FRONTIER PSYCHIATRY
In America, photography accompanies settlement. From the mid-nineteenth
century, as cities developed rapidly and land was claimed and cultivated, the
camera was constantly there, framing and recording the scale and impact of the
transformation. Often, photographers were amongst the first wave of explorers
and prospectors. In the years after the civil war, Timothy O’Sullivan accompanied
a whole series of survey expeditions and produced some of the most iconic (and
complex) images of the newly encountered western landscapes. We will return
to this image, and to others like it, later in this paper but for now we might
simply note how O’Sullivan, by including his own wagon (a converted Civil War
ambulance) in the frame manages both to accentuate the vastness and the
emptiness of the landscape and to hint at how those very qualities would be
mitigated and eventually obviated by settlement.
Thus was established a dialectic which exerted – and continues to exert - a
fundamental influence on the representation of America’s inhabited landscape
whereby, for every hymn to the civilising impact of settlers on the ‘wilderness’
and (if acknowledged at all) its native inhabitants, there was a paean to what had
been lost in the process. Often, as with O’Sullivan, the two impulses existed
within a single representation. Even as the benefits of infrastructural
development, urbanisation, and the spread of democracy and capitalism were
appreciated, the attractions of the first foray into the unknown remained. In
Democracy in America, De Tocqueville spoke of the gradual dominance of a
‘virtuous materialism, which would not corrupt, but would enervate the soul,
and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.’ If the urban centre, as the source of
that virtuous materialism, embodied the results of the American democratic
project, it was at the remote periphery that it’s original spirit remained vital. The
periphery was the frontier.
So it was, for instance, that in John Ford’s The Searchers, John Wayne chooses to
walk out into the wilderness rather than return to the homestead. And so it was
that, in 1884 Huckleberry Finn could conclude his adventures with the following:
But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because
Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I
been there before.
With those lines ringing in our ears, let us now turn to a contemporary
photographic artist whose work seems to continue and extend this tradition.
Alec Soth is, as he tells us, from Minnesota, and he likes to make photographs and
books. His first book, Sleeping with the Mississippi, was published in 2004
One of the first images in the book, and the photograph which clarified the
project in Soth’s mind (it was made in 2002), shows the bed of Charles Lindbergh
at his boyhood home in Little Falls, Minnesota. The picture gains its particular
poignancy from the disjuncture between the humble dishevelment of the setting
and Lindbergh’s later fame and heroic stature. Here, we see, is where the great
airman started life. In his notes on the pictures, Soth cites Lindbergh’s
description of his first sight of a plane from this house when he was nine:
1
Flying upriver below higher branches of trees, a biplane was less than two
hundred yards away- a frail complicated structure, with the pilot sitting out
in front between struts and wires. I watched it fly quickly out of sight.. I
imagined myself with wings on which I could swoop down off our roof into
the valley, soaring through the air from one river bank to the other, over
stones of the rapids, above log jams, above the tops of trees and fences.
Soth opens the book with another quote from Lindbergh, this time describing the
22nd hour of his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St Louis:
Over and over again I fall asleep with my eyes open, knowing I’m falling
asleep, unable to prevent it. When I fall asleep in this way, my eyes are cut
off from my ordinary mind as though they were shut, but they become
directly connected to a new extraordinary mind which grows increasingly
competent to deal with their impressions.1
Taken together the quotes and the image conjoin epic journeys and humble
settings, the rich world of imagination and the raw grain of reality.
Apart from a shot of Johnny Cash’s boyhood home, for the most part Soth’s
images feature people who are not destined for greatness. More akin to the
characters Huck and Jim encountered on their journey down the great river:
these are picaresques, living at the margins of society. Here for instance, we meet
another Charles, another kind of airman. Elsewhere, we will encounter convicts,
preachers, strippers. Like Huck and Jim, they seem motivated by a desire for
adventure and a distrust of settling down.
