creativity.
His latest exhibition, Capital Architectures: Buenos Aires / Mexico City, on view at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, initiates a dialogue between features apparent in these two major cities of Latin America.
Working since the mid 1980s in Buenos Aires and since the early years of this decade in Mexico City, Dow photographs the environs of these respective sites with equal elements fascination, eye for detail, and wry humor. Each photograph is a narrative to be imagined. Shot with an 8 x 10 inch view camera, many of the photographs here are color contact prints of the same size, inviting a close scrutiny for the eyeball to feast on. Their central subject is not people themselves, but their trace. Seen in local murals, shrines to sports heroes or religious figures, the inside of bars and restaurants, the architecture of toilets and train stations; these outlines of the manifestations of human ingenuity are distorted by the specific political and social shifts that, as instruments of history, have greatly affected the visual parameters of these respective cities.
Buenos Aires, flat, expansive, is the southernmost of South America’s major cities and with its wide boulevards and French classical buildings, is defined by a strong European flair. Mexico City, in a valley surrounded by mountains, contains intricate aspects of many cultures as the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. In the Latin American imagination both cities are giants of a different shape, it is no accident that their union in this exhibit is a provocative one.
To inspire dialogue, an image from one a city, a bakery for example, will be hung next to a bakery image from another. As the unique qualities of each are seen, and as the significance between the two is reflected upon, these pairs create a friction with implications that formulate a comparative third image: your bakery. The photograph speaks and it listens. Imagine the range of hometowns for the students and scholars at the Center for Latin American Studies, each responding to the collection of photographs in Capital Architectures with the third photos of their own experience.
Therein lies the archive of the mind’s eye.
Equipped with an 8-by-10 view camera and a patient regard for the history of place, Jim Dow commits his photographic practice to the clear description of the spirit of a perhaps vanishing environment through the language of its architecture. He has previously located and recorded the remarkable details of the vernacular; truckstop pool tables, barbershops and an entire nation of baseball parks. “Establishments: Clubs, Libraries and Associations,” a series begun in 1998, extends his obsessive mapping of the built American landscape. Dow was encouraged to undertake the project by the late writer and architectural preservationist Brendan Gill, and he set about gaining access to the redoubts that secure the pleasures and rituals of the elite – the privileged, the professional and the arguably meritorious, and the seriously connected.
INVITATION: folding triple page. Janet Borden, Inc 2003
The telling detail, isolated from the surroundings, attracts Dow’s attention, and in this series his images, many of them contact prints, are exclusively interiors. These carefully composed chromogenic color prints describe the architectural features of paneled and marbled clubs. Long exposures of up to an hour erase any visitor who may have passed his lens. The billiard rooms, swimming pools, changing rooms and backgammon tables of the Harvard and Yale Clubs, Union League and Explorers Club reveal only the furnishings of a lapidary world more often imagined than seen. If no one appears to dine in the grill rooms, or to read in the libraries, or to drink at the bars, presences are nevertheless felt. Dow venerates the verdigris and polished brass ram’s head of a Bannister Decoration, Lotos Club, and marvels at the arcane red-rubber hose and chromed gauges monitoring the hot and cold blasts of the Scotch Douche, Union Club (both 2002). Reminiscent of the opulent vistas of Candida Hofer, the great expanse of the Library from the East, University Club (1998) vivifies the world of the well-heeled clients of such famed architectural firms as McKim, Mead & White and Delano & Aldrich.
Among the relentlessly masculine, high-ceilinged rooms of such clubs, a door stands open in ivory and pale blue painted paneling in Doorway, Lotos Club (2000), one of the oldest literary clubs in New York. Class distinctions are implicit in the upholstery of A Shoeshine Stand, Union League Club (2000), where amply scaled marble seats with leather cushions are provided. Combs soaking in the antiseptic waters of a metal-topped glass jar, reflected in the mirror of a bathroom at the Union Club, signal the presence of an attendant, as do the whisk brooms that hang in the changing rooms provided for the swimmers of the University Club. These are desirable, handsomely private places made public through the intervention of a spy in the house of architecture. As Dow is their witness, some things never change.”
Jim Dow’s large, richly detailed color photographs provide glimpses of some of the most opulent, carefully tended time capsules to be found in New York City. For several years Mr. Dow has been negotiating entry into various private associations, clubs and libraries in New York, setting up an appropriately old-fashioned view camera and making 15- to 60-minute exposures of reading rooms, swimming pools, foyers or staircases.
The results often provide views of spectacular off-limits interiors, like balconied bookshelves and the vaulted Gothic-Renaissance mélange of the University Club’s library. These fascinating images document the rewards of fortunate birth and success, as well as an era that is not nearly as bygone as some may assume.
What taxonomical photography has in common with lepidopterology, poison-frog collecting, and train spotting is that it, too, can be a means of nurturing an idiosyncratic obsession. It combines the scientism of typological investigation with the more or less obvious charm of an eccentric interest cultivated over time.
Jim Dow’s recent photographic series of British storefronts, “Corner Shops of Britain, 1983-1993,” offers a glimpse into this kind of obsession nurtured over a decade. Forty 8-by-10 color contact prints depict the facades of family-run businesses, once keystones in the social and architectural fabric of the high street. Victims less of the recession than of suburbanization – of the one stop park-and-shop mega store – they have been disappearing at the rate of over 3,000 per annum. Here, as with the grain silos, mine shafts, and other monuments to the demise of industry documented by the Bechers, the drive-in movie screens of Hiroshi Sugimoto, or even the newsstands of Moyra Davey, rarity is a measure of impending extinction. Records of a way of life, institutions such as Bert’s Pie & Mash, Peckham, London, 1985-93, James Smith’s Stick Shop, 1985,or Baldwin’s Homeopathic Chemist, 1993, are captured in the period between the end of a tradition and its eventual resurrection in the form of the curiosity shop, where the purchase of memory is made possible by the homogenizing force of the ECU.
Whereas most early photography in this genre – of the sort first acknowledged in 1975 with the “New Topographics” exhibition at George Eastman House (which included work by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Frank Gohlke) – is focused on the skillful elimination of the anthropological, Dow…is preoccupied with its orchestration. Although Dow’s small theaters of commerce are generally unpeopled, their windows are both vitrines (they still bear the mahogany and glass stamp of their Victorian museological origins) and stages decorated for aesthetic pleasure, convenience, and transitional ease. Aware of the dangers of depicting people as symbols of what they do, Dow pictures not the proprietor but the assemblage, composition and palette of the elements that once formed and were passed down from one generation to another of proprietors. A Covent Garden tailor’s window is a diorama of gravitas, the gray pants and immaculately tailored jackets balancing appeals to vanity with austerity and deference to tradition. There are windows inviting the pleasures of scrutiny and what the French appropriately term leche-vitrine. In The Façade of Chapman’s Hardware, 1993, stacked outside in a configuration worthy of Tony Cragg’s sculpture, are horizontal or vertical tiers of cat litter bags, of multipurpose and ericaceous composts, of watering cans, dustbins, and brooms.
If taxonomical photography often seems most at home in book form – consider Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, 1963, Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968, and Thirty-Four Parking Lots in Los Angeles, 1967 – its most appropriate subject might be the storefront, which serves as both lens of inspection and display window. In Dow’s series, the play of inside and outside, of image as window and window as image, occurs across multiple planes of representation. Dow makes no particular claims to documentary veracity; the luminous glow of these works is as much a product of manipulated light and printing as the British fog from which they emerge. And like the stores themselves, these are modest photographs, artfully composed and precise in their attention to detail. Monuments to the transience of the rituals and esthetics of consumption, they are revealed as empty spaces animated only by the intensity of their gaze.
Like an arid corner of an otherwise fertile valley, formalism persists as a sere reminder that the many wonders of photography are not unlimited. From time to time the drought spreads, and I have a feeling that the periodic rises of formalism coincide with general declines of inventiveness and inspiration among photographers. The matrices and measurements of work seem to take on special importance when the muse proves elusive. This is not to say that there is any fault in form as such. Far from it. The forms of art, from the simple structure of a heroic couplet to the miracles of musical counterpoint to the hard-won laws of perspective, are spiritual architecture of the most glorious kind. But preoccupation with form to the exclusion of any other purpose is an academic exercise, not an artistic one.
Nowhere has formalism been more evident – and inspiration more often lacking – than in the color photography of recent times. The vapidity of most of the images in the International Center of Photography’s “New Color” show last fall was an unmistakable though eloquent statement of the purposelessness of much modern color work. The usual formalist sin of being “about photography” was compounded by pictures now said to be “about color.” Photographers who avoid thinking of what they might do with their medium by indulging their obsession on how to do it are like the medieval theologians who preferred to debate the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin than to ponder the meaning of life.
Once in a while, however, a photographer will still take the limited goals of formalism and produce remarkable pictures, proving, I suppose, that some people will be good photographers no matter how they handicap themselves. One such overachiever is Jim Dow, whose intriguing color prints were recently shown at the Robert Freidus Gallery in New York. He was one of the participants in the Courthouse Project, organized in 1976 by Seagram’s, and many of his images reflect a continuation of interest in the kind of interiors that serve as stage sets for quotidian rituals: barber shops, billiard halls, diners, Masonic lodges, small-town movie theaters. In these pictures Dow confronts and solves various formal problems, notably the rendering of color under low light conditions, and at the same time imparts a large measure of the dignity these uninhabited places seem to retain from the days and nights of their use.
But Dow is most startlingly successful when he sets about solving the formal problem of making multiple panel panoramas in color with an 8×10 camera. What distinguishes the results is not their technical success, but the aesthetic continuity Dow manages to maintain with his other work, and its literal and metaphoric expansion. He has chosen as his subject sports stadiums, sites of mass ritual that are, in a sense, the cathedrals of our age.
It is clear when looking at Dow’s interiors, that he has a strong affinity for most of the places he photographs and, by extension, for the human concerns they imply. But I’ll assume, for my own purposes, that he chooses stadiums not only because of a similar affinity but because of formal considerations: they lend themselves well to the triptychs and tetraptychs which allow him to break out of his accustomed format, offer muted but unusual color patterns, yet aren’t the landscapes that are the subject of most panoramic photography. But as with his other work, he seems to view the monumental structures with an almost intimate fondness. What he finds and shows to us with a combination of awe, affection, and melancholy – is astonishing and wholly unexpected.
Whether he expected them to or not, Dow encountered in his chosen stadiums scenery that is deeper and more memorable than even the most rabid sports fan could anticipate. Photographed on cloudy days, and when they were completely empty, the great brooding ovals seem to be waiting to come alive. And yet, as Dow sees them, each has a life independent of its function, a life both inherent and residual, each is a thing in itself and a collector of the emotional residue of a thousand closely watched games.
Anyone who has ever walked up a stadium entrance ramp and stepped into the vast, embracing space surrounding a baseball or football field will easily call to mind the boggling sense of wonder that the sight engenders, but Dow’s vision of these spaces is less heady and more contemplative. He gives us truly a chance to look, undistracted by the noise and flow of the crowd, a chance to take in the power of stadiums that derives from the vast forms their function dictates. In most instances, even with three and four panels, Dow doesn’t fully encompass the reach of the sweeping hillsides of tiered seats; his pictures imply space like Japanese screens.
Surprisingly, given subject matter so static and geometrically ordered, Dow’s pictures are blessed with frequent serendipity. In Philadelphia’s Veteran’s Stadium, home of the Phillies, the surface of a bright salmon-colored tarpaulin lying on the striated green Astroturf is pulled into graceful folds that Christo might be proud to have created. The unexpected color of the tarp is complimented by wide bands of red, brown, orange, and yellow seats that circle the field. This is a Grand Canyon of an odd but altogether appealing sort, an unnatural wonder that Dow presents with suitable gravity, as if he had just stumbled onto it in the course of a scientific expedition.
In London, at the home stadium of Crystal Palace soccer club, a less colorful but no less dignified place than Veteran’s Stadium, the wide strips caused by the countercurrents of mowing on the jewel-green grass of the field offers an air of appropriate rectitude for the gentle dinginess of the surrounding working class neighborhood. Here, at least, the impeccably groomed pitch seems to remind us the rules by which life used to be governed still apply. Similarly, at the small Huddersfield Town Football Club stadium, the green grass field seems to serve as a reproach amid the industrial sprawl that hems it in.
Even in the new stadiums where the hand of man has thoroughly banished any trace of nature, and where (as true sports fans know) games are severely disfigured by the voracious appetite of television, Dow can convince us that there are wonders to be seen. Of Texas Stadium in Irvine, Texas, a domed, entirely artificial arena of seamless modern sport, Dow creates a triptych filled with enthusiasm – not, I suspect, for what happens here, but for the sheer wonderment of so much enclosed space. Girders soar above simulated the grass of the playing field, vaulted like the fantasies of Victorian architecture.
Even to a non-believer like myself, Dow proves that formalism can be beautiful. But, more important, he proves that a concern for the form of photography can serve as a springboard for a strong personal statement, something few formalists manage to do these days. Dow’s stadiums have all the grandeur and loneliness of ancient ruins. They are, of course, the eventual artifacts of a civilization that is bound, someday, to vanish, and he treats them with all due respect.
In his earlier work Jim Dow photographed various forms of vernacular architecture, including county courthouses, interiors of bars and poolhalls, soccer stadiums in England, and minor-league baseball parks. Dow was pursuing the sort of photographic archaeological investigation of folk culture practiced by Walker Evans and a slew of followers. In this now-familiar approach typical but heavily connoted artifacts and scenes of contemporary life are presented in as neutral a fashion as possible, with the photographer typically using a large-format camera and great depth of field. Seldom is work of this kind concerned with genuine archaeological research; texts, beyond minimal captions, are almost never included. (Evans’ and James Agee’s resplendent collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—perhaps the archetypal embodiment of this kind of work—is a rare and striking exception.) Instead, behind most of this work lies the implicit assumption that presenting the subject in an uninflected way will allow its ineffable reflections of the culture to emerge.
In the work shown here Dow continues his interest in vernacular structures, presenting photographs of every major-league baseball park. In each picture Dow butts together three 8 by 10-inch color contact prints (in some cases arranged horizontally, in others vertically) taken from a vantage point in the stands, looking out over the playing field and the tiers of empty seats. Small details in each picture—advertising billboards, elaborate scoreboards, the skylines of the cities beyond the outfield walls—evoke both the specific qualities of each park and team, and the general character of the game itself. As a group the photographs form a catalogue of a particular class of vernacular architecture, and thus suggest the comparative typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Considered this way, they reveal the general structural traits of ballparks—from the spiffy new domes of Seattle and Houston to the funky, aged parks of Boston and Oakland.
Compared to the quainter, more idiosyncratic subjects of Dow’s earlier work, his big-league ballparks are bland. They have been stripped of many of their folk-culture aspects, reduced to a slick functionalism by the big-bucks commercialism of baseball today. But the spartan lines of these corporate coliseums are a medium for the Modernist concern with photographic form that underlies Dow’s work. Here, that concern is expressed through an articulation of the illusion of space in photographs.
Panoramic views are often made using special cameras, with lenses that scan the wide field of view during exposure while film is being pulled across the shutter opening. In other panoramic systems the whole camera rotates on a tripod head. The photographs that result from these sorts of cameras are perspectivally consistent throughout their length. Each of Dow’s triptychs, though, depicts three distinct tunnels of space whose edges are made to line up only approximately, producing the effect of a broad vista with a fractured spatial illusion. Straight lines in the scene are broken into angles where they cross the joined frames, so that each photograph can be considered separately from its counterparts in the triptych. This formal play between the unified vista of the triptych and the unified spatial illusion offered by each part is accentuated by the geometries of the stadiums themselves—straight rows of seats converge toward the centers of the various frames; the diamond of the playing field is twisted and pulled into various shapes, depending on whether Dow photographs from a spot behind homeplate or along the first- or third-base lines.
With their pop-cultural references and ironic formalism, these photographs are part of a widespread genre in contemporary photography. But the artifacts they depict are those of a fully commercialized sport, not of a folk game. The pared-down functionalism of these ballparks reveals the Modernist ironies that in other work of this genre are often masked behind sentimental or simply cynical evocations of a populist vernacular. Dow’s pictures demonstrate what is too often ignored in work of this sort—that this vernacular is being, and has been, radically altered by corporate culture.
[Nostalgia]- I hate that word . … To be nostalgic is to be sentimental. To be interested in what you see that is passing out of history, even if it is a trolley car that you have found, that is not an act of nostalgia.
– Walker Evans
In 1976, as U.S. citizens commemorated the American Bicentennial, Jim Dow expressed his concerns about the nation’s misguided efforts to celebrate a heritage that excluded individualized vernacular expression in favor of outmoded conservative traditions:
“As Bicentennial fever rages, historical societies abound, ladies put up plaques on one another’s houses, dedicate malls and post descriptive graphic displays outside churches. But, to me, that misses the point. This is the land where “mass culture” started, and it has also seemed to me that the greatest ingenuity and flair, in the sense of everyday people, has usually gone into commercial or individual communication; a sign, a façade, a gazebo for the customers to cool their heels in. To me this is more alive, more intrinsically worthwhile than all the official architecture, outstanding classical examples and historic spots. It is what we are surrounded by [and marks a period] when times were, a bit less corporate, … and many individuals’ creativity and cleverness … displayed.” (1)
The statement encapsulates Dow’s personal motivation to photograph material fragments of mass culture-the vernacular architecture, signage, and commercial billboards that constituted “the American road scape” – that he encountered along old U.S. highways on various cross-country road trips between 1967 and 1977.(2) Compelled by subjects that convey a unique sense of human spirit and industry, Dow produced this body of work in black and white, working extensively with an 8- by 10-inch Deardorff camera, which afforded detailed clarity and required careful, considered looking. (3) Dow’s photographs crystallized the didactic messages of his subjects by isolating specific details of image and text so that they appear unmoored from their immediate surroundings. More often than not, his subjects bear the marks of time’s passage, evident in the weather-worn surfaces, outdated cliches, and stereotyped imagery that prevailed in mid-twentieth-century American consumer culture but had begun to deteriorate in the shifting socioeconomic and political landscape of the early 1970s.
The desire to look closely at “what we are surrounded by” owed a clear and acknowledged debt to Walker Evans, whose work Dow grew to know intimately between 1969 and 1971 while printing from Evans’s negatives in preparation for a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.(4 ) This exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski, affirmed the significance of Evans’s achievement for a new generation of photographers, who had come to know his work largely through reproductions in two books, American Photographs and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.(5) Evans’s sophisticated embrace of vernacular American subject matter and straightforward, descriptive application of the medium were revelations for Dow. “My idea of photography at the time;’ he said, “was cross cuts of cabbages, naked ladies by the sea, rotting junk in the sun, prettiness, formality, people in the street looking stupid or mean …. I had never before seen pictures that could be read, could stand up to long-term scrutiny. To me, the spare sharpness, the reserve and respect due the subjects were magic:’ (6)
Evans’s “documentary-style” approach, as he came to define it in the early 1970s, held an appeal for young artists like Dow, who sought meaning in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and the media-saturated,increasingly corporate social landscape. (7) In a public talk delivered to students at the University of Michigan in October 1971, Evans speculated that this way of working was a more honest approach to picturemaking than those encountered in advertising, journalism, or even certain precedents in fine art photography. “What your generation is interested in is honesty, much to your credit;’ Evans insisted. “You’ve been lied to so much that you are damn well going to have something honest for a change, and this style seems honest … it wasn’t always so, but it seems so. It is possible to express yourself graphically with a camera, honestly, naturally, more so perhaps than another media.”(8)
The artistic endeavor that Evans proposed offered a viable alternative to prevailing skepticism about the integrity of image making in post-World War II American culture. As historians and theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Daniel J. Boorstin asserted in the early 1960s, images as sources of information had become highly suspect. They were best understood within the context of mass media and its mechanisms and should be critically scrutinized as vehicles of accurate reporting. Boorstin, more strongly than McLuhan, felt that American society had lost its moral compass. In his book The Image: A Guide to PseudoEvents in America, he criticized the shallow pursuit of fame for its own sake, excoriated television and newspapers for offering sensationalized so-called news as entertainment, and defined this regrettable phenomenon as the perpetuation of “pseudo-events:’ McLuhan, in his groundbreaking study Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, assumed a more observational tone, famously postulating that the content of a message is inevitably shaped by the technological medium used to express it. In fact, as he argued, the two were inseparable: “the medium is the message.”(9) Though the cultural stage from which Evans spoke was modest by comparison, he sought to assure young photographers that pictures could be made without pretension or political agendas and still have a profound impact in the age of mass-media fabrication. This desire to see and express subjects honestly in photographs, without nostalgic sentimentality or ironic condescension, resonated deeply with Dow.
Evans’s precedent underscored the importance of observing the built social landscape, a subject that had also been gaining both credibility and popularity among architectural theorists since the late 1950s. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, often credited with establishing the field of landscape studies, founded the journal Landscape, editing and publishing it from 1951 to 1968. At first a free promotional publication, the magazine quickly attracted subscribers from a variety of disciplines and included an international array of authors, who explored various aspects of land use and the built environment. As he proclaimed in the first issue, Jackson believed that “there is really no such thing as a dull landscape …. None is without character, no habitat of man is without the appeal of the existence which originally created it:'(10) Jackson, who began teaching at Berkeley and Harvard in 1969, establishing courses in cultural landscape history, was teaching at Harvard when Dow first began as a part-time instructor in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department there.(11)
The architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and their students at the Yale School of Art and Architecture also embraced the vernacular landscape during the late 1960s and early 1970s, making an extensive study of the commercial strip in Las Vegas and publishing their findings in Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. The research and writing garnered both praise and criticism for its unapologetic embrace of “a new type of urban form emerging in America and Europe, radically different from what we have known; one that we have been ill-equipped to deal with and that, from ignorance, we define today as urban sprawl:’ (12) With their proclamations that “billboards are almost alright [sic]” and their avoidance of moral judgment, Venturi and Brown convincingly asserted that parking lots, strip malls, drive-in churches, and gambling casinos were as worthy of serious study as were Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance palazzos.
In this spirit of embracing the legitimacy and significance of the everyday built environment, Dow found compelling subjects in the facades of diners, details of billboards, remnants of abandoned ice-cream stands, the hand-painted signs of burger joints, pool halls,roller rinks, drive-in theatres, and gas stations, and the religious exhortations on roadside structures that lined the old U.S. highways. Here he would discover evidence of the “ingenuity and flair” of “everyday people “that more often than not was in the process of disappearing into cultural obsolescence. For a young, liberally minded photographer coming of age in an era of questionable facts and government deception, artifacts rooted in American vernacular culture of an earlier era but now quickly disappearing from public consciousness represented a certain authenticity. In the straightforward earnestness of their messages and their often handcrafted design, Dow found subjects worthy of respect: “this stuff … should be recorded, and recorded sympathetically with an eye not so much to damning it but more to trying to show that it has, or had, strong roots in things and senses that we believe to be ‘good: (13)
Dow was born July 26, 1942, in Boston, the only child of James D. Dow II and Ruth Whitney Barrett. 14 His parents were Ivy League educated intellectuals whose love of each other and shared passion for political discussion, music, and literature shaped his childhood and adolescence and informed his political and literary sensibilities. In their liberal household in Belmont, Massachusetts, dinners were accompanied by candles and wine and often shared with academic friends and colleagues, who enjoyed lively debates about current events, such as the McCarthy hearings, polio, and fears about the hydrogen bomb and”the red scare.” The Dows, whose left-leaning politics were at odds with those of many of their neighbors, sent their son to the Cambridge School of Weston, a private, progressive high school with a roster of diverse international faculty and students. (15)
A self-described “mediocre” student, who enjoyed drawing, early R&B music, and sports, Dow decided to attend art school rather than university, believing, erroneously, that it would prove easier than academia. Though his parents were not overly excited about their son’s decision, they accepted and eventually supported it. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) as an undergraduate from 1961 to 1965, studying graphic design with Alexander Nesbitt, Ilse Buchert, and Malcolm Grear, who became a friend and mentor. Dow also took two required introductory classes with Harry Callahan, who led the photography department at RISD from 1961 to 1976. Dow immediately liked Callahan, whose humble demeanor encouraged his students to discover and pursue their own interests rather than follow a preconfigured formula for success. With Callahan’s advocacy, Dow was accepted into the MFA program at RISD in photography, from which he graduated in 1968. 16 From Callahan, Dow acquired the basic technical skills required to operate a large-format camera and produce black-and-white. prints. Perhaps more significantly, however, he absorbed the lesson that graduating from art school did not automatically make one an artist; such status came from devoting oneself to the daily work of making pictures. Callahan’s renowned work ethic and dedication to the rigors of picture taking left a deep impression, as did his professor’s generosity and earnest regard for his students’ well-being. (17)
During his time at RISD, Dow found comfort and camaraderie in his close friendships with faculty and fellow students and their partners, relationships that functioned much like extended family at a difficult time in his life. In the fall of 1965, in Dow’s first semester of graduate coursework, his mother died suddenly and tragically after being hit by a bus. Dow’s father was also ill with prostate cancer, which would take his life four years later, in 1969. (18) Dow was especially close with one of his photography instructors, Richard Lebowitz, and his wife Edith, both of whom had wide-ranging intellectual interests and were well read in history and politics. Dow admired the radical political views held by his fellow graduate students Walter Rabetz and Murray Riss and Murray’s wife Ellie and was close friends with Bart Parker and his wife Yvonne, who joined Dow for portions of several road trips (fig.1), as did Robert Richfield. Ed Sievers, who had moved to Venice, California, after graduation, and John McWilliams, who lived in the Atlanta area and became a lifelong friend, welcomed Dow to stay with them during his cross-country travels. Many of these relationships evolved naturally into a mutually supportive professional network during the early 1970s, as university photography programs were expanding and job opportunities arose.
Emmet Gowin, who was a year ahead of Dow in graduate school, and his wife, Edith (fig. 2), also became (and have remained) close friends. On his many road trips through the South, Dow often visited Danville, Virginia, where the Gowins would spend every summer with Edith’s extended family, the beloved subjects of Gowin’s photographs from this period. Gowin accompanied Dow on several early ventures in Virginia between 1966 and 1968, including trips through Fredericksburg and South Boston, where Dow photographed the facades of a double-frame house (plate 1) and a floor and carpet business (fig. 3).
During Dow’s first semester of graduate school in the fall of 1965, he was invited by the artist Dieter Roth, another early mentor, to New Haven to meet Walker Evans, whom Roth described as a “socialist photographer who uses glass plates.'(19) Though Dow knew little about Evans’s achievements at the time, he vividly recalls the setting of their first rendezvous: the murky, smoke-filled interior of the Old Heidelberg bar (fig. 4), located in the basement of Hotel Duncan and a favorite haunt for Evans since he began teaching at Yale in 1964. Dow soaked up the atmosphere, his admiration for the photographer’s curiosity and intellect decidedly piqued. Upon his return to RISD, John McWilliams showed him a copy of Evans’s American Photographs. Dow “was hooked.”(20)
His relationship with Evans intensified through a connection fostered by Peter Bunnell and John Szarkowski, respectively the curator and the director of photography at MoMA. Bunnell, whom Dow had gotten to know around 1968 when he and Emmet Gowin would visit the print-study room at the museum, was a resource during the early shaping of Dow’s graduate thesis on Walker Evans.(21) Through Bunnell, Dow met Szarkowski, who was then planning a retrospective exhibition of the work of Walker Evans and needing someone to make modern prints. After a few initial trials that proved Dow a worthy printer, Szarkowski trusted him to work directly from Evans’s negatives. (22) From 1969 through 1972, Dow traveled regularly from Belmont to Old Lyme, Connecticut, and New York City, often adjusting his schedule to accommodate issues associated with Evans’s fragile health and enduring the older photographer’s personal peccadilloes. (23) The opportunity to immerse himself in the darkroom with Evans’s images had a profound influence. Dow, who had inherited a modest sum of money from his father’s estate that kept him solvent for a few years, could afford this opportunity to build his experience and knowledge. Though he was not paid directly for his labor, the work earned Dow recommendations for subsequent grants, fellowships, and job opportunities.
Several of his earliest photographs from this period, made on trips South in 1967 and 1968, bear a close resemblance to the photographs that Evans had taken in the 1930s, while he was working for the Farm Security Administration. Dow’s view of an abandoned store along GA 99 in Ridgeville, Georgia, with its advertisements for Hires root beer, 7-Up, Dixi Cola, and Coca-Cola (plate 2), is directly comparable to the sign-plastered facade of Evans’s rustic Roadside Store between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama, with its neatly placed advertisements for Coca-Cola, Clabber Girl Baking Powder, Grove’s Chill Tonic, and other palliatives (fig. 5). Dow readily acknowledged his early penchant for producing Evans-like images, as well as his recognition that he needed to find his own aesthetic: “I had to find what it was that I wanted to take pictures of, what was mine and what was not. Like most, I began copying.”(24)
There seemed little time to make his own photographs. Though he regularly scanned the landscape through his car windows as he drove around New England and New York, he often kept driving, making notes in his journal to return with his camera. One particularly charming sign eventually proved irresistible: in 1971 he photographed a gigantic replica of a bowling pin pierced with an arrow, which was situated alongside a stretch of US 1 near Branford, Connecticut (plate 4). Other subjects that attracted his attention included a tin wall with a painted arrow in Wilmington, Massachusetts; the faulty letters of a window display advertising a dance studio in Pittsfield, New Hampshire (plate 10); and a neon ice-cream cone sign, taken in the light of day,made on a trip to an unsuccessful job interview at Georgia State University in Atlanta (plate 6). Much to his chagrin, it was on his return from Atlanta, while stopping to stay with a cousin in Washington, D.C., that a set of prints that he had made for himself from Evans’s negatives was stolen from his car. In a report to the police, Dow attempted to describe the prints and their value: “They are mostly pictures of landscape, facades of buildings and houses and portraits, both individual and group. There are no nudes, nor is it plausible that the photographs could be of any possible interest or use to whoever took them … as they are they are relatively worthless, unless one has an understanding of how and where to go and sell art:’ (25) None of the prints was ever recovered.
Keeping himself well informed about current events, Dow read the New York Times and the Boston Globe daily, as well as I. F. Stone’s Weekly, a liberal newsletter written by the investigative journalist Isidor Feinstein Stone, who was renowned for his meticulous analysis of published governmental reports to argue his progressive views. (26) Dow also read the New York Review of Books, which published blistering political cartoons and caricatures by David Levine. At times, however, Dow found it difficult to keep from being overwhelmed, particularly as the news of William Calley, on trial for his role in the My Lai massacre of 1969, and the sentencing of Charles Manson for the Tate-LaBianca murders (which also took place in 1969), consumed the news cycle: “Calley was found guilty today! Manson sentenced to die; the recession deepens; the lying, cheating, bombast and pettifoggery continues unchecked and I silently stir and push my prints about in the dark listening …. It gets me after a while.”(27)
Atlantic City, NJ. Postcard, n.d.
Dow did make a few road trips in the first half of 1972, traveling to visit friends in the South and driving across the country to take a part-time teaching position at the Vancouver School of Art in British Columbia. Though he bemoaned his overall lack of productivity, he made several notable photographs. (28) In March, traveling with Emmet Gowin, Dow photographed Lucy the Elephant, a well-known tourist destination in Margate, near Atlantic City in New Jersey (plate 54). For more than eighty years, the six-story colossus, originally known as the Elephant Bazaar and at times called the Elephant Hotel, had stood there, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Its novelty made it a popular subject for numerous postcards (fig. 6). By the 1960s Lucy, fallen into severe disrepair, was slated for demolition until a group of concerned citizens raised money to rescue her. After being towed approximately a hundred yards down Atlantic Avenue, the ninety-ton creature was gradually refurbished. Dow’s photograph shows the decrepit pachyderm in the process of renewal, with strips of sheet metal “skin” peeling back from the steel frame. (29)
In the fall Dow began teaching a documentary-oriented photography course in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University and received word that he had been awarded an individual artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the following year. In his project proposal, he clarified his intention to photograph the commercial establishments lining older U.S. highways that still served a functional purpose but were no longer deemed important enough to warrant new commercial construction and remained roughly as they had been twenty years earlier. (30)
These highways, first established in the mid-1920s, continued to thrive through World War II and into the early 1950s, but had been supplanted by the U.S. Interstate system. They connected towns and cities and, winding through vast expanses of rural areas, offered advertisers a prime location to sell goods, services, and lifestyles to mobile consumers. Their intended, and primary, audience was the white, middleclass motorist who could afford the luxury and safety of automobile travel (see plates 17-20, 24, 25, 35-38, and 40-48). Black motorists faced a great deal of peril and uncertainty. With a few notable exceptions, including The Negro Motorist Green Book and Travelguide, Black travelers were largely ignored or excluded completely from roadside signage and the establishments they advertised. (31) The imagery that Dow encountered on many of these signs, of smiling white men and women and nuclear families, clearly reflects this bias, even if the cultural moment in which he photographed, in the immediate wake of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, was inflected by the actions of many who were challenging the heterogeneity of those earlier representations.
As Americans became mobile consumers, highways became “buyways;’ and the commercial strips that lined these roads had a profound influence on the experience of everyday life. (32) Unlike advertisements in printed media, roadside culture evolved to accommodate an aesthetics of speed, enlarging imagery and reducing text to convey simplified messages as cars drove past.(33) Compared with the billboards on the Interstate system, which was constructed with fewer access points to accommodate more vehicles traveling at higher speeds, and often set above and apart from the natural landscape, the signage along the older thoroughfares, albeit larger than life, functioned on a much more human scale. Additionally, the imagery often reflected more idiosyncratic tastes, talents, and desires, especially if the signs were handcrafted.
Dow began his NEA-funded travel in February 1973, driving around the United States in a GMC van that he bought as a shell and equipped with a bed. (34) He covered approximately forty thousand miles over the course of six months and made three extended trips through the South, West, and Midwest, with various shorter trips in and around New England. In the West and Southwest, along routes such as US 101, US 66, US 93, and US 180, he photographed the romanticized imagery of “California vaqueros” or “cowboys and Indians” that regularly appeared in billboards, neon signs, and painted murals on stores and drive-in movie theatres (plates 14-17). Originally intended to equate tourism and leisure with the pioneering efforts of early white settlers as they conquered the frontier, these purblind depictions are far removed from historically accurate accounts of the people or events to which ostensibly they allude.
Dow experimented with different aesthetic approaches as he sought to refine his vision. For several exposures made with his 8- by 10-inch camera, he used a 150 mm lens, which is a normal lens for a 4- by 5-inch camera but smaller than his camera’s 8- by 10-inch film plane, with the result that it created a vignetted image with rounded edges visible in the picture itself (plates 7, 8, 33, 43, 52, 55, and 56). For some photographs, he would isolate parts of the imagery on a sign, leaving no background visible, an effect that focuses attention on the illustrations themselves (plates 19, 24, 34-39, and 48). In other works, his vantage point is more distanced and includes environmental details that add significant meaning to the photograph. In Praying Hands on Dirt Mound, US 66, Webb City, Missouri (plate 9), for example, a hilltop sculpture of praying hands is seen hoisted atop scaffolding on a grassless knoll. At the time Dow photographed it, the sculpture, conceived by a young artist named Jack Dawson, was under construction, funded through small, local donations. By including the metal support structure, Dow emphasizes the frailty of the unfinished work, which was built to serve as a symbol of uplift during difficult times.
Eureka Springs, AR 1975
By late May of 1973, Dow had established categories he would expand upon in subsequent travels: roadside food stands, diners and cafes, religious (often evangelical Christian) symbols and exhortations, drive-in movie theatres, laundromats, vernacular and patriotic architectural ornamentation, and billboards promoting everything from public safety messages to La-Z-Boy recliners (see plates 37-39 and 41 ). The visual lexicon his photographs depict is unmistakably American in its optimistic fervor to sell goods and services, safety and salvation, and an abundance of fast food. When he traveled to Europe with his girlfriend Linda Carmeroto in August 1973, Dow had an opportunity to compare American abundance with conditions under communism in Hungary, Romania, and the former Czechoslovakia. At the recommendation of his godfather, Dow purchased a new vehicle, a Mercedes diesel, in Germany and had it shipped back to the United States. Known for its longevity and fuel efficiency, the car indeed proved to be an astute investment as a replacement for his gas-guzzling GMC van (fig. 7) during the oil crisis in the 1970s. He drove this car for the remainder of his travels, affectionately naming it “Petunia:'(35)
In many of Dow’s subjects, the passage of time is readily apparent. Often, in his views of establishments barely hanging on or completely shuttered, a sense of loss is implied in the absence of the people. Dow gravitated to these subjects from the beginning of his travels: one photograph made in 1970 (plate 61) shows an abandoned truck stop along US 61 in an unincorporated community named Number Nine in the Mississippi delta in Arkansas. The site appears as a broken assemblage of concrete slabs, defunct light fixtures, and a rusted metal sign. Though it once thrived, its skeletal armature and a sign are all that remain, ruins in desolate surroundings. Other examples include a soft-serve ice-cream stand abandoned after a spate of regional floods in Pennsylvania (plate 7) and a crinkled canvas doll sign, its surface cracked and abraded, in Missouri (plate 44). These ruins-in-the-making are haunted by specters of the individuals who supported the once flourishing communities.
The post-World War II economic boom came to an end in the early 1970s, to be followed by a decade of economic recession and stagflation, exacerbated by the oil crisis. During this period, the possibilities for earning a livelihood through meaningful work had greatly diminished. As Studs Terkel, a historian and radio broadcaster much admired by Dow, suggested, the “planned obsolescence” of people and “the things they make or sell” had taken a psychological and emotional toll on Americans, with potentially devastating human costs. “It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things;’ wrote Terkel, “that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today:’ (36) Such sentiments permeate many of Dow’s photographs, picturing as they do the fleeting nature of individual endeavor in an economy that relies on the perpetual search for newer things and bigger markets.
Dow continued to make a “subjective investigation of the American roadscape” for the next four years, aided considerably by a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 1974 but deferred for a year due to full-time teaching responsibilities. (37) He certainly felt the effect of the country’s oil crisis, which resulted in inflated gasoline prices, the federally mandated 55-mph speed limit, gas shortages, and long lines at service stations. In January 1974, he wrote to the Guggenheim Foundation to propose an alternative form of transportation, in the event that car travel proved too difficult and costly for him: “Should it seem impossible to obtain enough fuel to keep on the road my intention is to build a “photowagon” in the manner of Roger Fenton … obtaining a pulling team and setting out over the same routes as proposed:’ Lest the foundation mistake his intentions as anachronistic, he went on to clarify: “I do not intend this as any sort of return to the land …. Consistent mobility, even at a strolling pace interests me far more than an endless scramble for gas.” The letter echoed his earlier descriptions of the project he was proposing, in which he noted that his interest lay not with “those slashes of technological conformity that make up the Interstate System” but rather in traveling the older roads, where there remained a sense of “human scale” and “some sense of local and individual uniqueness and style” within mass culture. He also postulated that his venture would more often than not be a “post-mortem” search, as these unique forms of expression were rapidly deteriorating. 38 In his photographs, several subjects convey this sense of individual style and technique. Though there is humor to be found, Dow’s intentions are neither to indict nor to look down upon his subjects from some imagined, elevated sense of aesthetics or taste. His eye is respectful and sympathetic. A painted image of two smiling teenagers roller skating together, arms akimbo (plate 25), for example, is rendered without concern for accurate details or bodily proportion. The sign readily conveys feelings of joy and camaraderie promised by a visit to this roller rink in Hammond, Louisiana. A hand-painted plywood sign for a lounge in Crowley, Louisiana (plate 42), entices visitors with a drawing of a bowler hat and pool cue – symbols of class aspirations, perhaps. Astutely, the illustrators used a diamond-shaped window as a central component of the overall presentation, incorporating architectural elements into the design.
Time and again, as he expanded his visual catalogue of subjects, Dow, without passing judgment with his camera, photographed similar signs and structures in which the graphic language ranged from amateur efforts to more polished professionalism. As pictured in full-frame close-ups, the rough outline of painted gas pumps on a plywood sign along US 119 in Neon, Kentucky (plate 58), performs the same function as a slick, stylized gas station painting along US 19 in Albany, Georgia (plate 59). Both signs, Dow seems to say, equally and effectively convey their messages. The flaking and faded form of a child praying (plate 34)- a detail in a larger church sign in Eureka Springs, Arkansas (fig. 8) – speaks as powerfully about the pervasive presence of religious symbolism in the American social landscape as does the sculpture, in Phoenix, Arizona, of a colossal pair of stone hands joined in prayer (plate 31 ). Nonetheless, although Dow’s pictures avoid a judgmental cast, the willful historical misconceptions of certain roadside novelties almost speak for themselves. A stucco teepee, situated next to a fire hydrant in Canutillo, Texas (plate 55), attempts to replicate a portable shelter used by Plains Indians, but radically transfigures it as an immobile structure for the amusement of twentieth-century (white) tourists. A simulacrum so far removed from its origins, the structure, stripped and whitewashed of meaning, is repackaged as a form of touristic mythmaking.
JIM DOW: Bench Area, County Court, Harlan County Courthouse. US 421, Harlan, KY 1977
In 1976, Dow was one of twenty-four photographers selected for a commission from the Joseph E. Seagram Corporation to photograph more than eleven thousand county courthouses as part of a project to commemorate the U.S. Bicentennial. Dow worked with a specific itinerary through 1976 and early 1977, making several photographs in the South (see plate 53). Dow credits the courthouse project with making him a better architectural photographer, forcing him to find the best angles and lighting when the historically important buildings assigned to him proved less than exciting. It also required him to photograph inside the structures and to ask permission, which was not always readily granted. Until then, his photographs had focused on the world outside.
While working on the courthouse project, he continued to photograph roadside signs and signage, including a sign for the Cypress Knee Museum in Palmdale, Florida; wall paintings for a hardware store in Nashville, Tennessee, and a clothing store in Lockhart, Texas; a papier mache elephant, purportedly warning drivers not to drink and drive, along US 202 in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania; and a “Ride with Rose” gas station sign in Ruston, Louisiana (plates 32, 45, 46, 57, and 60). The black-and-white format that had served Dow continuously to this point proved disappointing in the instance of the elephant, which was painted a bright pink. It was during the courthouse project that color film had become both more affordable and more acceptable for Dow, who shifted his primary practice to color at about this time. The pictures that Dow made between 1967 and 1977 established his unique vision of the built environment, a sensibility refined by what he learned from the many people with whom he traveled and whom he met along the way. These experiences and relationships, more than any influence from contemporary art trends or prevailing discourse about the medium of photography itself, gave meaning to his photographic pursuits in those early years and the courage and confidence to embrace photography as his primary means of expression. In looking back, some fifty years later, at those photographs, one becomes aware of the sense of observing and understanding things that are less of a particular time than about the passage of time itself. Though most of the subjects Dow photographed have long since disappeared, the impetus to make one’s mark on the land through an assertion of livelihood, values, and aspiration remains. In a democratic, capitalist nation, in which economic prosperity relies on a perpetual renewal of tastes, trends, and styles, there will always be a desire to express individual agency and creativity in the landscape we inhabit. As difficult as that endeavor may be in an era of multinational corporate conglomerates that seek to monopolize consumption, it remains vital for understanding our sense of self and community.
NOTES
The epigraph is quoted from Leslie Katz, “Interview with Walker Evans,” Art in America 59, no. 2 (March/April 1971), 87.
1. Jim Dow, notes for a lecture delivered at Harvard University, ca. 1976; collection of Jim and Jacquie Dow (hereafter, Dow collection).
2. This phrase is derived from the title of the project proposal, “A Subjective Investigation of the American Roadscape,” that Dow submitted in his application for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship that he was awarded in 1974; Dow collection.
3. Dow used a 4- by 5-inch Calumet camera while at RISD, switching to an 8- by 10-inch camera around 1968. In 1972 he purchased an 8- by 10-inch Deardorff camera with the assistance of friends. Ron and Mary Jane Todd bought the apparatus for him at Altman Camera Co. in Chicago, a legendary photography supply store founded by Ralph Altman, who operated his business from 1964 until he retired in 1975.
4. The exhibition Walker Evans, on view at MoMA in 1971, included two hundred prints, ranging from well-known work made in the late 1920s and 1930s to later and lesser-known photographs. For a full press release, checklist, and installation views of the exhibition, see https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2674.
5. Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein, American Photographs, 2nd ed. (1938; repr. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962); and James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939).
6. Dow, Harvard lecture, ca. 1976.
7. According to Anne Bertrand, Evans first used the term documentary-style in an interview with Leslie Katz in 1971; see Anne Bertrand, ed., Walker Evans: The Interview with Leslie Katz (New York: Eakins Press, 2019), 7. Dow recalls reading the interview and feeling at the time that it was one of the best pieces on Evans ever written.
8. Walker Evans, lecture, delivered at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, October 29, 1971 ; see https: //deepblue.lib.umich.eduhandle/2027.42/121522. In his early views, colored as they were by the social and political climate of the 1930s, Evans dismissed the possibility of objectivity or honesty in documentary photography. Though he retained this skepticism throughout his career, he began to clarify his practice in the 1960s and early 1970s, describing his work in 1964 as lyric documentary in a lecture at Yale University and, in 1971, as documentary-style in his interview with Leslie Katz (see note 7). During this period, he also admired the liberated views of a younger generation, and particularly those of his students at Yale University, where he taught from 1964 to 1972. The social freedoms and political activism he observed in his students resonated with his own desires as a young man, even if he felt that social strictures at that time made such pursuits far less possible. For a full transcript of Evans’s lecture at Yale in 1964, including reproductions of images shown, see Jeff L. Rosenheim, Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard (Gottingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2009), 103-23. For more on Evans’s desire to relate to his students, see Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 275.
9. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1961 ); and Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
10. J. B. Jackson, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” Landscape 1, no. 1 (Spring 1951 ), 5.
11. In conversation (July 2021), Dow recalls regular meetings with faculty involved in photography and documentary film, including Robert Gardner, Len Gittleman, Alfred Guzzetti, Janet Mendelsohn, Barbara “Bobbie” Norfleet, and Richard P. Rogers. Though Jackson taught in both the Visual and Environmental Studies department and the Landscape Architecture department, he did not attend these faculty gatherings. Nonetheless, as Dow recalls, his ideas were in the air.
12. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven lzenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), xi.
13. Jim Dow, journal, March 11, 1971; Dow collection.
14. In conversation (May 2021), Dow said that his father attended Harvard Law School and worked as an estate lawyer. His mother, who had a master’s degree from UC Berkeley, earned a PhD in sociology from Radcliffe in 1934; she stopped working when her son was born.
15. One of Dow’s high school friends was James Bond, the younger brother of the civil rights activist Julian Bond and the son of the historian, activist, and educator Horace Mann Bond. James, who, among other achievements, later served as a councilman in Atlanta, traveled with Jim on his first road trip to the South. For more about the significance of this trip, see the contribution “When the Present Becomes a Past” in this volume.
16. In conversation (May 2021 ), Dow recalls that Callahan fought “tooth and nail” with other faculty members to have Dow admitted into the graduate program, which rarely accepted students who had attended RISD as undergraduates.
17. Callahan’s connections with students endured long after graduation. In March 1972, four years after Dow had earned his master of fine arts degree, Harry and his wife Eleanor hosted a gathering of students, alumni, and faculty at their home in Providence after a lecture by Frederick Sommer. After several minutes of animated conversation, Callahan said to Dow: “I really love to see your intensity, your enthusiasm for whatever it might be at the moment: photo, Walker Evans, distance running. I don’t worry about you, but I certainly did” (Dow, journal, March 15 and 16, 1972).
18. After the death of his mother, Dow spent a great deal of time caring for his ailing father in Belmont while simultaneously completing his graduate coursework (Dow, conversation, July 2021 ).