In a manner which will characterise all his subsequent work, Soth varies
between portraits and photographs of physical settings. Beds become a
recurring motif – sometimes as emblems of abandonment, sometimes as strange
sites of fantasy. Chairs and couches – the equipment of domesticity – appear too,
often deployed in improvised and unlikely ways. Soth is observing how people
make themselves feel at home – how a life is constructed physically and
psychologically. (Peter’s Houseboat) He is interested in the way people establish
meaning and significance for themselves. Often in making portraits, he would ask
sitters to write down what their dream was, thinking that the act alone would
transport them from immediate circumstance to a richer mental realm, like
Lindbergh. (Or not: ‘My dream is running water’ wrote Peter, who lived in that
houseboat for 20 years)
Often this realm is represented through mementos, notes, pictures: Look at
Bonnie (with her photograph of a cloud that looks like an Angel). Look at Sheila,
her college sweatshirt adorned with biblical quotes, or Joshua, the selfproclaimed preacher man. Sometimes the traces alone suffice as portrait: Here is
Jimmie’s apartment and Jessie’s prayer room, both in Memphis; this is the
Reverend and Margaret (his fifth wife]’s bedroom in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
1
quoted in front of Sleeping
2
The collection made Soth’s name. It was featured prominently at the Whitney
Biennial in 2004. Favourable reviews, of which there were many, promoted the
idea that these images were making visible a different, hidden America. Viewed
from the metropolitan centre, this was the peripheral interior – an exotic
landscape populated by colourful misfits. During the same year, Soth was
nominated as a member of the legendary photo-agency Magnum where the same
work was presented as an extended piece of photo-journalism, revealing difficult
truths about America’s underbelly. Like other prominent Magnum members,
Martin Parr for instance, or indeed one of the founders Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Soth embarked on a path of making work which catered to very different
constituencies, with different expectations of the photographic image.
Soth, of course, knows this history, and understands that he is always operating
in a critical relationship with an inherited photographic tradition and a pictorial
language. Look at the way he treats the Mississippi itself. Where the river does
appear, it is a peripheral presence rather than a defining geographical feature.
(This, says Soth, is not a book about the Mississippi, it is a book about the idea of
the Mississippi.2) In adopting this strategy, Soth is deliberately reacting against
the romantic landscape tradition which dominated 19th-century American
painting, and which informed subsequent generations of photography.
Jonathan Raban, in Old Glory, his great account of a journey down the river
described how, in the 19th century, ‘The river was the best embodiment of the
sheer space and variety of American life; nothing else in the country could match
it for its prodigious geographical reach..’.3 He recalls the 1840s craze for painting
vast panoramas of the river which were unfurled as moving dioramas in
darkened rooms - proto-movies.
In Soth’s book, this whole pictorial tradition is reduced to a postcard stuck on a
wall in Cape Girardeau. We have as yet been unable to identify the painting, but it
feels very like the work of Thomas Cole, as for instance in his iconic picture, the
Oxbow - recalled in turn by a much later Ansel Adams image of Snake River – or
by Thomas Moran and Frederick Church in their fervid renderings of America’s
most celebrated sites - the Grand Canyon, the Niagara Falls.
Continuing his critical engagement with this tradition, Soth in fact turned to the
Niagara for his next project, published in 2006. However, for him the spectacle of
the falls was (as the river had been) marginal to the predominant settings of the
book – the preponderance of cheap motels and wedding parlours which had
sprung up in the adjoining town. Here, in cheap, synthetic settings, Soth found
once again a rich seam of life. Beds (again). Motel rooms. Couples. Another bride.
Another groom. Another sunny honeymoon….
In an effort to convey more of the unlikely emotional life with which the place is
imbued, to his familiar mix of portraits of people and places Soth here adds a
2
3
lecture at Walker Art Center, youtube..
Raban, Old Glory, 130
3
new element: photographs of love letters and diaries. The sweet, sad notes they
strike add depth and pathos to the images.
From this point on Soth’s practice becomes more varied and compendious. He
sets up a blog and a publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom and
establishes an alter ego, Lester B. Morrison, who writes prose and poems to
accompany Soth’s photographs. He experiments with different forms of
publishing, producing zines and, in 2008, a cheap newsprint publication called
The Last Days of W. He is pushing against the edges of photographic practice –
extending and supplementing it, exploring its margins.
In doing so, one of the kindred spirits he identifies is Robert Frank who, after his
huge success with The Americans, became increasingly experimental in his
practice, manipulating and marking his negatives, constructing narratives,
making films. Even when he was making the pictures in The Americans, Frank
was already acknowledging his own presence within them, sometimes tacitly– as
in this shot from his hotel room in Butte Montana (a homage to which Soth made
recently) – and sometimes openly, as in the final pictures in the book, showing
his exhausted wife and child in a car on the shoulder of the open road. (And of
course this shot in turn echoes O’Sullivan’s earlier work)
Attracted to the self-conscious artistry of Frank, Soth was equally drawn to the
socially engaged practice of one of his teachers at St. Lawrence College, Joel
Sternfeld. Soth recounts how he became confirmed in his mission as a travelling
photographer when Sternfeld pointed to the presence of his own truck in a
picture of Gatlinburg, Tennessee (again, echoes of O’Sullivan). The photo is one
of those collected in Sternfeld’s classic 1987 publication American Prospects, a
book which was deeply influential on a generation of photographers, for the way
in which it used large-format colour photography, but also for the way in which
it accommodated complex social landscapes within coherent compositions.