19. As an undergraduate, Dow first encountered Roth, then a part-time instructor at both RISO and Yale, when he was invited by Malcolm Grear to give design assignments to his students (Dow, conversation, May 2021 ). Roth’s comment about Evans is also reproduced in American Studies: Photographs by Jim Dow (Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2011 ), 119.
20. Dow, conversation, May 2021.
21. Bunnell’s commentary was both robust and detailed: “I have taken the liberty of being rather ruthless with corrections to you [sic] manuscript. Though it looks as though blood were spilled on the pages, please understand that I took this time in the mood of deep interest in what you are doing and the concern that it be done in the finest possible manner. Thus greater credit will be reflected on yourself and in another way on Walker” (Peter Bunnell to Dow, letter, June 7, 1968; Dow collection). Dow eventually abandoned the written part of his thesis, which was optional, and instead submitted a portfolio of prints, a requirement for graduation.
22. In his first attempt at printing Evans’s negatives, Dow emulated the deep contrasts typical of Harry Callahan’s work. Szarkowski rejected this approach, and Robert Richfield, a colleague at RISO, suggested the use of the developer Amidol in conjunction with a softer grade of paper approximating the type preferred by Evans in the 1930s. With a bit of experimentation this combination worked to resemble more closely the appearance of Evans’s prints (Dow, conversation, May 2021).
23. Dow had a difficult time with Evans’s self-proclaimed sexism and the dismissive manner in which he spoke about women. Belinda Rathbone, Evans’s biographer, mentioned his regular attractions to younger women, reciprocated and otherwise, during his later years; see Rathbone, Walker Evans, 280-308.
24. Dow, Harvard lecture, ca. 1976.
25. Dow to John Dials, Inspector, First District, Washington, D.C., letter, January 11, 1972 (Dow collection).
26. The Boston Globe also published Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” a popular, nationally syndicated cartoon that ran from 1949 to 1975 and detailed the misadventures of an opossum and his friends in the Okefenokee swamp. The political subtext of Kelly’s drawings, in which he took aim at McCarthyism, communism, segregation, and the Vietnam War, often roused the ire of censors, who suppressed certain comic strips or moved them to the editorial pages.
27. Dow, journal, March 30, 1970 (Dow collection).
28. In the first half of 1972, Dow worried that he had made only fifteen pictures in the past two and a half years and wondered whether his artistic aspirations were merely “self-delusions.” Yet the act of constantly looking, even without picture taking, seemed worthy. “Brood and plot as I might, I can see no other way.” (Dow, typewritten statement, February 1972; Dow collection).
29. The Elephant Bazaar was the brainchild of James V. Lafferty, a speculator in real estate, who took out a seventeen-year patent to create animal-shaped buildings and had the creature constructed to attract tourists and lure prospective property owners. The structure was sold in 1887 to Anton Gertzen of Philadelphia (whose daughter nicknamed the elephant “Lucy”), and it remained in the family until around 1970, serving, variously, as a restaurant, office, and vacation rental (though never actually a hotel) until it fell into disrepair in the 1960s; see https://weirdnj.com/stories/lucy-the-elephant/.
30. Dow, application for grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1972 (Dow collection).
31. The Green Book, as it came to be known later, was begun by Victor H. Green, a travel agent in New York. Inspired by Green’s example, William H. “Billy” Butler, a former jazz musician, began the Travelguide. For more on the significance of these two publications and the impact of race relations on the expansion of modern American road travel, see Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 115-16.
32. For a detailed and fascinating study of this subject, see Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004).
33. Motor speeds steadily increased between the mid-1920s and the 1930s, from thirty-five miles per hour to fifty-five miles per hour; ibid. 66.
34. The vehicle functioned as a more rustic version, perhaps, of the truck named “Rocinante” and fitted out like a camper, in which John Steinbeck traveled, with his dog, across the United States “in search of America’.’ He later chronicled these journeys in the best-selling, semifictional memoir Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Viking, 1961), a book Dow had read and enjoyed.
35. “Petunia” would survive through three coats of paint and over three hundred and fifty thousand miles (Dow, conversation, May 2021 ).
36. Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon, 1974), xviii.
37. Dow began his first full-time teaching appointment at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the fall of 1 973. Before this appointment, he had taught at Harvard beginning in the fall of 1972, at the Vancouver School of Art in British Columbia as apart-time photography instructor in the summer of 1972, and-filling in for Murray Riss, a friend and colleague at RISD – for several weeks at the Memphis Academy of Art in Tennessee. His experiences in Vancouver and in Memphis inspired Dow to think of teaching as a career.
38. Dow to Guggenheim Foundation, letter, January 25, 1974 (draft) (Dow collection). Roger Fenton (1819-1869) was a British photographer who traveled in 1855 to cover the Crimean War. He constructed a horsedrawn “photographic van” to carry his equipment, serve as a darkroom, and provide accommodation.
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past. (1)
– Berenice Abbott
I think we’re living in the good old days. (2)
– Merle Haggard
Someone once told me that a crowbar, a hacksaw, and a U-Haul trailer, employed to collect physically rather than visually, would better serve my purposes. Photographers always risk stealing aspects of a subject, but outright theft is unacceptable. I only want to take pictures. Many of the signs and other subjects in the photographs exist somewhere between utility and artifact, and the resulting image changes them into a cultural shard, part of a past, preserved as a document. The specter of nostalgia always hovers nearby, attended by another – irony – making picture-taking a balancing act, a constant effort to keep them both at bay. The pictures reproduced here come from my first ten years of photographing, and it seems to me they have become less objects of nostalgia and now function more as fragments of histories, the subjects themselves prevailing over memories. Perhaps distance has helped to achieve that goal.
This book and exhibition offer me an opportunity to look back at a formative time through the double lenses of memory and hindsight. Although my intent is objectivity, subjectivity is certain. The recollections are episodic; I found myself exploring a few features of the times, the work, and my experiences, and all the parts tended to seep into one another.
An Education through Emulation
Everybody’s seen a diner and knows what one looks like. Why bother to take any more pictures of them? (3)
– Duane Michals
Through others we become ourselves … (4)
– Lev S. Vygotsky
Most of us in the graduate photography program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) under Harry Callahan had studied or done other things beforehand: architecture, business school, 1960s campus activism, applied chemistry, journalism. One person wrote comic punch lines for Hallmark greeting cards; another had been a photographer for the only newspaper in Mississippi that supported the civil rights movement. Harry’s reputation was what drew us to the program, and his examples as artist and mentor were the catalysts for us. My peers were much further along in their development as photographers. I had always thought of photography in illustrative terms, and my time as a design student solidified that notion. Images were secondary to text that was intended to sway a person to favor a product, idea, or story. Now I was surrounded by people who saw photographs as extensions of their internal, thinking selves. Trying to catch up, I employed different approaches and explored a variety of subjects: streets, buildings, some portraits. I even took pictures for the yearbook.
Late in the fall of 1965 I met Walker Evans. I had no idea who he was or anything about his work. His book American Photographs completely changed the way I thought about photography. ( 5) The pictures were descriptive, literate, and distinct. They could be read slowly; information was packed into every square inch. They were intense but not dramatic. Rigorous in their making, they demanded attentive scrutiny (fig. 9). It was clear that I had a template for my education through a classic method: at first emulate, then lease the space, and ultimately own the process, until taking pictures was no longer a reenactment (fig. 10). Harry gave me a 4- by 5-inch view camera from the stockroom. He said I could keep it to use all the time. Through carelessness I managed to get it stolen. He said to use the insurance replacement and carry on.
I began to travel when I could. I went to new, unfamiliar places, looking for subjects that struck a chord of familiarity. I was learning, figuring out what was me and what was someone else. I loved Harry, but I didn’t want to be as minimal. I admired Aaron Siskind, but I wasn’t painterly or calligraphic. Berenice Abbott and Evelyn Hofer were huge favorites, but I wasn’t trying to describe a particular place such as New York or London. I was amazed by the photographs made by my peers, particularly John McWilliams, Linda Connor, Bart Parker, and Emmet Gowin, but theirs weren’t the chords I wanted to strike.
After graduating I bought a larger view camera, which allowed me more freedom to use the full range of the mechanisms to adjust perspective and focus. I began to accumulate different lenses, coming to understand that I could achieve a kind of respectful middle distance, neither so close as to eliminate context nor so far away as to complicate with excess information. Done carefully, the framing of the picture gave fresh life to what was in front of the camera and, as time went on, I was no longer replicating anyone.
The Extended Monologue of Slow Photography
People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land … things that were a little bit familiar but not things you feel nostalgic about. Hot dogs and typewriters-generic things people sort of recognize. (6)
-James Rosenquist
Wherever the real imposes itself, it tends to dissipate the fogs of irony. (7)
– Robert Pogue Harrison
R – Rear of Screen, Moonlite Theater. long version #2. US 11, Abingdon, VA 1998
My interest in photographing and photography has never been driven by an assumption that the present is somehow damaged goods and the past a more honest ideal. Nor is it to assume my superiority to the subject by employing any form of “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” irony. I’ve always done straightforward, sharp-focus, very slow photography. Although I don’t take pictures of people, I constantly interact with people. Conversations can be long, exposures often take minutes, and getting permission and setting up also require time. One’s thinking about the image itself frequently evolves during the process, even while the shutter is open. A car might pull up and park, a person walk through and sit down, the light can change, all potentially adding to or detracting from the final picture. Or, on revisiting a site (the Moonlite Theatre in Virginia, for example), I might find that the subject itself has changed; see fig. 11 (dated 1975), plate 28 (1977), and fig. 12 ( 1998)- each time different yet related.
Taking a picture is much like listening to an extended monologue or an in-depth interview. Nearly every weeknight when I was in art school I listened to a late-night talk show, an hours-long monologue by Jean Shepherd on WOR in New York City. Five nights a week he told stories and ruminated at length about ordinary lives and events that took place during his childhood in and around a gritty exurb of Chicago. Or did they? It was never clear. He focused on “the trivia of life, including the bric-a-brac of popular culture and mass-produced junk … the stuff worth examining.” (8)
I’d heard Studs Terkel’s radio show many times and, when I first encountered his book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, I read it from cover to cover. (9) His respectful, nonjudgmental approach, eliciting a torrentof every possible emotion from the subjects, was perfect. His interviews told tough truths about work, spoken without gloss. Carolyn Kellogg observed, “Terkel listens but he is neither transparent (an extension of tape recorder and lens) nor intrusive.” (10) The way the subject’s voice materialized through these filters always struck me as just right.
Terry Gross started on the radio in 1975, hosting Fresh Air on a local Philadelphia station. Through multiple visits to the area, I became a distanced fan. By 1984 she was on National Public Radio stations across the country, and I would tune in regularly at home and whenever possible on the road. Much like Terkel, she has been praised for her consummate skill in giving the subject voice through thoughtful, patient questions, waiting while they form a response. Gross has said, “I try not to make it about me …. I try to use my experiences to help me understand my guests’ experiences, but not to take anything away from them …. I try not to equate the interview with real life … (11)
Shepherd, Terkel, and Gross were familiar, friendly, almost daily presences during the time I was finding my own voice and approach in a different but parallel medium – one in which, at least in the case of Walker Evans, “the persona of the taker is masked by the subject.” (12) I wanted that for myself.
The First Decade and My First Trip South
People have long used decades to frame the past. Think of how potent “the 60s” has been. But the artificiality of the exercise means that the more you look at a decade, the more complicated it seems. A decade is experienced in an infinity of ways. It is made up of fragments. It blurs at the edges with other decades. Ghosts of previous ones live on within it, and premonitions of those to come gradually infiltrate it. (13)
– Andy Beckett
The pictures in this book were made on numerous trips around and across the United States between 1967 and 1 977, a ten-year span not quite in alignment with the oft-disparaged 1970s but close enough. Commencing with the later unfulfilled hopefulness engendered by the civil rights movement and the Great Society legislation, the period came to be characterized by stagflation and gas lines. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a run-up to the Awful 80s of Margaret Thatcher (the Iron Lady), Ronald Regan (the Great Communicator), “Just Say No;’ the beginning of the end for Pax Americana, and, in due course, burgeoning Boomer self-involvement.
It would be self-serving to think my path amounted to plain good fortune; sheltered as I was, I knew my head start made luck more likely. My parents loved books and music, but they weren’t visually inclined. They questioned art school, but, as I became more committed, their support was complete; I even inherited my childhood home. I didn’t get drafted and was able to spend seven years in art school. I made close friends who helped me in myriad ways. I switched majors from graphic design to photography. I graduated without debt. I could afford to do an internship and then take part-time teaching jobs that soon became full time, continuing for more than forty years with semesters off and support to travel. During that decade, between 1967 and 1977, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship and worked for the Seagram Corporation’s Bicentennial project photographing courthouses. I crisscrossed the country in two different cars and a van six times and made countless smaller, east-west and north-south journeys. Beginning in 1972 I started running ten miles a day, even doing marathons.
But my “decade” really started with my first trip to the South, considerably earlier, in 1962, not as a photographer but as a teenager, in the company of two other young guys. All of us were named James but two of us preferred Jim. I was from suburban Boston, the other Jim from Indianapolis, and James from Atlanta. We went to a progressive school, although, in our passion for sports, for example, we were more mainstream than many of our classmates. Two of us were white, one Black, and my car had Massachusetts plates. Taking turns, we drove straight through from Boston via Washington, D.C., to Georgia, wary of being stopped, harassed, or worse. In the end, our trip went without any overt incidents. As we drove through D.C. at night, I remember lying in the back seat, looking at the Washington Monument all lit up, and then waking up in North Carolina on the old US 301 with fume-belching semis, fancy cars full of tourists, wobbling trucks overladen with tree trunks, and wagons drawn by mules. There was cotton growing in fields, BBQ shacks along the road, “Jesus is Coming” signs, and soon, the then new, over-the-top “South of the Border” tourist trap, where none of us could buy beer or fireworks because of our age and the restaurants and motels were inaccessible to James because of his race.
Perhaps six hours later we got to Atlanta, driving by Ponce de Leon Park, where the minor-league baseball team, the Atlanta Crackers, was about to start a game. I remember the stadium lights glowing in the late spring dusk and a gigantic Sears warehouse looming over the street. Then, a few blocks on, we passed the Varsity Drive-In with its neon signs erupting and, not much later, arrived at James’s parents’ house, where we were welcomed with Cokes, iced tea, and supper. Shortly after our arrival, James’s older brother and sister drove up, fresh from a trip through Alabama and Mississippi, where they had been registering voters for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I think we were still drinking and eating when they told us about the fires, threats, bombings, and shootings: violence deliberately intended to prevent Black people from getting to the polls. I haven’t thought about anything culturally, personally, or politically in the same way since.
James’s father, Horace Mann Bond, was a prominent college president, historian, and social scientist. His mother, Julia Agnes Washington Bond, served as “first lady” at the various universities and was a librarian by profession. His brother was Julian Bond, a civil rights leader, politician, and educator. His sister Jane became a noted civil rights attorney and law professor. James himself later served on the Atlanta City Council, ran the Atlanta Media Project, funded by the NAACP to monitor coverage of minorities, and helped produce The American Music Show on local cable TV. Their intense, graphic stories made it clear that I was in the presence of extraordinary people, who were doing things that were beyond anything I knew about until that moment.
I have often recalled that first trip South and my visit to the Bond family. Recently, reading an editorial by Jonathan Capehart titled “Being Black in America Is Exhausting;’ I remembered it again. Written in April 2021, the whole piece is as powerful as the stories told in the Bonds’ dining room almost sixty years ago. One paragraph has resonated ever since:
“You know how you might stop and admire a nice house? I don’t do that. My admiration is done on the move. You know how you might take a look inside a sweet car parked on the street? I look from a distance. And, as I consider buying a car, my interior color selection will hue toward tan. The better for the police to see inside in case I get stopped for driving a nice car or whatever, which is why my dream of driving across country will remain a dream.”(14)
A Possibly Perfect Road
The American travelling to work by car was apt to be travelling alone, probably listening to his radio. … The improved American highway … system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway, which was identified only by a highway number, graded, and landscaped and fenced, with not so much as a stoplight to interrupt his passage, he had no contact with the towns he bypassed. If he stopped for food or petrol, he was served no local fare or local fuel. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as
the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims. (15)
– Daniel J. Boorstin
I’ve seen every highway in the United States by now, and they all look alike to me. (16)
– Loretta Lynn
I never traveled around the United States to find myself. I went to find people, places, and things I didn’t know about. Leaving familiar confines is an outward-facing process best done by car on older two- or three lane roads, stopping, looking, and listening every step of the way. From the first, my plan was to travel by US- and state-numbered highways, getting on Interstates only when unavoidable. The result has been an encyclopedic roll call of a number of routes: US 2, 6, 11, 20, 41, 51, 61, 62, 80, 90, 99 (old), 11, 9, and 301 are favorites (fig. 13). Some go north to south, others east to west, and a few run diagonally. Many of them follow old Native American trails or nineteenth-century rail lines, often twisting and rambling, dictated by river bends, mountain ranges, politics, even serendipity.
These roads and countless others have been a rich and continual source for pictures, and the most fruitful has been US 11, which is unique in that it connects Montreal and New Orleans, the two major centers of French cultural influence on the continent. One end, on the northern shore of Lake Champlain, is marked by a border station designed as a Georgian revival building and leading into Canada; the other is a nondescript junction with US 90 at the city limits of New Orleans East, close to a foreclosed tourist trap called the Fisherman’s Castle, on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. US 11 often runs parallel to the Interstates that have supplanted it, at times so close you can hear the diesel engines groan when the semis downshift. The small road frequently wraps around the big one, like asphalt ivy that can extend for miles. It splits in two in Tennessee. At times it hops onto the larger road with little warning, spilling the unwary driver into the fast lane. It passes former steel mills, sites of Civil War skirmishes and battles, not a few Confederate statues (though fewer with each trip), and a state park named Hungry Mother, wraps around Lookout Mountain, encounters a natural bridge, runs above caverns, under a Singing Tower and hard by military camps and schools, defunct coal mines, wildlife refuges, airports, universities, rivers, lakes, and waterparks. There are towns and cities with evocative names that trip off the tongue when read aloud: Slidell, Petal, Toomsuba, Cuba, Tuscaloosa, Chattanooga, Sweetwater, Trussville, Bean Station, Pulaski (twice), Shamokin Dam, Scranton, Marathon, Potsdam. The natural surroundings can be stunningly beautiful in the Shenandoah Valley, gray and cold north of Syracuse, hot, scratchy, and muggy in the piney forests in southeastern Mississippi, every mile to be taken in slowly and savored.
At last count I’ve driven up and down US 11, in full or in part, more than ten times over half a century. The old two-lane, three-lane, sometimes four-lane highway has proven a bonanza. In the medium-sized and smaller cities and towns the road itself is a Main Street with no bypass or alternate. It is a horizontal, visual strip mine sometimes running for a mile or two, described as part of “car-oriented, extended downtowns. (17) I’ve taken more than seventy different pictures along or hard by the right-of-way. Among the subjects are six minor league baseball parks and five drive-in movie theatres. There are restaurants that serve breakfast, BBQ, pizza, and hot dogs. There are signs for coffee, Dr. Pepper, parking, motels, hamburgers, and political candidates. There is the Big Pencil, an arrow into the front of a stationery store. There are grocery stores, beer and juke joints, a defunct guitar shop, and abandoned gas stations. There are windows for a beauty salon, shoe repair, dance studio, and lunch. And there is a pawnshop, a “sno-ball” stand, and a taco truck. Four of them are reproduced in this book: plates 3, 28, 29, and 47.
Coda: Walker Evans and Susan Sontag
We are overly literary, really, although I am very much drawn to literature; but I cannot recommend that as an approach, and I keep trying to tear it down because words are abstract things and feeling in a sense has been abstracted from them. (18)
– Walker Evans
Every writer has to reach and is constantly aware of how basically it comes from inside; it all has to be transformed in the homemade laboratory that you have got in your guts and your brain. Whereas, for the photographer, the world is really there; it is an incredible thing, it is all interesting and in fact, more interesting when seen through the camera than when seen with the naked eye or with real sight. (19)
-Susan Sontag
Right – PETER HUJAR: Susan Sontag. 1975
In 1975 I had the chance to attend two different lectures, one by Walker Evans, the other by Susan Sontag. Hearing them speak served to bookend for me the entire gamut of photography and to offer multiple ideas thathave stayed with me since and continue to inform my approach to working and teaching. I worked for Walker Evans from late 1969 to late 1971, preparing and printing negatives that had been selected by John Szarkowski for Evans’s retrospective exhibition in 1971 at the MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was an unpaid internship taken up in the hope that I would learn the craft with an eye toward future employment as a custom printer. In the end I decided to pursue teaching instead and, thanks to recommendations from the two of them, got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974. Beyond that, the experience – because Evans and I were at completely different places in our lives-taught me a great life lesson about the unfairness of younger people’s expecting an older person to conform to their callow expectations. It has proven to be a useful lesson, standing me in good stead as the times and tables have shifted.
Walker Evans gave what was to be his last talk in a seminar, “Lives Examined,” at Radcliffe College on April 8, 1975 (fig. 14). The next day he returned to New Haven, suffered a stroke in the night, and died in the early hours of April 10. Eleven days later, Susan Sontag spoke at Wellesley College, as part of a symposium titled “Photography within the Humanities.” By then she had written two novels and several major essays, among them “Notes on Camp,” and traveled to Hanoi. She also had published five of the six articles in the New York Review of Books that would form On Photography, the book that changed the way many people looked at the medium (fig. 15). (20)
When I heard Evans speak that night in Cambridge, I was standing well at the back of the room but, although by then I knew him well, I did not approach him. He had a close support group, who were far better at helping him. When I heard Sontag speak in the auditorium at Wellesley, I had run the Boston Marathon that morning. The place was packed, with no seats left, and I was surprised at how comfortably I was able to sit cross-legged on the floor. I attribute it to being mesmerized. Although they spoke a common language, the words they chose, the rhythms of their pronunciation, the tone and timbre of their voices, and the way they presented ideas came from decidedly different decades. At once intellectual and clubbable, Evans spoke in a luxuriant Upper East Side drawl, with a slight staccato hitch (not quite a stammer) in his voice. Sontag spoke seamlessly, with a contemporary clarity and little rhetorical affect.
Evans was careful to frame himself in relation to the present while speaking with authority on a long, significant past. Biographers have said that his last years were lonely and that he certainly relished the attention and company of younger people. Presentations in his later years were conversational, and he often used questions to spur his thought process. Frail and seated by the podium, he was masterful. His answers were fascinating as he retrospectively scrolled over nearly half a century as an artist. He was, in turn, philosophical, opinionated, historical, wistful, autobiographical, and always charming in a slightly prickly way. References to writers were constant and accompanied with running evaluations, often critical, about their accomplishments. He talked at length about the ruptures of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, how they exposed the brutality and inequity of society in the 1930s. He tied the time to that of the audience, alluding to the upheavals of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate without mentioning them. He made references to the students’ desire for honesty across the board, even addressing privilege and his concept of accompanying responsibility. Many of Evans’s most frequently quoted comments have come from this lecture.
Susan Sontag’s presentation wasn’t biographical. She was proposing a point of view, not detailing a life, although she did frame her interest in photography through a lens of personal compulsion. As part of a broader, multiday symposium that included five photographers and filmmakers, two sociologists, a curator, and a picture editor, she was clearly building a case. (21) In the moment she radiated prescience. The first public intellectual in the United States to pay attention to the meaning and impact of photography, she broke fresh ground with each point she made. Just over forty years old, vigorous of voice and presence, she dominated the room. Her son, David Rieff, once observed that “she was as uncomfortable with her body as she was serene about her mind.” (22) As a public performer she projected the complete opposite. Only six months after her appearance at Wellesley, she would receive a diagnosis that she had six months to live. She researched, challenged, battled, and suffered, recovering from her affliction while writing Illness as Metaphor with the same intense insight she brought to photography. (23)
Each was radical for the time and posed totally different questions. Evans insisted on the autonomy of the artist; individual ideas, the importance of interests and feelings. While his chosen subjects were mostly vernacular, and he professed a personal brand of nonaligned democracy, he elevated artists to a status of visual aristocracy, operating above any number of mortal concerns. He “had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past” (24) and, late in life, had assembled an extensive collection of the actual signs, which he and accomplices had liberated from their moorings.
Sontag, by contrast, questioned the acquisitive nature of photography, holding that to amass images by taking, collecting, owning, or distributing them was a form of domination and, ultimately, control. “The final reason for needing to photograph everything lies in the logic of consumption itself.” (25 ) Although appreciating how aesthetically extraordinary a wonderful photograph could be, she stressed the medium’s increasing influence on human perception and behavior. My father always emphasized what he called “the considered life,” meaning, in Socratic terms, the importance of examining the ramifications of everything one does. Sontag proposed a similar scrutiny for photography, and her ideas stuck, influencing everything I have done since.
At that time Evans was familiar and Sontag seemed progressive. Both their positions were important. I started art school with suspicion. I left feeling I had found my calling. In the bargain of becoming an artist, I didn’t much question all the ramifications of photography. We all wanted to be artists following our personal compasses. My coming to know Walker Evans proposed a road forward in terms of subject, style, and method; my hearing Susan Sontag helped me examine the route.
Thank You from the Road
Cutoff, LA c.1978
My “first decade” of travel roughly coincided with the loss of my parents, both of whom were thoroughly supportive of my desire to be an artist after some initial, understandable hesitancy. It ended with my meeting the love of my life, Jacqueline Strasburger (fig. 16), with whom I have been lucky enough to share everything including being parents to Roy and Alex Dow, two wonderful children and now friends and sometimes colleagues on the road. I drove over a hundred and fifty thousand miles in three vehicles – “Otis;” a beige VW hatchback; a big yellow GMC van, called just that; and “Petunia;” a Mercedes diesel, first beige, then yellow. They were constant and reliable, if demanding, companions.
But I also traveled with people, and many hosted me as I passed through, often more than once. Their advice, company, help, ideas, insights, kindness, suggestions, and understanding were unfailingly generous and invaluable. I wish to thank them individually for all of the above and for marvelous memories: John Benson, Jim Biddle, Horace Mann Bond, James Bond, Tony Braid, Annette Shaw Breukleman, Jim Breukleman, Bill Burke, Linda Carmeroto, Amos Chan, Valorie Fisher, Edith Gowin, Emmet Gowin, Russell Hart, Allen Hess, Judson Hill, Marc Hurlburt, Moria Thompson Kumer, Marcia MacDonald, Nancy Marshall, John McWilliams, Sybil McWilliams, Thomas O’Connell, Elaine O’Neil, Richard Pare, Bart Parker, Yvonne Parker, Michael Peavy, Sheila Pinkie, Emilia Pitre, Glen Pitre, Holland Pitre, Loulan Pitre, Loulan Pitre, Jr., Wayne Pitre, Walter Rabetz, Helen Richfield, Robert Richfield, Ellie Riss, Murray Riss, Patrice Rodi, Ed Sievers, Shellburne Thurber, Mary Jane Todd, Ron Todd, Michael Vorhees, Tom Walther, Steve Weisberg, and Sean Wilkinson, as well as three kittens, Dardanelle, Frank, and Iuka, who, in 1976, accompanied me for a week and a half from central Alabama to Boston.
Notes
1. Julia Van Haaften, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography (New York: Norton, 2018),449.
2. Merle Haggard, “I Think We’re Living in the Good Old Days,” track 5 on Country Pride, GEMA, CDL-57420, 1991, compact disc.
3. Duane Michals, lecture, title unrecorded, delivered at UCLA or Cal State Northridge, March 1975.
4. L. S. Vygotsky, “The Genesis of Higher Mental Functions;” in The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, ed. R. Reiber (New York: Plenum, 1987), 10.
5. Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein, American Photographs, 2nd ed. (1938; repr. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962).
6. Courtney Jordan, “Q and A: James Rosenquist,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2007; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/q-and-a-james-rosenquist-342387/.
7. Quoted in Christy Wampole, “How to Live Without Irony,” The Opinionator (blog), New York Times, November 17, 2012; https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11 /17/how-to-live-without-irony/.
8. Lee Vinse, “Betrayal: Jean Shepherd and ‘A Christmas Story,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 21, 2020; https ://www.lareviewofbooks.org/ article/betrayal-jean-shepherd-and-a-christmas-story/.
9. Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
10. Carolyn Kellogg, ‘”Working’ on Labor Day with Studs Terkel,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2013; https:/ /www.latimes.com/books/la-xpm-2013-sep-02-la-et-jc-working-on-labor-day-with-studs-terkel-20130830-story.html.
11. Susan Burton, “Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up,” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 2015; https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/terry-gross-and-the-art-of-opening-up.html.
12. Cindi Di Marzo, “On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag,” Studio International, July 27, 2006; https:/ /www. studio international.com/index.php/on-photography-a-tribute-to-susan-sontag.
13. Andy Beckett, “The Age of Perpetual Crisis: How the 2010s Disrupted Everything but Resolved Nothing,” The Guardian, December 17, 2019; https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/17/decade-of-perpetual-crisis-2010s-disrupted-everything-but-resolved-nothing.
14. Jonathan Capehart, “Being Black in America Is Exhausting,” Washington Post, April 17, 2021; https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/17/being-black-america-is-exhausting/.
15. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Exploring Spirit: America and the World Experience (New York: Random House,1976). For the genesis of his ideas, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/the-reith lectures/transcripts/1970/.
16. Loretta Lynn and George Vecsey, Coal Miner’s Daughter (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), xii.
17. Addison Del Mastro, “New Urbanism: Drive Like It’s 1950 on U.S. Route 11,” American Conservative,November 27, 2020; https://www.theamerican conservative.com/urbs/ drive-like-its-1 950-on-u-s-route-11 /.
18. Walker Evans, “Walker Evans Reflects on His Life and Work,” New Republic, July 19, 2013; see https://newrepublic.com/article/113950/walker-evans-harvard -address.
19. Susan Sontag, “Speech and Interview at Wellesley College (1975),” in Photography within the Humanities, edited by Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy Snyder MacNeil (Danbury, N.H.: Addison House, 1977), 113.
20. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1977), 179. This publication includes articles that, in aslightly different form, first appeared in the New York Review of Books, where I had read them, in 1973 and 1974, before I heard Sontag speak at Wellesley.
21. The symposium “Photography within the Humanities” took place at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in April 1975. The participants, each of whom spent a day on campus, were, in order of their appearance: John Morris, the former picture editor, N.Y.T. Pictures, New York Times News Service (April 7); Paul Schuster Taylor, the economist and co-author, with Dorothea Lange, of An American Exodus (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939) (April 9); Gjon Mili, a photographer forLife magazine (April 11 ); Robert Frank, the photographer and filmmaker (April 14); Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker (April 15); John Szarkowski, the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (April 16); W. Eugene Smith, the documentary photographer known for his photo-essays (April 18); Susan Sontag, the writer, critic, and filmmaker (April 21 ); Irving Penn, the fashion and portrait photographer (April 23); and Robert Coles, an author and research psychiatrist at Harvard University. The talks were published in Janis and MacNeil, eds., Photography within the Humanities.
22. Quoted in Leslie Jamison, “The Remaking of Susan Sontag;’ review of Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser, New Republic, September 12, 2019; https ://newrepublic.com/article/154988/remaking-susan-sontag-benjamin-moser-book-review.
23. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).
24. Department of Photographs, “Walker Evans (1903-1975),” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art (website), October 2004; http ://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd evan. html.
25. Sontag, On Photography, 179.
Baseball is a curious game to watch. On the one hand, it can be the perfect spectator sport in that the pitcher has to throw the ball over the plate, ensuring that the ball will be put into play, so neither team is able to stall to kill the game. Conversely, most of the time nothing much happens until it does at which point, suddenly, everything shifts. For fans, a contest can change with one batter from being a pleasant background for conversation and cold beer on a warm summer evening to a tension-filled, attention-grabbing drama. This aerobic rhythm is at the core of what is wonderful about it.
In a month’s time two of the sport’s most storied and successful teams, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees will play a pair of matches at West Ham United’s London Stadium, part of Major League Baseball’s campaign to engage international audiences. By the time the two clubs arrive they will have completed less than 1/3rd of their schedule of 162 matches and likely will have risen to the top of the American League East table.
When I was a kid in the 50’s and 60’s Boston’s American League baseball team was a punching bag for almost everyone, particularly the Yankees who like Barcelona, Real Madrid or Manchester City in today’s football, would raid teams for their best players and quasi-maintained a second major-league franchise, the Kansas City Athletics as a development squad. Boston’s National League team, the Braves, gave up and moved to Milwaukee in 1954.
For the Red Sox the equation changed in 1967, the Year of The Impossible Dream, when the perennial underachievers overachieved and went all the way to the seventh and deciding game of the admittedly myopically named World Series, one match short of the championship. A significant aspect of this new success was that the Sox, the last team in all of big-league baseball to sign athletes of colour, employed three very good African American players in their daily line-up as well as a fourth, their most important relief pitcher, who appeared in all the close games.
With this, the rivalry with the Yankees rekindled the long held but dormant enmity on both sides. This had originated in 1920 when the then upstart, parvenu New Yorkers (owned by a beer mogul, “fawh gawd’s sake!”) pinched Red Sox star Babe Ruth for $125,000, initiating the legendary “Curse of The Bambino” haunting the team for decades. In the minds of most Boston fans the Yankees inspire a noxious mixture of fear, loathing, and envy, albeit much of it grounded in the collective, proudly held but passive/aggressive inferiority complex that New Englanders generally display towards all things New York.
I became a West Ham United fan in 1980 when I went to my first match at Upton Park and found the club parallel to the Red Sox in myriad ways. For starters, both played in classic old stadiums and had long histories of flattering to deceive. As a result, I decided to photograph football grounds and one of the first was at Hammers. I subsequently have returned to Green Street five times over the years, as well as over 40 other venues across all the divisions and his spurred me to photograph baseball parks throughout the United States and Canada.
Since the late 1950s the vast majority of professional baseball games have been played at night. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of watching a game in person is the slow, subtle shift from bright sunlight to fully floodlit evening, with the accompanying magic of the atmospheric and colour changes. There is nothing more visually delightful than a sunset or moonrise over an advert-laden outfield fence. When I was photographing many of the lower division parks, I would buy an extra seat for my tripod and wooden view camera and wait. It was as close as I’ve ever been to being a nature photographer.
Most big-time sporting venues are now overly determined, even florid architectural statements. The great charm of the older ones, like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs, lies in their out-of-date functionality. Just like Upton Park until Hammers got the achievement bug and moved house to that big bowl on the edge of a shopping mall. The older baseball parks and football grounds were built in the midst of the neighbourhoods they represented and were often configured to fit between surrounding streets, railroad tracks and factories, giving them an eccentric shape, as with the Green Monster, the short left-field wall at Fenway or the old East Stand and Chicken Run at West Ham that served as a roof over tiny Priory Road behind it.
Both versions of football, U.S., and world, are games suited for television while baseball, like cricket, is best presented on the radio. The great announcers, like John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman (Yankees) and Joe Castiglione (Red Sox) become background accompanists to the full gamut of summer activities. Back in the day you could catch their legendary predecessors’ often poetic narrations wafting out of open windows when walking down the block or padding along the beach. It still happens. If the London Stadium matches are audio streamed with any of the aforementioned doing the call, listen, it’s worth it.
I have always photographed architecture in an informal, vernacular sense, from neon signs to football grounds. But when the subject of the private associations, clubs and libraries of New York City was presented as an opportunity, I soon found out that they had never been documented in any consistent fashion. I took this as a challenge and, almost immediately, came to realize that these supposedly stuffy, formal places were as idiosyncratically fascinating as anything I might encounter along the side of the road.
Some of the clubs depicted here are formed around birthright, old school ties and that enduring trinity: gender, religious affiliation, and sports. Others focus on dogs, first editions of books and stamps or derring-do in faraway places. There are associations for people in the arts, letters and the law and private libraries for quiet research and tasteful cultural events.
The original clubs were semi-sober places for young well-to-do men, freshly moved to Gotham and on the way up, to congregate and network in the mid-19th century. Their female counterparts were formed at the turn of the 20th century. The Cosmopolitan, one of the earliest, counted Eleanor Roosevelt, the writers Pearl Buck and Willa Cather, and anthropologist Margaret Mead among its members. Bowing, often reluctantly, to social pressure and legal decree, today only two large clubs fail to admit women. The rest reflect current mores and the inadequacies of metropolitan institutions across the board: overwhelmingly white in a city that is less than 50 per cent so, with an African American population a quarter of the whole.
New York, NY 2014
Affinity can be a laden term when considering these factors. A basic requirement is financial ease – fees differ but a reasonable average for establishment clubs can approach $5,000 a year (though fees for the newer, hipper clubs that cater to coolness while feigning inclusivity can be more than double that). Memberships are now less gendered and somewhat more diverse, though they still signify social class. Exclusivity and privacy are omnipresent but more mutable.
When I started this work, I never thought of these private places as a significant part of the fabric of New York City. Now I can’t imagine it without them. I photographed my first club in a borrowed jacket and tie, feeling semi-throttled about the neck. Over the years, thanks to the kindness of friends, I have acquired a seersucker suit for summer, a full complement of year-round outfits and a selection of ties that are no longer a cause for discomfort or embarrassment.
Congruences
Three years ago, Jim Dow and Guillermo Srodek-Hart began to open up old boxes of negatives and prints, with the intention of making a proposal for a small, two-person show. To their mutual surprise, they discovered that they had selected a plenitude of pictures full of unmistakable similarities and meaningful differences that served to initiate dialogues about influence, ideas and intent.
This inspired the decision to include two more artists, Argentine Fernando Paillet and Walker Evans from the United States, both of whose works have had enormous impact on both of them.
“Congruences” is a series of photographic juxtapositions that seeks to delineate inspirations, cultures and time periods. The images displayed offer differing approaches towards history, nostalgia and artistic engagement, all placing equal emphasis on careful observation and formal arrangement, no matter how humble the subject might be.
Fernando Paillet made many of his most memorable images in February 1922, employing a direct, “subtle style (that) triumphs by disappearing as style,” (1) quite different from the portraits that were the bread and butter of his studio work.
Only a few years later, having decided to abandon his ambition of becoming a writer, Walker Evans took up photography, first experimenting with everything from surrealism to self-portraits, soon coming to embrace the same direct, deadpan approach that Paillet employed some 5,000 miles to the south. The resulting images have been described as “poetic, surgical, encyclopedic.” (2)
Evans and Paillet were certainly unaware of one another, separated by distance, culture and, to some degree, intent. Paillet, also a painter, writer, violinist and choral director, ran a main street business, much like the ones he photographed. Evans, without a steady source of income, moved in the literary and art circles of New York City, surviving through part time jobs and private and public commissions.
In the late 1960’s, Jim Dow set out to make photographs in a style that was once reviewed as being, “dumb, in the honorific sense of the word.” (3) A chance meeting with Walker Evansled him to begin to set his camera in the tripod marks of his master. (4) With the passage of time, the results evolved to reflect his own sensibility.
At the end of the 20th century, Guillermo Srodek-Hart -who had studied with and then assisted Dow- set out to work in a manner that has been described as, “less ruthlessly classical (with) an edge of nostalgia.” (5) Driven by a desire to document and pay tribute to “the last ones standing,” he sought the descendants (allegorically speaking) of those immigrants who, a century before, Paillet had so carefully photographed in their shops and bars.
With these differences and similarities in mind, Congruences seeks to encourage dialogues about social, political and artistic motivations through combinations of images produced by each participant. This exhibition is a study in influence; from teachers, mentors and exemplars, as well as cultures, continents and time periods.
A Miraculous Coda
Photographers make photographs for posterity, to offer distinct evidence of presence; I saw this, it was important, I preserved it as a picture. However, the results, be they prints, negatives or digital files, are insubstantial; being susceptible to light, temperature, humidity as well as an infinite range of other calamities.
That said, the tale below is at once a caution and a celebration.
Towards the end of his career Fernando Paillet opted to store his life’s work of over 3,000 glass plates in boxes under the stage of the Esperanza Choral Society where he had been conductor of the choir.
Sometime after his death, in 1967, a selection was made of what were thought to be the most important works, comprising the 300+ negatives now housed in the archive at the Museum of Colonization in Esperanza. Then, somewhat heartlessly, the bulk of rest of the plates, portraits for the most part, were donated to the local university, to help with their need for glass to make laboratory slides for the preservation of botanical and veterinary specimens.
Later, at some point between the late 1970’s and early 80’s a number of the remaining plates ended up in the hands of Hector “El Gallego” Garcia, who also obtained them for the glass. He had opened a dance club and his brother, Alberto Cortez, a well-known musician who had been on tour in Europe had recently told him about the latest rage in psychedelic effects for discos. In a rush of innovation and improvisation he bought the glass and made use of the plates, sandwiching a mixture of oil and water and placed them in front of spotlights, whose heat would cause the liquids to swirl and gyrate, like a two-dimensional lava lamp, even as the images melted away. They were projected on the walls, over the gyrating couples on the dance floor of the club and causing an immediate sensation.
But later the business closed, Garcia passed away and the few remaining plates were wrapped in paper, put into a box, and stuffed next to a washing machine in his house, where they remained until recently.
A few months ago, Garcia’s widow made her long time, annual visit to Buenos Aires to see her daughter, Graciela. One day she overheard a single side of a chance telephone conversation where Graciela was talking about a forthcoming BA exhibition that would feature this photographer, Fernando Paillet.
After Graciela hung up her mother asked, “Did you say Paillet? Do you know that back home in our laundry room there is a box with some of his negatives? Your father had them to make one of his inventions.”
As a result the box of 14 plates, was brought to the archive in Esperanza to show to Guillermo Srodek Hart, who was in town, for only two days, to make a few final scans for the Buenos Aires show. He saw the plates and, of course, was entranced, so six of the works are on the wall here at FOLA.
Jim Dow & Guillermo Srodek-Hart. Belmont, MA, USA & Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018
(1) Luis Príamo from his introduction to ‘Fernando Paillet. Fotografías de Esperanza y la Pampa Gringa. 1849-1949.
(2) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm
(3) quote from a review, c.1975, source unknown.
(4) See the “ Castellucci Gravestone” series.
(5) Anne Tucker, from the introduction to Guillermo Srodek-Hart: Stories. Prestel, 2015
In the late 1970’s if you were a soccer fan living in Boston, Massachusetts the only way you could watch foreign football was at members-only Irish, Italian and Portuguese sports clubs that had satellite dishes the size of swimming pools in the backyard or on the national “educational” channel (PBS) where hour-long highlights from the Bundesliga (Soccer Made In Germany) and the English Match of The Day (repackaged as Star Soccer) were shown on Sunday mornings in living black and white.
Besides the games themselves, often brawls in the winter mud, half-obscured by fog, what caught my eye most were the stadiums, particularly the English ones, how they sat right in the middle of neighborhoods unlike in the States where they would be surrounded by car parks. When the camera panned away from the action there would be a panoramic, monochromatic, view of the immediate environs: tower blocks, terraces, potting sheds, fish and chip shops, maybe a passing bus.
The first time I saw West Ham was the Charity Shield in August 1980 when they played Liverpool, winners of the League and as a distanced football fan from the States the Reds were all I knew about.
When I got on the Tube to Wembley the swaying car was full of chanting, singing, cheering claret and blue clad folk of every size, age, shape, and description. I was a veteran of countless baseball, basketball, football, and ice hockey games in the supposedly sports mad city of Boston, but I had never seen anything like this and after two stops I was hooked. There was and is nothing similar in the States to match the raucous bonding, edgy wit, and the frisson of anticipation that a British football crowd evokes. I wanted to be a part of it and while slithering along Wembley Way on a sea of empty lager cans, I first heard what I took to be the team anthem, “I’m forever blowing bubbles…”
And then there was the stadium itself – a somewhat funkier cousin of a more familiar Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, famous baseball stadiums from the States, packed full of all the people just described with the most idiosyncratic nooks and crannies: I showed my ticket, clanked through the turnstile, and arrived home.
I came back as soon as I could to photograph, with the wooden 8×10 view camera that I have always used. In order to capture the full sweep of the ground, I made three different exposures that were then pieced together to make a single, panoramic image. Inspired by the results, I went on to photograph scores and scores of stadiums throughout the United States, Canada, the UK, Argentina, and Mexico.
Since then whenever I’ve been in England, I’ve always returned to West Ham to attend matches and make photographs. Part of it is being a fan, loving the ground and the area, wanting to reconnect with everything about the game and the club I’ve come to feel a part of. And when I heard that they were moving, and the stadium being demolished I wanted to create a photographic bookend; homage to a place where much has changed over the years, but a great deal has not.
Built in the first iteration of the stadium, the Chicken Run – the terraces at the front of the East Stand where the self-proclaimed loudest home fans used to stand, still existed. However, Rule 12 of the “Terms and Conditions” on the club website states optimistically, “It is a condition of entry to the Stadium that the holder of the ticket agrees to remain seated during the match.”
The crossed hammers have always been ubiquitous at West Ham, visible on walls, crests, shirts and particularly on the gates, each of which bears the warning sign, “This gate must be locked open before every match.” The symbols appeared by themselves on the earliest match day programs and will return to solitary prominence on the new club crest for the forthcoming season.
While the most renowned memorial to the club’s glory is a statue of Bobby Moore and Co. a few yards down Green Street from the ground there is now a shrine in a corner of the player’s car park to accommodate those fans whose ashes can no longer be scattered on the pitch. I am told that it will be maintained when the club moves.
Recently Sister Immaculata of Our Lady of Compassion, the church next to the stadium, was quoted in The Independent, “We have been almost sucked into West Ham, as a Hoover sucks one in.” Deep in the belly of the Boleyn Ground someone has planted a big, hot pink lipstick kiss smack next to Alan Pardew’s dressing room exhortation, “winning, it’s what we are here for.”
I would like to believe that she was responsible.
When I was done photographing on this trip I walked up Green Street, across Portway, through the huge shopping mall to the Olympic Stadium. I felt I’d left East London and arrived in Houston in just 3.4 miles. In a place like the Boleyn Ground there seem to be ghosts in every corner and if you sat quietly, as I often did in the two days I was there, you could hear them.
There are no ghosts as yet in Stratford.
To circumvent a poor career choice in graphic design as well an impending call-up to the rapidly intensifying Vietnam War, Jim Dow (b. 1942; Boston, USA) enrolled in 1965 at the Rhode Island School of Design to do an MFA course in Photography with Harry Callahan. Initially unsure about his new direction a chance encounter with the great American social documentarian Walker Evans led him to search out his seminal book, American Photographs (1938). Dow was instantly mesmerized, recalling that, “I had never seen photographs like these, pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative.”
Upon graduation he worked as an assistant making prints for Evans’ 1972 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art while beginning a lifetime of recording vernacular culture – architecture, signage, interiors and other overlooked corners of the American landscape – in the tradition of the acknowledged 20th century master.
With the assistance of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation he crisscrossed the country, additionally working for the Joseph E. Seagrams County Court House Project (1976-77), which proved to be another important educational milestone. Because his brief dictated that he make pictures of every edifice that was of historical, architectural or vernacular import he learned the value of the careful visual, typological approach that proved to be fundamental for him from that point on. This method owes much to Bernd and Hilla Becher who from 1950 onwards produced a comprehensive photographic archive documenting the demise of the architecture of industrialisation in order to raise social, political and aesthetic questions.
His work first came to prominence with a series of richly detailed panoramic colour photographs of major and minor league baseball stadiums across America, which he began in 1980 while concurrently photographing football grounds and sports arenas in England and Argentina. Dow’s photographs not only document ‘man-made creations that are extraordinarily commonplace yet smack of uniqueness’ but more significantly the photographs examine the place sport occupies in the American psyche and beyond. Using multiple individual negatives taken with an 8 by 10 Deardorff view camera, Dow’s meticulous panoramas offer an unusual perspective of the ballparks and sports grounds as seen from a fan’s point of view high up in the bleachers. Devoid of human presence, Dow ,captures the unique characteristics of the places and spaces he photographs with the precision of a surgeon and, as the critic Owen Edwards has observed, “(his) stadiums have all the grandeur and loneliness of ancient ruins. They are, of course, the eventual artifacts of a civilization that is bound, someday, to vanish, and he treats them with all due respect.”
In the early nineteenth century when the French Emperor Napoleon was asked what he thought of the UK he famously replied ‘Britain is nothing more than a nation of shopkeepers’. Indeed, the humble neighborhood enterprise has been a British institution since the Victorian era as cities and towns expanded during the Industrial Revolution, the corner shop became a stalwart of the British urban landscape. Fascinated with this local vernacular architecture and aware of its uncertain future Dow returned to the UK on numerous occasions (1980-1994) to work on a project titled Corner Shops of Britain, photographing his subject with taxonomical clarity, appreciatively recording a traditional way of life seemingly on an inexorable path towards cultural extinction.
His prints depict the facades and interiors of family-run businesses that were once keystones in the social and architectural fabric of the high street: from off-licenses whose walls are stacked to the brim with candied treats to haberdashers whose faded wool bundles and patterns are no longer in vogue. Doomed by the twin juggernauts of EU regulations and suburbanisation – of the one stop park-and-shop mega store – these establishments are disappearing at an alarming rate. Whilst the storefronts that Dow records with their faded signage seem consigned to a bygone era, our current obsession with cultural nostalgia has prompted a re-appropriation of these out dated interiors with contemporary bars, restaurants and boutiques adopting a range of styles and content that hark back to the ‘good old times’.
In the afterward of American Photographs Lincoln Kirstein states that, “(Walker Evans) so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.”
Three-quarters of a century later the author and humorist Ian Frazier wrote in a forward to Dow’s book American Studies, “What I love about Jim Dow’s pictures is that they’re not kidding…And when I say his pictures aren’t kidding, I mean they avoid the danger that exists in recording such hints and signs – a danger having do with kitsch…There’s no World’s Largest Ball of String in Dow’s photographs, no superiority, no wry chuckles from a more refined altitude. Aspects of his photographs are funny, maybe even hilarious, but that’s only noted in passing. He’s more interested in what the American vision is, or was, and in the scary open-endedness of our identity.”
Dow’s work on view in Strange and Familiar unquestionably references Evans, the Bechers as well as Harry Callahan. At the same time, on their own, from roadside kiosks selling cockles and whelks to the unglamorous premises of a fish and chip shop to a greasy spoon proudly advertising its menu, his photographs offer, in Frazier’s words, “a human simulacra” that supersedes nostalgia, and bears witness to the wholesale transformation of the British high street.
Alona PARDO, Curator, Strange and Familiar January, 2016
“What I love about Jim Dow’s pictures is that they’re not kidding.” Ian Frazier, American Studies (2011)
On October 24th and 25th, the Griffin Museum of Photography will host the 2014 Focus Awards, an event that honors members of our community for their significant contributions. This years recipients are Jim Dow, Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Rebecca Senf, Rising Star Award, Dr. Elin Spring, Scribe Award, and Larissa Leclair, Spotlight Award. Congratulations to all for their commitment to the photographic journey. Today we celebrate photographer, educator, and mentor, Jim Dow.
Jim Dow is a fixture in photography as a noted photographer, educator, and mentor. His credentials are long and prominent. This year, the Griffin Museum of Photography is presenting Jim Dow with the Lifetime Achievement Award 2014 because of his accomplishments as an educator of consequence.
Dow has informed a myriad of students that include Nan Goldin, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Kathy Kissik, David Hockbaum and Doug and Mike Starn to name just a few. With his RISD roots and his great love of the journey, Dow imparts the notions that he learned from his continuum of photography role models. “Harry Callahan taught us to find all that you care about and care about it very deeply, said Jim Dow. “That is a luxury these days but that is one of the most important things that we can do.” We at the Griffin Museum of Photography would like to acknowledge Jim Dow as an influencer for the medium of photography. – Paula Tognarelli, Executive Director and Curator of The Griffin Museum
Jim was extremely fortunate to study with not just Harry Callahan, but also Walker Evans and Minor White; three of the most outstanding figures in photographic history, and all masters of black and white. His formal approach to his work obviously stems from their teaching, and in some ways, his love of “collecting culture” with his 8 x 10 view camera does as well. Like Evans and to some degree, Minor White, Jim is attracted to aspects of material culture which often speak to a fading history – that of small-town America. He doesn’t seek out majestic or sublime subject matter, rather, he simply elevates the everyday. This characteristic of his work aligns him with other photographers working in color in the 1970s and 80s, such as Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Joel Sternfeld who were all similarly enchanted with revealing the true textures of the world immediately around us and feeding our popular imaginations. And like his peers, Jim is indelibly part of the tried-and-true American tradition of hitting the road and traveling extensively to make his work. His wanderlust has led him throughout the country, and he has amassed an impressive archive of the American vernacular in the process. – Hannah Sloan, RoseGallery, Santa Monica, CA
Jim Dow’s interest concentrates on places where people enact their everyday rituals, from the barbershop to the baseball park, has guided the path of his photographic career. Dow is concerned with capturing endangered regional and national traditions–a barbershop with a heavy patina of town life covering the walls, the opulent time capsule of an old private New York club, the densely packed display of smoking pipes in an English tobacconist shop, a bar in Mexico City–all artifacts of a vanishing era.
Born in Boston, MA in 1942 Dow earned a B.F.A. in graphic design and M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965 and 1968 respectively. Walker Evans’s seminal book American Photographs (1938) was an early influence. Dow recalls the appeal of Evans’s “razor sharp, infinitely detailed, small images of town architecture and people. What stood out was a palpable feeling of loss…pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative.” Soon after graduate school Dow had the opportunity to work with Evans. He was hired to print his mentor’s photographs for a 1972 Museum of Modern Art retrospective.
Dow has taught photography at Harvard, Princeton, Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and his work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States as well as Argentina, Canada, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
His work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The New England Foundation for The Arts, Tufts University and The School of The Museum of Fine Arts as well as numerous private organizations and individuals.
In addition to appearing in numerous publications over the years, he has authored two books, Marking The Land (2007) with the North Dakota Museum of Art and American Studies (2011) with The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
He first gained attention for his panoramic triptychs of baseball and soccer stadiums, a project that began in 1980. Using an 8″ x 10″ camera, he has documented more than three hundred major and minor league baseball parks and soccer grounds in Argentina, Canada, England, Mexico, Portugal, Scotland, the United States and Uruguay.
He continues to work on projects involving barbeque, carritos, drive-ins and drive-thrus of all kinds, private social clubs, roadside signs, tacquerias, taco stands and taco trucks throughout Argentina, Mexico, the United States and Uruguay.
Dow has an insatiable appetite for the vernacular, from french fries to phone booths. But (he) seems always willing to linger a bit longer. He’s never ironic or distant and, as (Janet) Borden points out, “He is patient, often using exposures of 15 minutes. His photographs release their information slowly.” Dow himself suggests, “Perhaps because I grew up without a television, I’m not just watching. I’m looking.”
The Jim Dow Interview
Congratulations on the Lifetime Achievement Focus Award! Why don’t we start at the beginning and have you share what led you to a life of photography?
When I was studying Graphic Design as a very mediocre student at RISD in the mid-1960’s the two courses where I showed any promise in were the required ones in photography, both with Harry Callahan. I don’t know why I did well, but I did, and I guess it caught because I asked Harry if I could apply to the graduate program that he had just started a couple of years before.
From a practical point of view, it was a holding pattern. I had what we would now call an internship working in the publicity office of the University of Rhode Island, where I designed school’s Annual Report in red…so needless to say, I transitioned and while I was in the MFA Program I met Walker Evans by chance and was exposed to his ideas and approach and, again, it took.
Really, the important thing is that most everything happened by chance and serendipity; I met Callahan, Richard Lebowitz, Dieter Roth and Malcom Grear through course requirements, I met Evans because a friend introduced us, Emmet Gowin, Linda Connor and John McWilliams happened to be at RISD when I was there and so on.
I’ve never planned out what I was going to do; pretty much everything has come my way through the help of teachers and friends. Likely, it would be different now but as Janet Borden told my students once, “your job is to make your own peer group, to find those people who you respect and trust and to learn from them and keep learning and they become a support system for life”
That continues for me right up through today and actuarial tables aside, hopefully, will carry on for some time.
As someone who has been at this for a while, I would love for you to give some insight into living a photographic life.
I couldn’t have achieved much of anything without mentors, including my parents and friends and, most importantly, my family. My wife Jacquie is my partner in everything, including the photography and having that relationship makes it possible to do what I (we) do.
For example, I just did a commission in Wyoming, I was asked to photograph there and produce a group of pictures for a collector. Jacquie scouted, took pictures with an Ipad, we decided together the best time of day, etc. etc. In that case, the working together was very practical, logistical.
Other times it is far more subtle, but the really important thing is the complete honesty, telling me when I’m off track or doing something wrong. Our kids are the same, I sometimes travel with them, and they speak their mind as well. In fact, we all speak honestly with one another and that is more important than anything else.
John Tagg says there is no such thing as photography, and I agree with him in the sense that photography is a medium, it becomes what you bring to it and I like to think that for me, photography is about people, interacting with people, all the time, despite there not being people in my pictures.
Any reflections on your legacy of teaching?
I have been very, very lucky in that regard. I’ve always been able to teach what I was interested in, first large format photography, photography history and, for the past two decades, contemporary art.
I have had wonderful colleagues and bosses who let me shift and grow and didn’t hold me to one specialty or direction, allowing me to respond to change and that has been a pleasure.
And, of course, the students, on who I have always labored to stay just a little bit ahead of, so far as I can. It has always been a challenge, in the best sense of the word. They know when you are faking it, so I have tried to let my enthusiasm for the subject carry the day and never, ever pretend I knew something when I didn’t.
I decided that I wasn’t cut out to be a role model a long time ago and now I walk into the classroom and ask them how it feels to be taught by your grandfather?
Seriously, that is the treasure, where else in our culture do people one-third my age (or more) actually sit in a room and exchange ideas? Or at least I like to think they listen to what I have to say, but of course I’m not really sure that they do.
Right now, where I work there is a lot of fretting about learning outcomes, whatever they are. I don’t want to make light of it, but I don’t think I have ever thought that I, as a teacher, should determine any outcome for my students. I have to help them find the right outcome for them as individuals in every way possible, but I can never get into anyone’s head to tell them what they should know or how they should go about knowing it.
Do you think being an educator has enhanced your personal work or restricted it?
I refer to teaching as my day job, and it is a wonderful one, but I never refer to myself as an educator. That is not a role I chose to adopt. In my photography I am very much a one trick pony, I know exactly what I want to photograph and how I want to do it and I take great pleasure from that. In teaching, I am much more of a polymath in my approach, I have to be because of the kind of program we have had. And that is wonderful because it continually draws me out of myself, beyond my own experience. I get to talk about painting, performance, and social history, and to be paid for it in the bargain.
So in that regard the job has never gotten in the way, except for the time it has taken but I don’t begrudge that at all. Other than meetings of course, they are and always have been a waste of time. Academic meetings can be described in the way Borges spoke of the Malvinas War with England, two bald men squabbling over a comb.
Tell us about receiving the Guggenheim—did it change things for you?
It is funny about that, and I’ve heard it happen to other people as well. You get that grant for having already done something and, despite making a proposal, sometimes it falls a bit flat, you maybe need to change gears. That certainly happened with me, and my being invited to work on the Courthouse project just as the term of the grant ended saved the day. I had sort of run out of ideas of what to do and suddenly I was thrust into a quite different situation, I had to make pictures on demand, of county courthouses! It was the best thing because, again, it forced me to step beyond my own thinking whereas before I had become too selective in what I would take a picture of, I had to break that and to do so, I had to work for someone else, not just myself.
It was a great lesson and I’ve always set myself specific projects, even quotas since then.
That said, the Guggenheim opened a lot of doors for me and I’m very grateful for that.
You have managed to capture America in such a rich and varied way. Is there any part of America that you still want to explore or return to?
I go back all the time. In the past few years, I’ve returned to California (north and south), the Carolinas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Illinois. I am always game for another trip. But I also think of America as Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay (of course other countries as well) as I have been to them many times.
What’s next?
I have a whole body of pictures of some of the great private clubs of New York that I want to turn into a book. I have a huge number of pictures of taco trucks from all over the United States that I want to turn into a book. I want to go back to Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay to do more work on tacquerias and carritos. I have an idea to photograph all the 100 different Sears Kit Houses as they exist today. I’m certain there are other things, I just can’t think of them at the moment.
Is there something we don’t know about you?
I’m a soccer fanatic. I really would like to be a soccer writer and I do blog for a great website, but I have too much to do at school to keep up as much as I’d like. I have a collection of about 200 soccer shirts, and I did a show of them this past June, along with my photographs of soccer stadiums. I also am, along with my older son, a season ticket holder for the New England Revolution, we’ve been going to games for 19 years.
What does receiving this award mean to you?
It means a great deal. Once again, it came about through other people and that makes it truly meaningful, I didn’t initiate it, Paula just rang me up and I take that to heart.
I describe myself as a middle-class artist, not because I’m middle-class (although I am) but because the space I’ve been lucky to occupy is somewhere between being well-known and obscurity. I have been lucky enough to make a good living, to do what I want more often than not and to be recognized for it. Ian Frazier wrote, “what I like about Jim Dow’s photographs is that he’s not kidding.” By that he meant that the aim and scope of the pictures is direct and without any forced irony. I’d like to think that I’m the same and if that is what I’m being recognized for, then I’m pleased.
And finally, describe your perfect day.
One where there are no meetings, only interactions.
Survival is relative: to be poor in Somalia is different from being poor in the ninth ward of New Orleans, Hackney or suburban Dallas. But difficulty anywhere is something to be survived and this year I met people whose attitudes and places offer testimony to that spirit.
Cricket, a feisty woman in her late sixties, sells bait to sportsmen headed for the swamps, as well as antiques on eBay, from a roadside cabinet of wonders on US 190 in Krotz Springs, Louisiana. She told me that she was called Cricket as a child but only began to sell them as bait after her divorce.
Then there is the man who drives down to New Orleans from Mississippi with truckloads of watermelons he picks himself. On hot summer days he parks his trailer in the shade of a tree marked by a hand-painted fleur-de-lis, the emblem of his beloved New Orleans Saints football team.
Martin Sanchez, who came to Riverside, California, from Mexico, runs Tio’s Tacos, a successful restaurant next to the bus station. When the city fathers would not let him expand his place into a house on the corner he built a homage to his roots, including a chapel made from beer bottles, cement and found objects. Sanchez claims to have not thrown anything away for more than 17 years.
Isaac Bartelle owns a liquor store at the edge of the low country near Hemingway, South Carolina. He also rents houses or trailers, I don’t know which, but streams of folk come into his place to buy gin or pay rent. Everyone there is a survivor.
The more smoke and neon, the better the barbecue.
Next to peanut butter, it is America’s national food, with more varieties than there are states in the union. Death and taxes aren’t the great levelers, barbecue is. At the Bob Sykes Barbecue in Bessemer, Alabama, the guy picking his teeth with a toothpick is just as likely to be the president of the city’s famous steelworks as a worker at the blast furnace.
Back in the 1960s, Martin Luther King used to gnaw on ribs at Aleck’s Barbecue Heaven, Atlanta. Nowadays hedge-fund honchos pick up orders to take on their private jets. Wilber’s Barbecue in Goldsboro, North Carolina, boasts that George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton and Jesse Helms have all sat down to pork plates with side orders of fried liver and gizzards. Underbones Lounge at Redbones Barbecue in student-saturated Boston has valet parking for fixed-gear bicycles.
All across the south, long before the civil war, cuts of cheap meat, particularly pig, were cooked and smoked. The meat was often rubbed, poked and seasoned, then drenched in sauce. “Pig pickin’s”, church picnics and political rallies soon sprung up. With highways came a steady evolution from a communal pit at the plantation big house to the roadhouse glowing in neon, now the industry standard in all its retro glory.
Some etymologists claim that the word barbecue may derive from the French “barbe à queue”, “beard to tail”, meaning roasting a whole animal on a spit. Others plump for barbacoa; a Caribbean word for meat swathed in leaves and cooked underground. Then there is the Mayan term baalbak kab (meat, cover, earth)… but for most it is just three large capital letters.
In the Carolinas your hog can arrive adjacent to a mountain of deep-fried cornmeal bullets known as hushpuppies, accompanied by an ice-filled glass of highly sugared tea. In Texas, the brisket comes wrapped in newspaper and is washed down with a freezing cold beer slid along the counter.
Barbecue sauces are state secrets. At The Original Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City they say there is blood in the recipe. One guy in Chattanooga mixes his ingredients in a metal tub with a canoe paddle. In Missouri, a coveted sauce is concocted by a retired veterinarian and marketed as “liquid smoke”.
Blood, smoke and secrets aside, one thing is certain, real barbecue isn’t meat cooked quickly over hot coals or a gas flame in a suburban backyard. That’s grilling.
“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death; I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
Bill Shankly, Played, Carlise United, Preston North End, Scotland. Managed Carlisle United, Grimby Town, Workington, Huddersfield Town, Liverpool
“Amongst all unimportant subjects, football is by far the most important.”
Karol Jozef Wojtyla (John Paul II): Skawa Wadowice, Vatican City. Poland – cleric & pope
In the late summer of 1980 I traveled to London, newly married, to visit my mother-in-law a war bride from Tottenham who had spent much of her life in California. Knowing that I faced many hours being introduced over cups of tea if I didn’t have a photography project in hand and having watched Match of The Day on PBS I thought it might to fun to go and look at the many football grounds that dot the great metropolis all the way from Watford to Crystal Palace.
As preliminary research I bought a ticket to the traditional season opening Charity Shield match at Wembley Stadium that featured King Kenny Dalglish and mighty Liverpool vs. the soon to be Sir Trevor Brooking and newly promoted West Ham United.
To reach the entrance to the stadium one had to navigate Wembley Way, a half-mile trudge from the Tube amidst a Sargasso Sea of urine and empty beer cans in the company of an enormous dense pack of Kopiites and Cockneys, each and every one singing taunting, tribal songs that deprecated all aspects of the opposition.
The match itself was a deserved and dominant 1-0 victory for the then First Division champion Reds over the F.A. Cup winning Irons but it featured the irresistible combination that makes football so wonderful; non-stop balletic athleticism in pursuit of a ball played out amidst an atmosphere of incessant, loud and creative hostility generated by a stadium packed with singing souls.
Hygiene aside, I was hooked and I started photographing football grounds the following week. A few days after that I bought my first football shirt, an Addidas West Ham United replica, I have it still. Since then, over 34 years, I have attended games, taken pictures and purchased shirts in Argentina, England, Mexico, Portugal, Scotland, the United States and Uruguay. Along with my older son I am a seventeen-year season ticket holder to the New England Revolution, my home club, along with Boca Juniors in Argentina, Cruz Azul in Mexico and West Ham United in England.
Many of these photographs are from another era, taken before the advent of the Premiership, the Champions League, Fox Soccer Channel, Gol TV and MLS. ESPN wasn’t interested in football and Andreas Cantor hadn’t yet brought “goooooooaaaalll” into the mainstream. Diego Maradona was a bright-eyed kid just moved to Barcelona and Landon Donovan was still in diapers.
In those days the keeper could pick up a back pass with his hands and tackles from behind weren’t fouls. Managers smoked on the bench during games, fans puffed away as they stood on the terraces and players took drags in the changing room at halftime.
Everything has changed, the game is faster, the skill level is higher; there are fewer dull, tactical draws, except when Chelsea is playing. Teams in every country are multinational; Japanese players play in Manchester, Togolese toil at Tottenham, the New England Revolution have a Vietnamese midfielder from Dallas who played a season in Saigon and struggled to speak the language of his parents with his Texas twang. Ownership too, reflects globalization; there are oligarchs, sheiks, investment bankers, cement workers and car manufacturers bankrolling teams.
Everything about the game fascinates me; it’s history, the players, fans and coaches, the atmosphere in and around the stadiums and, of course, the shirts.
The oldest shirt in the show is from 1981, a classic Aston Villa strip, decorated only with the club crest. The newest, from this season, is a concoction of commerce and design made for Chacarita Juniors of Buenos Aires, with nine different sponsors, front and back. Fans pay through the nose to buy the latest version of these advertising vehicles; indeed the validity of a team is often judged by its sponsor. Revolution fans complained when their team signed on with a healthcare company rather than the ubiquitous Dunkin Donuts. Looking at the club shirts is as much an exercise in brand recognition as team awareness.
The quotes in the show are thanks to Philosophy Football (a site always worth visiting), Google and personal memory. The thoughts of players, managers, philosophers, authors and thinkers are roughly paired and they eloquently echo many of my feelings about the game. Each player and manager are linked with their teams of record and I took the liberty of imagining that the philosophers and other notables would support their hometown side, even if it was in the wrong century or if they had moved far afield.
Which is just like the rest of us and as it should be.
“Football without fans is nothing.”
Jock Stein: Played for Blantyre Vics, Albion Rovers, Celtic. Managed Dunfermline, Hibernian, Leeds United, Celtic, Scotland
“Football implies the desire to suffer.”
Theodor Adorno: Germany, Eintracht Frankfurt – sociologist, philosopher and musicologist
“Thank you to the mothers who gave birth to these Atléti players… their sons have massive balls.”
Diego Simeone: Played for Velez Sarsfield, Pisa, Sevilla, Atleticao Madrid, Inter Milan, Lazio, Racing, Argentina. Managed Racing Club, Estudiantes, River Plate, San Lorenzo, Catania, Atletico Madrid
“All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”
Albert Camus: Hamra Annaba, Algeria – philosopher
“Whoever invented soccer should be worshipped as god.”
Hugo Sánchez: Played for UNAM, Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid, America, Rayo Vallecano, Atlante, Linz, Dallas Burn, Celaya and Mexico. Managed UNAM, Necaxa, Almeria, Pachuca, Mexico
“Dear players, you are very popular. People follow you, and not just on the field but also off it. That’s a social responsibility.”
Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Francis): San Lorenzo, Vatican City & Argentina – cleric & pope
“22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and, at the end, the Germans win.”
Gary Lineker: Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, Tottenham, Nagoya & England
“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
Jean-Paul Sartre: PSG & France – philosopher, novelist, and literary critic
“The only thing that has never changed in the history of the game is the shape of the ball.”
Denis Law: Huddersfield Town, Manchester City, Torino, Manchester United, Scotland
‘In football there enters an intermediary, a ball. It is in order to possess it that one is strong.”
Roland Barthes: Paris, St. Etienne & France – philosopher & cultural critic
“To see the ball, to run after it, makes me the happiest man in the world.”
Diego Maradona: Played for Argentinos Juniors, Boca Juniors, Barcelona, Napoli, Sevilla, Newell’s Old Boys, Argentina. Managed Deportivo Mandiyu, Racing Club, Fujairah, Dorados de Sinaloa, Gimnasia de La Plata, Argentina
“Football is a part of I. When I play the world wakes up around me.”
Robert Nesta “Bob” Marley: Tottenham Hotspur & Jamaica
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Football. Bloody hell!”
Sir Alex Ferguson: Played for Queen’s Park, St. Johnstone, Dunfermline Athletic, Rangers, Falkirk, Ayr United. Managed East Stirlingshire, St. Mirren, Aberdeen, Scotland, Manchester United
“Difficulties increase the nearer we approach the goal.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Eintracht Frankfurt & Germany – writer & statesman
“We know playing anywhere other than Mexico City, we’re the better team.”
Landon Donovan: Bayer Leverkusen, San Jose Earthquakes, L.A. Galaxy, Bayern Munich, Everton, Leon, San Diego Sockers, USA. Managed San Diego Loyal
“International football is the continuation of war by other means.”
George Orwell; Wigan & England – novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic
“Look! We have two eyes, two legs, we are the same as them; the only difference is that they play in Europe.”
Cuauhtémoc Blanco (to the Mexico team in the 1998 World Cup): America, Necaxa, Real Valladolid, Veracruz, Chicago Fire, Santos Laguna, Irapuato, Dorados de Sinaloa, BUAP, Puebla, Mexico
“The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people.”
Eric Hobsbawm: any team playing against any other team with a fascist history – historian
“I preferred my first Serie A goal to my first kiss because (at the age of 10) you do not understand anything.”
Francesco Totti: Roma, Italy
“Dopo la letteratura e lleros, il calcio e uno dei grandi piaceri.” (After literature and sex, football is one of the great pleasures.)
Pier Paolo Pasolini: Roma, Italy – film director, poet & writer
“Tomboy. Alright, call me a tomboy. Tomboys get medals. Tomboys win championships. Tomboys can fly. Oh, and tomboys aren’t boys.”
Julie Foudy: Sacramento Storm, Tyreso FF, San Diego Spirit, USA
“Football is a game for rough girls, not suitable for delicate boys”
Oscar Wilde: Bohemians, Ireland
“If what is most important about your project is to make a circus, you have much less chance of sporting success.”
Luis Figo: Sporting, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Inter Milan, Portugal
“For those who desire not simply an aimless skipping from instance to instance, an integral central movement will take us forward towards a great goal.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Zenit St. Peterburg & CCCP – revolutionary, politician
“Female athletes are supposed to be toned down. You’re always supposed to talk about the team and never stand out.”
Hope Solo: Washington Huskies, Philadelphia Charge, Kopparbergs/Goteberg, Lyon, Saint Louis Athletica, Alanta Beat, magicJack, Seattle Sounders Women, Seattle Reign, USA
Germaine Greer: Melbourne Victory, Australia – academic and journalist
“Football is an art.”
“When I was playing, they said soccer was a man’s world and women should remain on the sidelines, all I can say is I’m glad I never had to go up against Mia Hamm.”
Pele: Santos, NY Cosmos, Brazil
“Without some goal and some effort to reach it. No man can live.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Dynamo Moscow, Russia – novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher
“There are scientists who will tell you that spirit, because it can’t be measured, doesn’t exist. Bollocks. It does exist.”
Sam Allardyce: Played for Bolton Wanderers, Sunderland, Millwall, Tampa Bay Rowdies, Coventry City, Huddersfield Town, Preston North End, West Bromwich Albion & Limerick: ManagedLimerick, Blackpool, Notts County, Bolton Wanderers, Newcastle United, Blackburn Rovers & West Ham United
“Five days shalt thou labour, as the Bible says. The seventh day is the Lord thy God’s. The sixth day is for football.”
John Anthony Burgess Wilson: Manchester City, England – composer, writer
“I get goose-bumps only thinking about it (playing for Liverpool). Only 4 years ago I used to pretend that I was a Liverpool player, on Playstation.”
Luis Suarez: Nacional, Groningen, Ajax, Liverpool, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Gremio, Inter Miami, Uruguay
“Football causeth fighting, brawling, quarrel picking, murder and great effusion of blood, as daily experience teacheth”
Philip Stubbes: Macclesfield, England – pamphleteer
“The rules of soccer are very simple… If it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.”
Phillip Abraham “Phil” Woosnam: Played for Manchester City, Sutton United, Leyton Orient, West Ham United, Aston Villa, Atlanta Chiefs, Wales. Managed Atlanta Chiefs, Wales
What I love about Jim Dow’s pictures is that they’re not kidding. We live, as we know, in a vision: “The Shining City on a Hill” or “The last, best hope of mankind” or “Zion” — in other words, America. The vision never ends, though it flickers, and though we rethink it and reimagine it in every generation. Dow’s photographs accept the vision at face value and piece it together in fragments of perfect clarity. In wordless ways America continually describes its vision to us, dropping broad hints about what its citizens are expected to be. With these photographs Dow catches the hints latent in dozens of American settings, almost all of them temporarily unoccupied. The absence he finds is rich with suggestion about the parts we are supposed to portray in the dream.
And when I say his pictures aren’t kidding, I mean they avoid the danger that exists in recording such hints and signs– a danger having do with kitsch. Years ago when I was writing a book about the Great Plains, people were constantly asking me if I’d seen the World’s Largest Ball of String, in a small town in Kansas. The World’s Largest Ball of String may be remarkable, but I didn’t want to see it, because of the difficulty of describing it without playing to the kitsch-appreciating strain in all of us– i.e., to a kind of easy superiority. There’s no World’s Largest Ball of String in Dow’s photographs, no superiority, no wry chuckles from a more refined altitude. Aspects of his photographs are funny, maybe even hilarious, but that’s only noted in passing. He’s more interested in what the American vision is, or was, and in the scary open-endedness of our identity.
“America is a didactic country,” Saul Steinberg, the artist, used to say. Dow’s pictures capture didactic messages so detached as to be almost orphic: “Save,” “Buy,” “Shape,” “Sealy,” “Shrimp Cocktail,” “Watch for Opening.” Throngs of ghosts fill his empty Masonic temples, courtrooms, stages, and pool halls, but the human simulacra he records are even more tantalizing. The happy waiters and vacationers of roadside signage may overwhelm us with how far we would have to go to be them, but what about the bathing-suited giantesses baring their teeth in pleasure, and the temptresses on barroom signs? How could anybody, male or female, live up to these dames? The point, Dow seems to say, is that we can’t; we only aspire, forever.
Any dream has its flip-side nightmare, and by now we know our dream’s opposite maybe better than the dream itself. Seen after a slight double-take, many of Dow’s pictures reconfigure themselves into possibly sinister enigmas, places where something went or is about to go horribly wrong. The gas station in Dallas (“GAS.” “rentals”) sits there wide-open like a store that was just robbed; the wonderfully odd “Airline Motors Restaurant” begs for one more piece of narrative to complete it, maybe some connection to Charlie Starkweather and his getaway. Dow’s barbecue places (“Real Blue Ribbon Bar B-Q”), with their delicious smells somehow inhering in the photograph touch us with their fragility; they’re just the sort of places Katrina washed away. Empty shoeshine chairs resemble a cleaned-up crime scene – wasn’t Carmine Galante shot to death in that chair on the left, back in ‘81? – and then suddenly don’t resemble it, and are just shoeshine chairs again. Yet even after the nightmare goes away it can’t be unlearned.
From a certain perspective, something has gone wrong in these pictures: most of the places and signs they record probably don’t exist any more. The earliest photograph in this collection dates from 1968. During Dow’s long career America changed. Nowadays you rarely see truly local postcards in non-metro places, and business owners are less likely to make (or hire local artists to make) their own signs. Global franchises have taken over just about everywhere. Ordinary folks may have become disinclined to contribute their own visual interpretations of the American dream, knowing that mega-corporations have teams of experts on the job. Maybe what gives Dow’s Coca-Cola sign [p. 87] its power is Coke’s sameness through every change: It was, is now, and always shall be.
Jim Dow and I are about the same age. I can remember the first slice of pizza and McDonald’s hamburger I ever ate, and the first tattoo I ever saw. When I was young, almost nobody where I lived (small-town Ohio) sported tattoos. A friend got a rose tattooed on his upper arm one summer during high school, and I was shocked. Now you see tattoos everywhere, on everybody. Today most pro athletes look as if someone doodled all over them while on the phone. It seems to me that in our lifetime, the American vision or dream or whatever it is has moved from mostly public to mostly private areas of expression. The pictures at the end of the book– the intricately painted taco trucks, with their civic or historic themes– are interesting in this regard, because after the era of depicting the dream ourselves in our public buildings and on our roadside signs, we began to paint it on our vehicles. In the 1980s, seaside or mountain utopias, in glorious colors, began appearing on the sides of people’s vans; the taco trucks? Mobile panoramas would be part of this trend. And more recently (as my theory goes) we have shifted our realm of visual statement to the entirely personal– our tattoos– many of which are often hidden under clothes.
The emptiness of the places Dow photographs implies their eventual abandonment, and our own. A chill of impermanence shudders through it all. The signs will be painted over, the minor league ballparks torn down. The barbershops and diners and bars will morph into other businesses, maybe ones less directly comforting. Even without the encouragement of the smiling giantess in the bathing suit, the pursuit of happiness will proceed, though we may not know exactly how or where. In typical American style, we will be on our own, making it up again as we go. The affection and respect and clarity and stillness and vision in these photographs provide reason to hope that we will come up with something good.
© Ian Frazier, 2010
I learned how to drive a car long before I started taking pictures seriously and I always had a desire to travel. I took extensive road trips during high school and college to places like Atlanta, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and across Canada and constantly fantasized over my Rand McNally, following the ribbons of classic old highways that stretched across the pages – US 1, 2, 6, 11, 30, 40, 41, 62, 66, 75, 80, 90, 99, 101 and 301 – imagining endless journeys.
This book is an atlas of its own, a road trip through twenty-seven states, in black and white and color, made over forty years and maybe half a million miles of driving. All of the photographs depict someone else’s imagination and hand; the subjects are creations of culture, not nature.
A person on the road is an outsider by definition, and a photographer even more so. Every sign, quirky building or motel room offers a commercial version of inclusion; a domain of surface attraction that promises more – a respite from the blur of motion, a chance to unwind by the pool, to chill in the room, have a coffee or maybe something stronger, see a movie, eat a burger or a plate of barbecue. Further, the neon and fluorescent lighting, institutional paint colors, checkerboard flooring that are common to such places take on an amplified palate and patina when they appear in a photographic print – a heightened, two-dimensional representation of an already fabricated subject.
I went to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design on the mistaken assumption that it would be an easy alternative to book learning. My estimation was completely wrong – it was terribly hard. In the first year my advisor told me to study graphic design, saying, “you just can’t draw.” As luck would have it the school required that I take a photography class, and my teacher, Harry Callahan, turned out to be a generous and inspiring master of dedication and innovation. While I didn’t like the subject at first, I did well enough and decided, somewhat self-servingly with the Vietnam-era draft looming, to apply to the MFA program. Callahan kindly got me accepted and a few weeks into the course I had a chance encounter with photographic legend Walker Evans.
The opportunity came through a former teacher, the Fluxus artist, Dieter Roth, who described Evans to me as “a socialist photographer who used glass plates.” Both men were on the faculty at Yale, and one late October day I went with Roth to New Haven to meet Evans. The setting for the encounter resembled a scene from Good Night And Good Luck or Mad Men. Design faculty from the School of Art were gathered around a table in the basement grillroom of the Old Heidelberg restaurant drinking and smoking their lunch. At the center of the glasses of booze and swirling fumes sat a slight, somewhat dandyish man seemed to be the instigator and focal point of all the conversation. I was fascinated.
Later Evans recalled Sylvia Beach’s literary soirees at the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore when he was a youthful ex-pat and would-be writer in 1920s Paris. He observed the great and the good of Left Bank intelligentsia while pressed up against shelves of books, but when he had the chance to meet his idol, James Joyce, he fled, and according to legend, subsequently destroyed all of his own nascent efforts. He soon abandoning writing altogether to take up photography.
My reaction was quite different, most likely because I was completely ignorant of who this intriguing character actually was. I just ate my sandwich and listened. When I drove back to RISD that evening I asked a more photographically versed friend, “Exactly who is this guy Walter Evans?” He took me to the library and showed me the book American Photographs. The experience of turning its pages was galvanizing. I had never seen photographs so complex – picture after picture hovering between a short story and an affidavit. I immediately wanted to try to do something similar and I began to travel with a camera.
Studying with Harry Callahan was an equally powerful experience. His devotion to his work, his family and his students was compelling and influenced everyone who met him. Harry spoke plainly but always with a great deal of thought and the insights embedded in his straightforward words could sometimes take a while to sink in.
Minor White came to RISD as a visiting critic and when he looked at my prints he asked if I took my pictures at a similar time of day and in the same sort oflighting conditions. When I said that was likely the case, he responded that if I were studying with him he would give me a lighting assignment. Callahan, who had been sitting there quietly, turned and said, “Well, he’s not your student and I wouldn’t.”
At that time I didn’t understand what he meant. While I was certain that it was complimentary and protective, I couldn’t see how it related to me, but over the years, I came to realize that Harry felt that I needed to work out my own way of doing things. He was well aware of my fascination with Walker Evans and he made it his business to push me towards understanding my own connection with vernacular subjects. Harry strongly believed that you solved problems relating to ideas or technique by making more photographs, and he was right. I eventually came to appreciate different kinds of light and taught myself the applicable techniques but as this came about through the evolution of my own ideas, not because I was told that I should.
The opportunity to learn from Callahan and Evans was priceless. They couldn’t have been more different as artists or as people but both had a deep commitment to their ideas about photography and became the bookends of my education. Callahan made pictures almost every day, in a constant flow of experimentation and production and likely made as many photographs in a year as Evans did in a lifetime. Evans used photography, employing a variety of styles until he hit upon his own adaptation of the deadpan directness of nineteenth century record and survey pictures that became his signature.
In 1972 a friend saw a mint wooden 8×10 Deardorff at the closeout sale of the famous old Altman’s store in Chicago. That camera represented the acme of photographic technique, at least for me; similar equipment was used to make precise documents for science, commerce, portraiture, and architecture, even art. Knowing that I wanted one, he telephoned me. I immediately mailed him a check, and he purchased the camera and sent it to me, I’ve used it ever since.
Just unfolding the device to set it up has always presented a potentially threatening, albeit out-of-date, technology that can be greeted by hostility or marvel, sometimes both; you can never predict. People have thought that I was from the government, the press, an insurance company , even Hollywood, and have responded accordingly. I’ve spent a great deal of time explaining myself.
R. Page from Photography LogBook 1973
At first I would just go off on the road searching for the perfect subject in precisely the right conditions, much like entering a studio to produce a painting. I might drive a thousand miles to make two or three photographs. In 1976 I became part of the Seagram Bicentennial Court House project for which I had to produce usable pictures at every assigned site. This forced me to search beyond what I initially thought worthwhile, and I became a much better photographer for it. At the time my subjects were county courthouses and their environs, down the road they included baseball parks, barbeque joints, folk art, private clubs and schools, shop interiors and windows, highway signs, taco trucks. I came to understand that my best role was as a collector, not as a creator.
I rarely take photographs without people around; they just aren’t in the frame of the picture. Sometimes they are slightly off to the side, in the next room, perhaps nearby down the street waiting patiently while I make the exposures. We have conversations and exchange stories. Since their individual sensibilities are the foundation for my photographs each picture is something of a portrait. While I don’t believe you need a backstory to fully appreciate any individual picture, travel itself is a series of anecdotes, encounters, and events, and so, expanding on the notion of this book as a a journey I’ve included a few favorite tales. If there seems to be an emphasis on food, it is important to remember that not only armies travel on their stomachs.
Garage with Corrugated Metal Front, US 31, between Calera and Ocampo, Alabama, 1968
While I was still in school I didn’t take very careful field notes, which was surprising since I was completely smitten with the way that Walker Evans had scrupulously organized his records. I copied his method of writing instructions for processing and printing on each negative sleeve, but as far as notations about the location went I wasn’t very accurate or detailed. Since that time I have filled eleven thick sketchbooks with all sorts of information from highway numbers and times of day to biking and running routes, but in this case the only certainty is that the picture was taken in October 1968 on US 31 somewhere between Calera, then a small rural town and now the fastest growing city in Alabama and Ocampo, a hamlet that was completely abandoned in 1914 and has been a spot on the road ever since.
The car that I had at the time was perfect for long trips in every way save two – it was a VW hatchback with Massachusetts plates. I might as well have painted the words “Yankee liberal” on it in Day-Glo lettering. As a result of a few scrapes with the authorities that could have ended badly but for good fortune I vigilantly obeyed the speed limit and carefully fed every possible parking meter. But despite all expectations, there were times when presumptions and stereotypes collided with reality in unpredictable ways.
Earlier on this particular trip I was in Bonham, a small city in East Texas, with two friends from graduate school. One of them had relatives in the town and was making the journey to conduct some family business. Unbeknownst to me, he had packed an oil-cloth wrapped pistol all the way from Rhode Island in the glove compartment of my car. I freaked out when he produced it after a Sunday chicken dinner at his Aunt Clella’s, suggesting we drill a few tin cans that he had set up in the backyard.
The next day, while he was tending to affairs, my other friend and I decided to have an ice cream at the soda fountain on the town square. The ladies running the place seemed uncomfortable with our presence, so we took our cones to go, climbed back into the VW. We had circled the courthouse and made a right-hand turn when rrrrrRRRRRR!, with siren wailing and bubble gum machine flashing, an enormous V8 county sheriff’s cruiser pulled out from the shadows and up alongside. The deputy behind the wheel motioned to me to pull over and roll down my window and when he decamped from his vehicle he was at least ten feet tall and wearing the shiniest belt buckle and the biggest side arm I’d ever seen. He was even slowly chewing on a toothpick.
He eased over, his huge body completely blocking the light. Staring right through me, put his meat-hook hands on the door and said, “The ladies phoned me from the ice cream parlor, you boys from Massachusetts?” My heart sank, we were done for, as he continued, “Aw, don’t mind them, I’m from Quincy, Mass, I married a girl from down here and this was the best job I could get. Just wanted to talk to somebody from home. Hey, how are them Red Sox gonna do next year?” (Note: The Red Sox 1967 “Impossible Dream” pennant drive had taken place the previous fall after more than twenty straight seasons of ineptitude and mediocrity.)
Court Billiard Parlor, US 421, Harlan, Kentucky, 1977
On my first day in Harlan, Kentucky I needed a haircut. The barbershop was next to the pool hall and across the street from the courthouse that I planned to photograph, so it was all conveniently located. It turned out that the barber and I were both distance runners. We were chatting amiably but he stopped me in my tracks by asking how I carried my gun when I went out training on the road. At the time Harlan had a homicide rate that rivaled murderous Motown or Ed Koch’s New York, although these days this is no longer the case. In 1977 circumstances born of coal-field strife, bootlegging and family feuds set the scene for my visit to the county courthouse where the sheriff, the same Billy G. Williams of Barbara Koppel’s Harlan County, USA fame introduced me to the byzantine world of a “dry” county. His office looked like a bodega, stacked to the rafters with confiscated PBR, Jim Beam, and Thunderbird. He said that he was actually in favor of legalizing alcohol but the church and the bootleggers had formed an unholy alliance to block his progressive views.
He told me a story of coming home one night and bending over to get the mail from his roadside box only to look up and see a burning Chevy roaring down the hollow intended to do his squashed features to a golden turn courtesy of the Harlan County friends of temperance. He said that every election day upstanding citizens sold their votes for a free fifth of sour mash, paid for by the prohibitionists who, in collusion with the region’s bootleggers would slip bottles of hooch to true believers out behind the county’s houses of worship.
Magistrate’s Bench, Harlan County Courthouse. US 421, Harlan, KY 1977
To help me gain perspective on Harlan County ways, Sheriff Williams invited me to attend a pretrial hearing for a particularly grisly murder, where a supposedly wronged husband had gunned down his young bride after being told she had cheated on him. The act had divided the two families into feuding factions, like latter day Hatfields and McCoys, and the prospect of further mayhem made for the highest security with beefy deputies patting everybody down for knives and pistols at the door.
The sheriff, doubling as bailiff, gaveled proceedings to order by rapping his Zippo lighter on the bench and ordered all to rise for the judge’s entrance. It appeared that fearing possible retribution not a single one of the jurors had shown up. The judge declared that everyone had “gone fishin’,” and beckoned the attorneys for both sides to approach the bench. Every single soul in the jam-packed courtroom leaned forward attentively, straining to catch the whispered negotiations between the three huddled men. The conclusion reached was that with no one sworn in and available to start the trial, the judge could recommend that the case be tried in the far western part of the state. The two groups of grim-faced relatives, who made up most of the audience, filed out via separate entrances greatly relieved that at least on that particular day they would not have to confront one another.
Coca-Cola Sign, US 72, Burnsville, Mississippi, 1978
Going on the road is often a solitary venture and while I have had many wonderful companions, including abandoned kittens, much of the time I’ve been alone with the radio. I’ve outlasted Susan Stamberg, Bob Edwards, Noah Adams, Linda Wertheimer, and Daniel Schorr on All Things Considered, but Terry Gross will always ride shotgun.
In 1978 midlife muddles caused me to abandon a secure teaching appointment for a job as a deckhand on an offshore oil supply boat in South Louisiana. My plan was to parlay the “7&7” work rotation, alternating a week of travel and photography with seven days offshore, into studying for the LSATs when I wasn’t cleaning decks or throwing ropes. I never took the test but I did do a great deal of driving throughout the Deep South and Texas with the radio on.
I was in Memphis on Sunday, October 1, when the Boston Red Sox capped off an improbable two-month run by defeating Toronto on the final day of the regular season to force a one game playoff with the New York Yankees. Later that evening my boss from the boat company called to tell me that I’d been re-assigned and should be at the fuel dock in Dulac, Louisiana first thing that following Wednesday. I had left a lot of clothes and other things at a friend’s house in Atlanta, and as I had to collect them, I wanted to make sure to see the big showdown set for the next afternoon.
I chose to go back on US 72, then a two-lane truck route out of Memphis that takes a gentle diagonal across northern Mississippi and ducks south at the beginning of the Tennessee River valley past places like Iuka, Muscle Shoals and on to Chattanooga. The drive to Atlanta was going to take eight hours, so I left early in the morning to look for things to photograph, planning to stop at a bar along the highway and watch the game.
Sometimes there are subjects that are so ubiquitous that they resist being singled out. This is certainly true with the omnipresent Coke, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, RC Cola and 7-Up signs that seem to dot every highway, county road and building front below the Mason-Dixon Line. To make an effective picture of such a thing requires unique circumstances and the warm penetrating light that early fall morning, combined with the green piney woods behind, yellowish-brown dirt of the roadside, and deep blue sky overhead, made the slightly down at the mouth, double-sided, bright red, button-style Coca Cola emblem burst into my view like a cherry bomb going off in a toilet.
Thrilled, I took the picture, jumped back into the car and kept going but when I stopped later for a soda I failed to notice the lack of beer in the Quick Mart cooler. I hadn’t accounted for the fact that I was traversing a belt of dry counties and there wouldn’t be any bars where I could stop. I furiously dialed around on the radio but there was nothing but bubblegum country, heavy metal and born-again brimstone until at the very, very bottom of the FM dial I found a TV channel from Huntsville with the game. I was driving along listening to the less than fully descriptive audio waft in and out, getting deeper and deeper into Appalachian Alabama valleys, when Bucky Dent drove his dinky pop fly dagger into the Red Sox heart, the coup de grace to what many have called the greatest pennant race ever.
Rear of Grandstand, Dudley Field, El Paso, Texas 1988
In a fifteen-year period I took pictures of more than two hundred different baseball parks throughout the United States and Canada. At Yankee Stadium a flack followed me around, checking under the dark cloth to be certain the Yankee symbol wouldn’t be in any of my photographs. At a few of the minor league parks the groundskeeper would lock me inside, telling me to be certain to shut the gate when I had finished. Every baseball stadium has unique features and fascinating histories at every stadium, but there was no more colorful, madcap setting than Dudley Field, the home of the Double AA, Texas League, El Paso Diablos.
The ballpark was on the southeast side of town, within smelling distance of the city zoo and only a few blocks from the Rio Grande. Legend had it that during the Depression years half the crowd would wade across the border to attend home games, slipping back to Juarez after the final out. When I was in attendance the ambience, announcements and audience were totally bilingual making for an atmosphere that was part circus and part fiesta. A hopped-up public address announcer kept everything at fever pitch, bawling insults and playing mocking ditties directed at the opposing team while continually heaping hyperbolic praise on “your El Paso Diabloooooos.!!!”
Further evidence of this vaudeville sensibility was a local tradition that
held that after a hometown hero hit a homer and finished circling the bases he would jog around the perimeter of the stands holding his batting helmet inverted towards the fans who gleefully stuffed it full of dollar bills, a sporting version of a pole dance at the Bada Bing. During my visit this happened twice but it could easily have been more since the park was a tiny bandbox with no lead ever safe. One famous game ended Diablos 35, Beaumont 21.
The Old El Paso Foods Company sponsored the signature yellow and red motif that covered every square inch of roof, wall and seat, giving the stadium the look of an elongated, floodlit gordita dinner box. The top of the visiting team dugout bore the designation “Enemy” and the outfield wall was festooned with a double layer of fifty different ads each one outlined with the same little red triangles that appeared on the containers and cans of the sponsor’s products.
At minor league parks I often took the pictures while a game was in progress. So as not to block anyone’s way I would buy a seat for myself as well as the two adjacent ones to set up my camera and tripod and would sit chatting with other fans until the light was just right. This particular evening I took the inside panorama early on and went to take another picture across from the back of the adobe and corrugated metal grandstand with the word “BASEBALL” painted diagonally in chili can red capital letters. A breeze wafted back and forth swapping stenches from the sewage treatment plants to the east and Mona the Elephant’s cage across the park to the west. The street itself was deserted, the crowd was still inside watching the game but at the moment I opened the shutter a lone low-rider went by and popped a wheelie causing his red brake lights to produce a Zorro-style red slash across the bottom of the picture.
The Swimming Pool, University Club, New York, New York. 1998.
Brendan Gill, the New York author and preservationist, wrote that the only bills Walker Evans ever paid on time were his membership dues at the Century Association, a discreetly private midtown Beaux Arts enclave for men “engaged or interested in letters and the fine arts,” according to a statement by its founders. The club did open its membership to women in 1988.
In 1968 Evans took me to have lunch in the club’s outer dining room that was set up each day in the antique, fuchsia-wallpapered library, supplying me with a coat and tie so I could enter the premises. From where we sat I caught a glimpse of the wood-paneled inner sanctum that contained the Long Table where members dined with one another if they were alone. Thirty-five years later, clad in my own suit, I stood in the same spot to take pictures for a project suggested to me by Brendan Gill.
I have made photographs at twenty-five different private associations, clubs and libraries in New York City, and while their intrinsic formality might seem at odds with my work, their idiosyncratic and varied natures are decidedly not.
Manhattan has at least forty different institutions that would qualify under the rubric of traditional private clubs. There is a club that caters to gentlemen who put on humorous theatrical productions (The Amateur Comedy Club), a club where both sexes lunch in a contemporary version
of the Algonquin Round Table of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker (The Coffee House), a club where people gather to chat about their pedigreed dogs (The Leash).
There are clubs of social affinity, for people who collect things or pursue particular activities or sports. There are clubs that bear the names of colleges and universities and are for alumni of those institutions, and there is also the huge, unaffiliated University Club, formed in 1861 by a group of recent graduates to continue collegial associations.
The University club’s marble and tile swimming pool, in the basement of the seven story, palazzo-style building, is shut down once a year for two days – emptied, scrubbed clean and then refilled with fresh water that gushes from a lion’s head. The other 363 days it is used by the male membership swim laps, or just float and relax, bathing suits optional. The pool is directly below the Fifth Avenue corner depicted in Norman Rockwell’s famous 1960 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, University Club where a few elderly members watch through an ornate window while a young woman flirts with a sailor.
Clem’s Place, US 1 & 158, Norlina, North Carolina 2000
Barbecue, barbeque, Bar-B-Q, Bar-B-Que, BBQ, ‘cue and Q are all common derivations likely from the French barbe a queue which, literally translated means “from chin to tail” and describes the roasting of some kind of impaled creature above smoking coals. Across the United States, particularly in the Southern half, there are far more possibilities for selection and preparation than spellings and only the uninformed and innocent who asks for an inappropriate combinations of meat and condiments.
With many regional differences now flattened by cable TV, big box chains and the internet, it is amazing to know that a distance of just a few miles can still dictate significant distinctions in the kind and cut of animal on your plate and the sauce that permeates it. At Clem’s Place, behind the car wash next to the big turn on US 1 at the North Carolina/Virginia line, the pork came in shreds and was mixed with cracklings and a thin red pepper-vinegar sauce. At King’s Barbecue No.1, less than an hour to the north on the same highway, I was able to order smoked beef, chicken or pork with the sauce served on the side – full of tangy ketchup added to the vinegar base that gave it the consistency of puree. Pure heresy only a short distance to the south.
Clem’s was a soul food spot that concentrated on the midday meal. King’s was a regular restaurant serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, staying open until 8:00 p.m., late for those parts. In addition to pulled pork, Clem’s offered chitlins, collard greens, corn bread, mac and cheese, stewed tomatoes and banana cream pie, each slice tightly wrapped in plastic and kept in rows on the counter. The menu at Kings included barbecue beans, biscuits, French fries, hash browns, ham steaks, fried oysters, onion rings and slaw. Apple pie a la mode was the prime dessert, and a custom smoking service was available should you choose to bring in your own catch.
The décor at Clem’s was a pastiche of practicality, some leftover green paint trim from the abutting car wash, a segment of wooden fence behind the iced tea dispenser, pastel tartan oilcloths on the tables; everything seemed piecemeal yet perfect. King’s Barbecue No.1 had a far more self-conscious style, with tongue-in-groove pine paneling, a collection of porcelain pigs, and a yellowing enlargement of a Civil War photograph above the counter in the main dining room. King’s No.1 employed a fleet of battle-axes-with-hearts-of-gold waitresses while at Clem’s the different dishes were dolloped onto paper plates atop a red plastic tray.
There are similar contrasts all along the great barbecue highways like US 11, 80 and 301 that run north/south/east/west through and across states such as Alabama, Arkansas, the Carolinas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. As the landscape changes one moves from sweet tea to Shiner Bock beer, hush puppies to Texas Toast, sliced dill pickles to jalapenos on the side, and of course, myriad variations of meat and sauce.
Many of the great barbecue places started out as holes in the wall, as Clem’s has often been described, sometimes expanding to larger buildings and sometimes multiple locations, hence King’s No.1, which was on the highway outside Petersburg as opposed the second King’s downtown. Since the picture was taken Clem’s has become the Roadside Café and King’s No.1 is now Eley’s BBQ, although still owned by the same family.
Darcy’s Café, US 81, Grand Forks, North Dakota 2001
Twenty years before this picture was taken I had my first “Trucker’s Special” at Darcy’s Café; coffee, two eggs over easy, bacon, toast and jelly with a small paper cup of chunky peanut butter on the side. It was also my first winter morning in North Dakota yet it was nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the parking lot, the same temperature as inside the plain breakfast spot that sat in the middle of an undistinguished business block in Grand Forks, hard by the more picturesquely named and decorated Paradiso Mexican restaurant, Happy Harry’s Bottle Shop, Home of Economy outlet store and Slapshot Pizza.
Darcy’s was always full of friendly men in bib overalls and bulky Carhartt outerwear drinking mug after mug of surprisingly weak coffee (I soon discovered that the mild brew was by intent, you could drink more and linger longer). On that first day they seemed somewhat overdressed for the January thaw, but less than a day later the temperature topped off at ten above zero and stayed that way for weeks.
Initially I went to North Dakota on a commission to photograph folk art that couldn’t be moved; tree-sized, chainsaw-sculpted garden gnomes; a thirty-foot-high wooden cactus; old combines called “dinosaurs” that had been decorated and hauled up to the tops of hills – the handiwork of a population of creative farmers, ranchers and store owners who had time to kill before the late planting or after the early harvest. Having tinkered with the tractor for the umpteenth time, what better than to build a hundred wooden coo-coo clocks at the kitchen table as the winter winds howl?
One thing I’m certain of is that going back to the same place over and over allows for a useful distillation process. I once convinced a friend to triangulate a trip from Los Angeles to Boston via Tuskegee, Alabama so I could re-photograph a particular courtroom from the front as the one I had taken from the back had proven to be less than stellar. In North Dakota I had crossed and crisscrossed the state looking for folk art, and when I returned almost a generation later I was able to distinguish all sorts of other things, mostly relating to small town life as it was being squeezed by mega-farming, cycles of oil and gas boom and bust, and the flight of young people to the Twin Cities or the coasts.
I went back to North Dakota seven more times and on every trip I went to Darcy’s at least once. Sometimes it was open, others times closed, the ownership and hours fluctuated, but when it was in business there were the same customers and the same hearty Trucker’s Special. I always wanted to take a picture of the place but somehow it never looked as wonderful as it felt.
One day I walked in to find a large Pop-Art-style painting of a coffee cup made on plywood hanging above a rack of brewing appliances on the back counter. It was if Roy Lichtenstein had paid a visit, and the combination of colors and the juxtaposition of objects now added up to something that was more than before and made for the perfect picture of the place. When I asked the owner why he had decided to have the sign made his answer was that he hadn’t. He had rented the restaurant to be used for a movie while he went on vacation and the set designer had painted and installed the cup for effect. When he got back he decided to leave it, a happy instance of life imitating art imitating life imitating art.
Cemitas Tepeaca Taco Truck at the Five Points Mural, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, California, 2009
Taco trucks are one of the most popular Los Angeles institutions, a result of the city being the second largest Mexican metropolis in the world. The Los Angeles Business Journal estimates that there are at least two thousand of the colorfully adorned, purpose-built vehicles moving about the avenues, streets, and boulevards, setting up at curbside or parking lots at all hours and in every neighborhood, rich and poor alike.
These convenient commissaries first became popular in the 1970s, coinciding with a mushrooming Mexican population that wanted the same good, cheap street food found everywhere back home. Thirty years along these movable diners are the subject of internet and magazine reviews, academic dissertations, and flurries of tweets that announce the appearance of a particularly trendy truck at the appointed cool corner. But this goes only for the few that are dubbed worthy by the hipster bloggers and foodies. Most of the trucks are mobile mom-and-pop shops, vehicles of dreams, carrying the weight of a whole family’s aspirations for financial success.
(c) 2010 Rand McNally
I used to drive around the country looking out the car window until I saw something I wanted to photograph. Searching for taco trucks across L.A.’s enormous grid is more like Hollywood location scouting and involves a laptop, Google and websites like The Great Taco Hunt or LA TACO, and a mobile phone, as well as annotating the pages of a spiralbound atlas of Los Angeles with color coded Post-it notes with hard-won information. Maps aside, none of these methods of picture hunting existed when I started out.
A taquero often has to multitask to get by and often has two, even three jobs. In West LA, Don Pepe parks his taco truck on West Adams in front of his auto body shop. His daughter, who runs the counter at Pepe’s Tacos, leaves her flamingo pink T0Bird between the truck’s little back patio and a lot of waiting wrecks and freshly delivered parts. The patrons use a restroom at the back of the auto body shop, where the business cards covering the walls reveal that Don Pepe is also a full-fledged mariachi with a four-piece band (and three CDs) available for bookings.
Tacos across Mexico are even more diverse than barbecue in the United States. Every region and state has its own style, and then there are the salsas. If mustard, vinegar, and tomato with some type of pepper are the ingredients for most gringo sauces, the variety of condiments that bear the name salsa boggle the mind; red, black, green, sweaty hot, mild, wild, raw, ranch, mole, and mango. Every truck offers unique mixtures and selections.
As is common practice, the truck parked in front of the mural at Five Points at the eastern edge of Los Angeles advertises the origins of both the owner and the fare. Cemitas refers to the deliciously dense sandwiches made with large amounts of avocado, white cheese and meat that originated in Puebla and the hometown of the folks that run the enterprise.
Some things change while others don’t. Recently I was traveling Highway 99, the Main Street of California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley looking for rural cousins of the urban trucks. My oddball requests for permission to take a photograph, delivered in Tarzan Spanish, can elicit suspicion, on this trip such reactions were the norm. I’d failed to notice, until a kindly taquero pointed it out, that my rental car had Arizona plates, an association with their recent immigration law that I certainly didn’t need, like my German hatchback forty years before the had “Massachusetts” written all over it.
The water retreated and alkali lay upon the land. Jim Dow first came to the semiarid Northern Plains in the winter of I981 when the alkali lay heavily upon the land. Coinciding with his arrival, Bismarck experienced the highest January temperature on record: sixty-two degrees above zero, I00 degrees above Dow’s expectations. And the word “snirt” entered his vocabulary.
Snirt, a miserable melding of snow and dirt, blows across the landscape during open winters. Bypassed by fall rains, the topsoil is bone dry at freeze-up, and the deepening cold squeezes the remaining wetness from the scant snow. Combining, these fine particles of shifting snirt blanket the earth and blacken the sky, making everyone wretched. When the prevailing westerlies die down, the snirt settles and Jim Dow’s camera records a different truth. Under the shining sun, the graveyard near Hague (page 172) becomes glorious with its sheen of blue-black velvet, a foil for a field of elegant iron crosses forged by Germans from Russia, immigrants to the Dakotas at the end of the nineteenth century.
North Dakota: the landscape absorbs the people, marking them, possessing them. The seasons consume their minutes, their days, their years, and finally their lifetimes. In North Dakota, all conversations begin with the weather. While still back in Boston, Jim Dow’s first exchanges were about his 8 x IO camera: would it function in the brittle cold of January? He soon learned to worry about his fingers: the camera would manage just fine.
During the two decades between Jim Dow’s first visits in the early 1980s and his return in 2000, the climate on the Northern Plains moved through a vast cycle of change. In 1988, dry weather once again gripped the land, only to be broken in 1993 by an exceptionally wet spring and summer; followed close on by heavy spring snowfall in 1994. The accumulation continued into the historic winter of 1996-1997, when raging blizzards and record snows culminated in an April flood of Biblical proportions. Battered by ice jams and overrun with melted snow, the north-flowing Red River grew into a vast inland sea, stretching from the South Dakota border; across eastern North Dakota, western Minnesota, and into Manitoba, where it drained into the Hudson Bay, hundreds of miles to the north. Dow sat glued to his television in Boston, little imagining how these changes would mark his adopted North Dakota-a place to which he was destined to return.
Farther west, the drama played out more slowly. Devils Lake is the largest freshwater lakein the state. It is also in a closed basin, second in size only to Utah’s Great Salt Lake, neither of which has an outlet. When Dow began his photographic venture, some experts feared that Devils Lake was drying up again. Short years later; the lake began a relentless march, overflowing its banks, taking out hundreds of homes and businesses, reclaiming thousands of acres of farmland. Ten years later; the water tenaciously clings to its extended shoreline.
Shifting, changing weather; endless winds, extremes of heat and cold: these are the forces that dominate all forces across the Northern Plains; these are the powers that tailor the landscape and inform the spirit of the people. Uncannily absent, weather is the unseen frame that encircles every Jim Dow photograph.
Dow first came to the Northern Plains at the invitation of the North Dakota Museum of Art. The Museum had recently been involved in a statewide folk-art survey that resulted in an exhibition. Oddly incomplete, the exhibition begged for all the stuff that wasn’t there: stuff too large, too permanent, too embedded into the landscape, unrecognizable as folk art even. Yes, Dow agreed, he would spend a couple of months photographing folk art within the landscape.
In the beginning, North Dakota folklorist Nicholas Vrooman drew roadmaps and made introductions to bona fide “folk artists.” It wasn’t long, however; before Dow took over his own itinerary and began to expand the definition of “folk art” and” in the landscape.” Crisscrossing the state, armed with his young bride and this photo student or that-all happy to sign on as assistants-Dow would pull into any and every town. The cafe or bar would be his first stop. Out would come a binder of pictures. “Anyone around here make something interesting?” Ever polite, looking not unlike the working man sitting on the bar stool next to him, Jim Dow got people remembering. “There is this old guy…” and Dow would be off.
Again, the weather dictated the making. Most farmers and ranchers in places like North Dakota are skilled mechanics, gifted welders, brilliant make-doers. Their lives split into two seasons: farming and fixing. Their shops are their winter places of business-and their refuge. Christmas rolls around and hidden under the tree among the warm socks and sweatshirts and books is a coveted tool, for; as soon as fall work is finished, the season of “winter repairs” begins.
Repair work gets tedious, so one welds together a dog cart, fabricates a mechanical toy, carves a wooden rocking horse. Maybe a planter for beside the house or a whimsical mailbox. Soon, unplanned, and unpremeditated, a sculpture emerges, then a yard full of objects that no local would think to call art, then a museum of one’s own to contain it all. And the neighbors come by for a look, and the winter passes, and it’s time to begin spring work. The shop reverts to its original place for repairing machinery. And lurking in the borders of every Jim Dow photograph is the human impulse to mark one’s passing through ordinary days, to let the imagination wander; to allow some pleasure to creep into one’s work, to wonder.
Dominating Dow’s peopleless photographs are the people. North Dakota, a vast grassland mostly devoid of trees-excepting for a few trillion planted by white settlers-was always home to migrating peoples. Early farmers, the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa settled along the Missouri River. The nomadic people, the Dakota and the Lakota, moved with the seasons from summer camps to winter grounds and back. Centuries later; white settlers came across the Canadian border from Scotland and Ireland, overland from the East, having arrived earlier from Norway and Sweden, from England. The Armenians and Syrians turned up, also from the East. Jews came south from Winnipeg. Chinese passed through on railroad crews, and a few stayed on to open restaurants. By and large, the English and the Jews retreated to more settled places. Life was hard. At the end of the nineteenth century, Iceland spewed out twenty-five percent of its population, some I0,000 to 15,000 immigrants, all starving. They stayed, bridging the territory between southern Manitoba and northeastern North Dakota, intent upon creating a New Iceland. Today, it remains the largest Icelandic settlement outside of the home country. Germans from Russia formed self-contained communities in what would become south-central North Dakota. Scholars continue to seek them out, intent upon studying German as it was spoken all those years ago.
In the United States, the settling of the Dakota Territory occurred in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. The years between 1877 and 1913 saw populations explode, railroads snake their way across the continent, and factories, which primarily produced textiles before the Civil War, soon rolled out every kind of product. In 1889, midst all this change, North Dakota became a state with few traditional craft traditions. Why weave when yard goods could be bought in town for pennies? Why spend days and nights in the ceramic shed when kitchenware could be traded for a dozen eggs? But some skills couldn’t be bought. Just as the Germans immigrants made their grave markers (pages 172-75), Norwegian woodworkers spent long winter months inside their churches carving traditional altars (page 168). Amateur architects imagined small buildings, the likes of which they had never seen. These wonders became magnets for early morning coffee or Saturday nights out. Surely the Kite Cafe in Michigan (page 132), the Starlite Garden in Fingel (page 134), or the Big Fish Supper Club in Bena, Minnesota (page 135), assisted in the transformation of lonely and demanding lives into knitted communities essential for survival.
And these people painted. How they painted! Signs, of course, were necessary, so signs became the canvas of choice for many a skilled amateur. Once signs could be made commercially. the painters became designers and the signs remained local inventions. Even industrial products begged for embellishment (page 158).
Jim Dow, ever the sports fan and widely recognized for his panoramas of major league baseball stadiums and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic sports palaces, returned to North Dakota in 2000. He had been commissioned to photograph Northern League baseball fields. Passing through Grand Forks, Dow called and invited me to join him at a local, semipro baseball game. And it began all over again. Somehow the money came together, modest amounts, of course. Accompanied by a new batch of assistants, who were also his students at the Boston Museum School and Tufts University, Dow resumed his pilgrimages. This time there were no restrictions: “Shoot whatever you please. Sure, cross the borders into Minnesota and South Dakota, for they also are ‘our’ people, their ‘stuff’ is our stuff.”
By the end of 2005, Jim Dow had shot more than 300 photos. Except for Walter Piehl, the lone artist sleeping in his studio (page 78), a crowd at a baseball game (pages 150-51), and photographs of outstanding citizens lining the halls of the capitol (page 144), Dow’s photographs are devoid of people. Instead, they inhabit the margins, felt but unseen. Only their makings and their markings upon the land remain visible. This body of photographs is a gift to the people of this small corner of the world-little known people whose lives are ruled by climate and distance and longing-from an artist who has come to cherish them.
It used to be said that only mad dogs and Englishmen ventured out in the noonday sun in places such as Khartoum, Cairo, and Calcutta. And certainly it would take a fool of similar magnitude to agree to travel around North Dakota in January and February to take photographs of folk-art objects that couldn’t be moved. Yet that is exactly what I agreed to do during a telephone conversation with Laurel Reuter, the eminently persuasive Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art.
Just a few days later. I found myself in Grand Forks, on the twentieth of January 1981 with the thermometer standing at seventy degrees. Two days later, it had dropped to zero, but such fluctuations of temperature have been only one aspect of what has turned out to be twenty-five years full of contradictions and surprises.
In North Dakota, what is on, in, or below the surface of the land governs everyone’s fortune, good and bad. Coming from the East my first impression was to gasp at the enormous scale of what I then saw as unfettered, incomprehensibly empty space that stretched mile upon mile in every direction. It was only after some time and an enormous amount of help from a great many different people that I came to understand that almost every available inch of land is usefully engaged, often in multiple ways. Eventually I was able to see that the insistent, precisely parallel sugar beet rows are sown within a hairbreadth of the highway right-of-way; that the number of cattle permitted to graze per acre is painstakingly parsed out with strict adherence to what the local water table will bear; or that the scale of shale-oil operations is consistently governed by microscopic attention to calculations that balance the world price per barrel with exploratory costs of digging it all up and refining it. If intensity of land usage might be taken as analogous to density of population, then North Dakota offers the complexity of Manhattan or Mexico City.
There are relatively few people per square mile throughout the Dakotas, and that rarity gives a special value to every human activity and interchange. It may seem strange to think that this book is really about people, since, on first inspection, none appear in the pictures; but every single image reproduced here is both a document and a testimony to human enterprise and ingenuity. The subjects are as varied and complex as the population: consistently pragmatic, but also blending the symbolic, humorous, and ironic into a rich visual and cultural fabric that binds the enormous expanse of the High Plains into a coherent whole. At times, they are as straightforward as an outsized wooden watermelon slice, sculpted by a twelve-year-old girl wielding a chain saw. In other cases, they are as self-consciously subtle as the gentle arc of the art deco metal bar at Whitey’s, lovingly restored after the 1997 flood that devastated much of Grand Forks and the surrounding area. In each and every instance, they are worthy of attention in their powerful testimony to the self-reliance, imagination, and character of the individual sensibilities that created them.
VIEWS OF NORTH DAKOTA
The twenty-five-foot-high brick walls, originally built in 1910 to encircle the North Dakota State Penitentiary, were, by 1981, a sagging, crumbling relic of more than a half century of enclosure and isolation for as many as 530 men whose transgressions against society ranged from keeping marijuana in the pickup to first-degree murder. With the death sentence outlawed since 1915 and a traditionally cautious approach by parole boards statewide, most inmates had to deal with the prospect of long sentences without being able to catch more than a glimpse of the rolling hills and wheat fields that surround the aging facility located on the outskirts of Bismarck, the state capital.
Charles Olive was sent to prison for the murder of a sixteen-year-old boy, David Ruff, a crime that included kidnapping and sexual abuse. Sentenced to life imprisonment, the front gates clanged shut behind him as he shuffled, handcuffed, into the slammer on January 30, 1956, facing the near certainty that he would spend the rest of his days within those four immense walls. Trained as a sign painter, he asked the warden if he could decorate the margins of the enclosure that demarcated his existence with a series of murals depicting all those places and spaces denied to him by his transgressions. The paintings, often as large as ten feet by twenty-five feet, were completed within a few years and covered three of the four walls. After serving sixteen years, a combination of good behavior and a thaw in Pardon Board policy resulted in his sentence being commuted in 1972 to fifty years. He was paroled in 1975 and stayed in the Bismarck area until his death in 1992.
Beginning in 1982, the original quadrangle of brickwork was replaced by chain-link fencing and razor wire that permitted broad, albeit slightly obscured, vistas for those inside and rendered Olive’s skillful panoramic replicas superfluous. Time and weather had degraded the quality of many of the murals, and there was no attempt to preserve them. Some of the bricks, however, were rescued from the rubble, cut up into small rectangles, and attached to blocks of wood by enterprising inmates, who crafted them into commemorative plaques with the recipient’s name and date of the wall’s demolition incised on the front. They were then given away as gifts or sold as souvenirs.
MARKING THE LAND
Practically everyone in North Dakota puts a mark on the landscape in some visible way; it goes with the territory. The reasons range from commercial to commemorative and are deeply embedded in the psychology of living in the midst of such unmitigated vastness. In the case of dinosaurs, a region-wide term for the disused threshing machines that are hauled up to the tops of hills, their presence is like a buoy or light that bobs on endless seas of white or green, depending on the season: a mechanically inoperative, often rust-encrusted, three-dimensional form of “Kilroy was here.” A glimpse of one of these creatures from afar; even on a bright, sun-drenched summer’s day, elicits a primordial frisson that stretches all the way back through the mechanization of the family farm, the free-range movements of the bison and nomadic Native American tribes to the time when an actual brontosaurus might have set itself down to rest atop a windswept moraine.
The landscape of North Dakota is punctuated by all kinds of perpendicular objects that stand out against the insistent high skies. There is a wind farm full of whirligigs near Minot, a gigantic concrete buffalo at Jamestown, and a candy cane “Home of Economy” sign in almost every major population center. There are water towers decorated with college colors, stucco statues of Norse warriors, metal storks, and, of course, church steeples and grain elevators everywhere. Amongst all of this imperative of verticality, nothing stands out like the calculated incongruity of Henry French’s fifty-foot wooden cactus that rises above the potato and sugar beet fields near Cashel.
Like many successful farmers, French became a snowbird, a term for someone who opts for the sunshine and warmth of either the Florida coast or the Arizona desert during the worst months of winter. In Henry French’s case, he fell in love with all things Southwestern, particularly the spectacular saguaro cactuses that grew near the kitchen window of his winter home. Since these plants could hardly be expected to survive if transplanted to the prairie, he built one: fifty-feet high in three wooden sections with metal rods at their cores to resist the wind, so he could truck them back to Cashel to reassemble in his back yard next to the barbeque smoker.
ARTISTS AND THE WORKPLACE
To a great degree, the North Dakota tradition of self-reliance has been forged in thousands of workshops situated in the corners of barns and basements, of garages and outbuildings. People of all ages spend hours and hours adjusting, building, calibrating, designing, engineering, and fiddling with every kind of device, machine, and material imaginable. While much of the resulting production is insistently practical, the idiosyncratic nature of each person’s storage system for tools, parts, and bits, to say nothing of the infinite variations of apparatus installed for specific tasks, make each shop the particular province of its occupant and an artwork in its own right.
North Dakotans spend massive amounts of time driving trucks, tractors, and combines; sitting in duck blinds; checking oil rigs; racing snowmobiles; mending fences; playing golf; shoveling dirt, gravel, or snow; playing or watching hockey; walking their dogs. It is an outdoor kind of place, and the populace is, for the most part, made up of outdoor people; the immense scale and distinct seasons ensure that such is the case. Yet, the overwhelming distances and climactic intensity encourage these same folks to linger amidst the comforts and closeness of their kitchens, coffee shops, bars, lounges, clubs, workshops, and stores. Even the signs along the roads display this twin condition, compelling the traveler to keep on going, yet beckoning to come inside. In so many ways, this duality sums up everything about the state: grand yet intimate, timeless but completely temporal, harsh as howling midwinter winds yet gentle as an extra comforter over fresh, warm sheets.
With the growing season lasting only a fraction of the year, it would seem that there would be plenty of opportunity to tinker, but while there are more than 30,000 farms within its borders, more than half of North Dakotans live in town. In fact, more than fifty percent of the state’s total population (almost 350,000) work in non-farm jobs, often as second, even third occupations, and there are many farmers who commute and commuters who farm. Thus, most residents are both inside and outside people, and they seem to put their mark on the locations that they frequent in ways that can be as blatant as the “World’s Largest Holstein Cow” or as subtly inviting as the pattern of the place settings at a favorite coffee shop.
THE PEOPLE AND THEIR INGENUITY
From ornate spires, like those of the Warsaw cathedral jutting against the sky, to tiny cut-metal angels balanced atop iron crosses that peek out above the snow, (see Religious Life, on page 165), the need to visibly venerate and memorialize has been a continual, powerful impetus for crafting a presence in the immense North Dakota landscape.
Right: Wall Painting of Palm Trees. US 12, Marmath, ND 2003
Outsize cement bison and wooden cactuses, metal heifers and plastic Holsteins, stucco potatoes and drain pipes in the form of cans of pop, barn doorways that feature naked schoolteachers and a supper-club entrance through the maw of a ravenous walleye collectively pale as palliatives of the imagination next to palm trees and flamingos flourishing in the Upper Midwest. And while all these and other wonderful curiosities are to be found in every nook and cranny of the 70,704 square miles that encompasses North Dakota, as well as the contiguous environs of Minnesota and South Dakota, the recurrent, symbolically hardy yet realistically doomed image of the pink flamingo and the palm tree (page ii) is an all-pervading index of a definitively sublime resistance to climactic reality.
THE SEASONS
Spring In addition to placing objects on the land itself, North Dakotans often create competitions that celebrate the inexorably slow passage of the seasons. There are raffles to guess the number of inches of rainfall over a harvest cycle, lotteries regarding the depth of a winter’s worth of snow, sweepstakes on the number of goals the University of North Dakota hockey team might score over a full campaign. For a number of years, the boosters of Max have sought to raise funds for local projects by setting a section of highway culvert pipe, wrapped in the banner of the sponsoring soft drink brand, in the middle of a frozen pond by highway US 83. Starting a few days after New Year’s, people place bets at the nearby Texaco station as to when the faux pop container might sink into the slowly thawing ice, serving as an outsized harbinger of spring.
Summer In the city, the term “harvest” often calls up images of chilly nights, pumpkin zombies, decorative dried corn cobs, and other autumnal icons. But in North Dakota the first growth of hay matures in the midst of high summer with alfalfa getting cut three times between June and August. Passages of the harvest season become visible in a variety of ways. Huge bailers chug along in the sunset’s gloom – sometimes using the global positioning system – in their race to finish haying by the end of July. On the rolling ranchlands of the western half of North Dakota, the season is often acknowledged by assembling multiple hay bales into sculpture and placing them in a conspicuous spot, usually along the highway. These can be as fanciful as an outsized Raggedy Ann and Andy or as practical as a John Deere tractor, made completely to scale.
Fall Drivers in the Red River valley take particular care in September when fully laden potato trucks speed between fields and warehouses. What were section-sized tapestries of yellow sunflowers in the summer become acres of seedless, drooping hulks during October. In November, the curtain rings down with the incongruous sight of mountains of sugar beets, humming air conditioners at their cores to prevent spontaneous combustion within.
Winter The eastern quarter of North Dakota is as fine a spot for farming as exists in the world, sharing that appellation with places such as the pampas of Argentina, the grasslands of Brazil, or the breadbasket of the Ukraine. Part of the reason for the astonishing fertility of the region is that much of it lies on a gigantic glacial lake bed that has served to collect and mix rich, finely ground mineral deposits with centuries of decaying vegetation to continually enrich dark, fecund topsoil. Row upon row of WPA-planted shelterbelts have helped to minimize the losses from the incessant wind, but when winter arrives their naked branches offer scant protection. Because of the low temperatures and humidity, the snow is often as light and powdery as the loose soil. Gusting, swirling winter winds pick up and combine the two elements to create a microscopically pulverized, airborne emery board called “snirt,” a regional term derived from snow and dirt, much as smoke and fog combine to form “smog.”
Wind-driven snirt can penetrate a keyhole, sweep under a front door, or invade the workings of an air-conditioning unit in a nanosecond. The rasping, ultimately debilitating powder can foul an engine, wreck the finish on floors and furniture, or coat the clothing of the hapless occupant of the windward side of a car, creating a fluffy, frigid, latte-colored half-parka of snow and dirt.
HUNTING FISHING
Sports are taken very seriously everywhere in the United States, but nowhere is there a greater degree of interest and participation than in North Dakota. At the big-time level there is the holy trinity of University of North Dakota hockey, Minnesota Twins baseball, and Minnesota Vikings football. Just below, but only slightly, are high school football and basketball and American Legion and Babe Ruth League baseball and hockey in every permutation possible. There are golf courses laid out against prevailing winds that make the Scottish moors seem temperate, skateboard parks in shopping-center parking lots, and, in winter, a constant latticework of snowmobile tracks that seem to crisscross every single section from one end of the state to the other. You can buy ammo in most pharmacies, bait in bars, and camouflage in every convenience store.
If there were a hybrid sport called “huntingfishing,” there would be no question that it would upstage any combination of the others by miles.
RELIGIOUS LIFE
The immense numbers of places of worship in every city, town, and hamlet, as well as the myriad structures throughout the countryside, visually affirm the statistic that North Dakota contains the most church buildings per capita in the United States. The decorative vertical demarcations, only rivaled in size and number by the ever-present grain elevators, offer a spiritual rejoinder to agricultural ascendancy by virtue of a statewide plethora of clapboard spires, brick bell towers, stamped metal steeples, and even onion domes.
From the time of the earliest European settlement, prairie communities have gathered around their houses of worship according to denomination, and this continues to be the case today. According to the State Data Center in Fargo, 73.2 percent of North Dakotans described themselves as religious adherents in 2000 (ranking only behind Utah by 1.5 percentage points), and the state leads the nation with twenty-three officialcongregations for every 10,000 people. Of the religiously acknowledged, Lutherans account for thirty-five percent, with Catholics a close second at thirty percent. Whatever sectarian tensions existed in the past, a long-term level of tolerance on the part of almost every segment of the population precludes any such thing these days. In fact, the composition of the local crops seems to bear as much ecumenical import as any declared religious affiliation.
US 83, Strasburg, ND 1981
Contemporary North Dakotans are said to spend the least amount of time of any group of U.S. citizens in commuting to work, but they may well collectively travel the greatest distances to attend such church functions as weekly services, funerals, socials, and reunions. It often seems that the larger the gathering, the more remote the location, a phenomenon frequently memorialized through fading color photographs pinned to bulletin boards in the back rooms of country churches.
Far closer to the ground and located primarily in the southcentral section of the state are perhaps eighty graveyards and individual sites that feature blacksmith-crafted iron crosses. Never taller than a fully-grown adult and sometimes smaller than a child, these severe metal intersections are ornamented with tiny figures, designs, patterns, and symbols that read like notes on a musical score, offering an intimation of the life remembered.
The custom of fabricating these markers was developed by blacksmiths emigrating from the steppes of southern Russia and the Ukraine to the grasslands of North Dakota. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they settled in or near places such as Hague, Strasburg, and Zeeland. These descendants of German-speaking Bohemians, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians were making the journey to the New World less than a century after their forebears had migrated from Germany. In numerous ways, they were more inclined to transfer their traditions rather than adopt new ones. Penny-wise to the point of parsimony, both smith and client employed only what was at hand, often resulting in a spur-of-the-moment production from shards and scrap, hand-crafted in exchange for some poultry or produce.
DREAMING AND REDEMPTION
Those unfamiliar with North Dakota habitually say that it is cold, boring, flat, desolate, and empty-inadequate generalizations that simply don’t hold up. In fact, the landscape continually changes, mile by mile, from a dead horizontal in the east, to rolling bluffs, high buttes, broad rivers, and deep valleys in the center and west.
Practically every town of any size contains a grain elevator; but there is as much shale oil drilled, coal mined, cattle grazed, and electricity produced from the land as barley, oats, sugar beets, sunflowers, and wheat harvested. Milk is the official state drink by law, but beer is far more popular; and signs bearing magical names like Grain Belt, Leinenkugel, and Summit dot the landscape with as much frequency as those proclaiming Bud and Miller. While the sunflower is the state flower of Kansas, North Dakota leads the nation in the harvesting of the seeds for oil, snacks, and bird food. Prior to the breakup of the old Soviet Union, the state was the third leading nuclear power in the world because of the nuclear arsenals and the Grand Forks and Minot Air Force bases.
As of January I, 2007, there were eight Wal-Mart stores and twenty Burger King franchises within its borders. But there were also six Home of Economy outlets, five Paradiso Mexican Restaurants, four Happy Harry’s Bottle Shops, and three Space Alien Family Restaurants, in-state chains all started and owned by North Dakotans.
During the twenty-first century; almost 4,000 people have left the state annually despite the fact that per capita earnings and wages rose far more quickly than the national average. In 2004, North Dakota voters overwhelmingly supported George Bush, banned same-sex marriage, elected a Republican governor and lieutenant governor; plus heavy GOP majorities in both houses of the state legislature. But, at the same time, the Washington-bound delegation of two senators and one representative were Democrats, elected by equally large margins.
The weather is, as always, overpowering in its fierce, implacable seasonal swings from broiling heat to bitter cold. But while wintertime North Dakota may be the coldest and windiest place in the lower forty-eight, the dramatic contrast in the seasons is only a climatic overture to becoming familiar with a place where dichotomy is the order of the day.
As I said, I went to North Dakota prepared to freeze and was greeted by people wearing T-shirts in the midst of a January thaw. And, over the ensuing years, each subsequent day spent in the state has exponentially compounded that initial blend of surprise and allure.
This book contains no pictures made along “America’s Longest Straight Road” (a county highway between Hickson and Streeter), or the “Enchanted Highway” (a ·group of fantasy metal sculptures set on a county road between Gladstone and Regent). Nor are there any pictures of the “World’s Largest Structure,” the KTHI television tower at Blanchard, the “World’s Largest Historical Quilt” at Antler, or the “Geographical Center of North America” (if you don’t include Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama) at Rugby. There are no photographs of the birthplaces of Roger Maris in Fargo or Lawrence Welk in Strasburg. Nor is there much if any mention of Lewis and Clark. George Custer, Sakakawea, Sitting Bull, or Theodore Roosevelt.
At the same time, there are images of the “World’s Largest Buffalo” at Jamestown, “Salem Sue, the World’s Largest Cow” at New Salem, and Henry Luehr’s Giant Hereford Bull, now in Buchanan. There is a picture of Earl Bunyan, the supposed brother of the more famous Paul, as well as the “World’s Largest Tin Can Pile” in Casselton, the “North Dakota Hall of Fame” at the State Capitol in Bismarck, and Uncle Sig’s “Jugville, USA” in Auburn.
All of this is to say that a significant part of my depiction of North Dakota has been along the lines of the obvious: tourist traps, odd manifestations, and surface appearances. At other times, the process has been perhaps more intrusive: people’s places of business, classrooms, workshops, homes, backyards, and hunting lodges as well as churches, cemeteries, and prison yards. While it would be presumptuous to offer my view as authoritative or even exhaustive, there is enough nuanced irregularity in this collection of pictures and stories to suggest that the actuality of the place is far more complex than either the muted incongruities of Prairie Home Companion or the debauchery lurking behind every door in the movie Fargo.
The photographs have been made through a method that more or less guarantees some form of interaction with the landscape, the weather; or the people, often all at once. The camera, an old wooden box atop a tripod, uses film that calls for long exposures, sometimes as much as five to ten minutes in low-light situations. Coupled with the time that it takes to gain permission, set everything up, and, finally, take the picture, the pace is as unhurried as a weekday afternoon in a prairie bar, or a Sunday spent watching the Vikings. It is impossible to hide, sneak, or speed things up, and so, for at least a short period, the whole undertaking becomes as much a part of the scenery and fabric of the everyday as anything else. My deliberate approach has been described as “dumb, in the honorific sense of the word,” which is entirely apt given the extent to which I value practically every characteristic of the absorbing subject, North Dakota.
As a rule, I try not to put much stock in epiphanies, in the belief that graft and dedication with a pinch of insight are the stuff of both life and art. Yet I have to admit that one look at a single book of photographs altered the course of my life forever.
I had just started the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965 and was frozen in my tracks by double doses of guilt from having successfully ducked the Vietnam War draft by getting into art college and yet lacking any real feeling for my conveniently chosen course of study, photography.
Belmont, MA 1970
One day a friend who was teaching a course at Yale suggested that I come along with him to “meet a socialist photographer who used glass plates.” We drove to New Haven and found the bulk of the art and architecture faculty enjoying a long lunch. Occupying center stage was an elegant, elderly, almost bird-like man whose stories, jibes and repartee fascinated me. He was, indeed, the photographer in question. I was so intrigued by him that I raced back to Providence and immediately buttonholed a more artistically literate friend to ask if he had ever heard of a photographer named Walter Evans? With an understanding smile he led me to the library, pulled down a copy of a book entitled American Photographs and handed it to me saying: “It’s by WALKER Evans and it’s like the Bible.”
I started thumbing through it and couldn’t take my eyes off the pictures. They were razor sharp, infinitely detailed images of small-town architecture and people taken during the years of the Great Depression. What stood out was a palpable feeling of loss. I had never seen photographs like these, pictures that seemingly read like paragraphs, even chapters in one long, complex, rich narrative.
All my experience and training had served to relegate photographs to the role of teasers; images high in visual impact, to be scanned in a nano-second, at best capable of only introducing complex ideas but not of describing or elaborating upon them. As a result of this rather chance encounter, the prospect of spending a lifetime trying to make photographs was no longer a second-rate cop-out for not being able to write (to say nothing of draw) but a venture that engendered excitement, self-respect, even dedication.
There are no roaring crowds in Jim Dow’s photographs of sports stadiums, no athletes caught in mid-stride, no fans welling up with hysteria at the prospect of winning or losing; nothing, in short, that comes under the rubric of “going out to the ball game.” Dow photographs the other half of a stadium’s life – those times when it is empty and silent and least alive. No longer part of an event, the stadium is revealed as a stage, a landscape of orderliness and possibility. “The point,” says Dow, “is not to show the Pittsburgh Steelers lining up against the Oakland Raiders. To photograph a stadium with something going on makes it a narrative.”
Dow views sports stadiums as settings for contemporary morality plays, places of order where behavior is governed by an elaborate set of rules and rituals. “Sport,” he says, “is as close to religion as anything we’ve got. It represents a system that people cling to – the rules are standard, the games have a beginning and an end, and they are won or lost.” A stadium, Dow feels, also symbolizes the enduring attraction of the sport itself as opposed to the changing fortunes of the players. And whether it’s a domed major league stadium or a ragged sandlot, a playing field engages the imagination. “The bigger, fancier stadiums,” says Dow, “are the places where the dreamers gather to watch their fantasies played out in front of them. The little ones are where the dreamers gather to play.”
Dow, a wiry, energetic man with a passion for the vernacular, uses photography “to record those manifestations of human ingenuity and spirit that are still left in the day-to-day landscape of our country.” Like his earliest influence, Walker Evans, Dow uses an 8×10 view camera to record those man-made creations that are extraordinarily commonplace yet “smack of uniqueness.”
Jim Dow’s interest in photography began at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he earned an undergraduate degree in graphic design. With harry Callahan’s encouragement, he began to concentrate seriously on photography as a graduate student. His crisp compositions give evidence of his early graphic training. While at RISD, Dow discovered American Photographs, Walker Evans’ book of documentary photographs, which encouraged him to take a straightforward, factual approach to photography. “A friend showed me the book,” he says, “and at that point I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Everything came clear.”
After leaving RISD, Dow landed a job as a printer for Walker Evans and the Museum of modern art. Over a two-year period, he made prints for both the Museum’s 1972 Evans retrospective and the monograph that accompanied the show.
After completing the Evans project, Dow taught photography for a summer in British Columbia. Subsequently he has taught at Harvard, cooper union and Princeton, among others, and currently at the Boston Museum School. In addition to technical classes, Dow has developed a history of photography course especially designed for photographers. By teaching only half a year, he has been able to balance the demands of academia and his own work.
In the fall of 1972, Dow was awarded the first of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships that allowed him to “photograph along the American Roadscape, particularly the old trough-routes that have been supplanted by the Interstate System.” Two years later, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue the project, during which time he logged over 100,000 miles in search of that which is essentially American, always looking for the “wonderful irregularity of carefully made things.”
As an extension of this quest, Dow asked to be included in the Seagram’s Bicentennial Project, the County Courthouse. (Serving on a grand jury at the time undoubtedly sharpened his interest in the subject.) One of the 24 participating photographers, he traveled throughout the South Atlantic and South-Central states, photographing the interiors and exteriors of over 200 courthouses with his 8×10 view camera. Many of these pictures were published in Courthouse (horizon press, New York, 1978) and have been exhibited worldwide. The entire group collection, a remarkable documentation of American judiciary architecture, is now in the Library of Congress. The courthouse project taught Dow something about himself that changed his way of working. “I discovered that I’m a better photographer when I’m working on an idea that’s bigger than I am… something that has a wider scope that just how clever a picture I can make of it.”
in 1980, Dow became interested in photographing places where people play sports. “I’ve always been a maniacal sports fan,” he says, “and used to watch British football matches on public TV. Because the stadiums in England are relatively small, when the camera panned back and forth, you’d see that people were sitting in all sorts of crazy constructions, and you’d see the neighborhoods where the stadiums were locate3d.” Dow had the chance to photograph British playing fields in the summer of 1980, and upon his return to the United States, he continued the essay here. Dow was convinced that he had hit upon a subject full of possibilities. so far, he has visited 150 stadiums. Although he has made single images of a tenant farmer’s ball field in Kentucky and the American Legion ball park in Jamestown, North Dakota, Dow feels the multiple-image panorama has been his most successful format.
An image composed of several color contact prints, he says, best reproduces “the sense one would have if one were standing there, of what these places look and feel like. Rather than use a conventional panorama camera, which he feels renders an image that is too inclusive and detailed, Dow uses a tripod mounted view camera to pan across his subject. He takes three or more shots to cover a scene and matches up the section by using signs and posts as landmarks. Dow uses normal to slightly long lenses (9 ½ to 24 inches) to preserve the relationship between background and foreground and works in color for its “amazing descriptive qualities.” The sections of the whole are so precisely matched that they seem to be more difficult to assemble than they actually are. Because he rejects the use of tilts and swings to align the images, Dow says, “a real view camera freak would find the way I work highly suspect.” Instead, he turns his camera slightly for each picture to avoid “what the camera sees” and, instead, to “reproduce, in a sense, what you would see as you turned your head.”
Dow is methodical. He begins a shooting at Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, home of the Boston Red Sox, by reconnoitering the stadium for visual possibilities. After deciding on the spot to set up the camera, Dow goes through a dry run of the production of a panorama shot to see if it will work visually. He is excited by a rack of drying red Sox uniforms in left field, a detail that adds a touch of humanity to the picture. After leveling the camera, Dow makes three different panoramas. one consists of four horizontal panels, the other two are made up of three and four vertical panels respectively. For all of them, Dow makes two exposures of each panel. Judging the exposure is usually difficult, as one image frequently includes both shaded bleachers and a brilliantly lit playing field. Dow’s rule of thumb is to give the side panels an extra stop of exposure, but even so, he often has problems matching prints, especially at the edges. Before making a final print, Dow and his printing assistant, Valorie Fisher, often piece together an image from many narrow test strips. Fisher usually burns and dodges with several combinations of filter packs to get the effect the photographer wants.
Dow mounts the finished prints in sequence, trimming each one to the edge made by the film holder. Then he touches up the edges with a black marker pen so the prints blend better and backs the seams where the two prints meet with a small strip of exposed and processed paper to give them a smooth appearance. Rather than blend the prints into a seamless panel, Dow includes the black dividers to remind the viewer that these images were made in a straightforward manner.
Meanwhile, Dow has continued to work on his collection of scenes from American daily life. His abiding interest in the objects and places people create enables him to find his subject almost anywhere. “What I find beautiful about the things I photograph is that they are absolutely right for what and where they are. And that’s what I’m celebrating.”
JIM DOW had his first New York show last November at the Robert Freidus gallery. his portfolio of major-league baseball stadiums will be shown there in the spring of 1983. Amy Bedik is a photographer, writer, and former photography curator.