Drawing inspiration from Breughel’s so-called ‘world paintings’ in which, for
example, Icarus could fall to the sea from his ill-fated flight while a farmer
ploughed on regardless, Sternfeld’s used framing and composition to allow his
images combine several registers - from solemn to comic, (pumpkins, elephant)
to reveal social disjunctions (cleaners in a suburb) and, repeatedly, to set the raw
edge of settlement as it extended into the landscape against the confident
purpose of its inhabitants. He showed a particular gift for the situated portrait
and a capacity to find character and specificity in any setting.
Of course Sternfeld himself was building on the example of a slightly earlier
generation of photographers who had spearheaded the first forays away from
the dense, hectic metropolis which had shaped the street photography of the
fifties and sixties and into the expanding suburban hinterland. As the subject
matter changed, so too did the favoured techniques, with formal views and largeformat cameras replacing glancing shots and lightweight Leicas. The era of street
photography – exemplified by the work of Gary Winogrand – yielded to an age of
typological and topographic survey, much of it collected in the seminal ‘New
Topographics’ exhibition of 1975.
4
For the photographers included in this exhibition, among them Lewis Baltz,
Stephen Shore and Robert Adams, developments at the edges of urban
settlements – shopping malls, industrial estates and tract housing – represented
the central site of a changing American identity and therefore demanded to be
depicted. While the photographers’ individual approaches varied, the
exhibition’s title proposed a shared interest in the physical lineaments of the
land. At the same time, its subtitle - ‘photographs of a man-altered landscape’ –
affirmed that this was territory which had begun to be remade.
In documenting this transformation, Shore embraced the possibilities of colour,
and Baltz worked with formal, abstract series. Only Robert Adams seemed to be
trying to negotiate some kind of rapprochement between older pictorial
traditions and this new built reality. In his 1974 book The New West, Adams
scrupulously documents the leading edge of cheap development as it encroaches
rapidly on previously undeveloped landscape in pictures which, in their tonal
range, their fine printing and their composition recalled the landscapes of Ansel
Adams.
Finding little to celebrate about this new frontier, Adams’ pictures nonetheless
sought to acknowledge its existence, to understand its built form and the
patterns of life it sponsored. In his introduction to The New West, John
Szarkowski suggests that Adams goes further, that ‘he has, without actually lying,
discovered in these dumb and artless agglomerations of boring buildings the
suggestion of redeeming virtue. He has made them look not beautiful but
important, as the relics of an ancient civilization look important.’
In interviews and essays, Adams’ describes how his own reaction to this new
civilization varied between wonder at its incidental beauties and revulsion at its
ugly excesses, more often the latter than the former. But the pictures, so ‘civilized,
temperate, and exact’ in Szarkowsi’s phrase, are less declamatory and therefore
more open to multiple readings. And if his regard for the consummate craft of
Ansel Adams marked him out from his contemporaries, his interest in Timothy
O’Sullivan was much more widely shared. ‘I liked him’ said Adams, ‘because he
seemed more honest about disagreeable fact than did many nineteenth-century
photographers – less selective in favour of the picturesque. And he seemed
better able to make subtly unified pictures.’4
Time and again in his pictures, O’Sullivan stages or frames a contemporary
intervention into an undeveloped landscape and establishes a delicate
equilibrium between them. The emptiness of the territory and the exposure of its
few inhabitants are comfortably co-extant. Inhabited emptiness was O’Sullivan’s
special subject. Adams speaks of O’Sullivan’s ‘interest in emptiness, in apparently
negative landscapes, in the barest, least hospitable ground….The preponderance
of his best pictures are of vacancies – canyons or flats or lakes..’5
4
5
quoted in Framing the West, 11
all Framing the West, 26
5
Sometimes this involves very selective siting and framing. For instance, that
famous image I showed at the start is in fact set here at Sand Mountain, Nevada, a
small hill, anomalous within its immediate surroundings, on a road now
tarmaced, but even then traversed by many travellers. Nonetheless, the
photograph speaks a larger truth about the attractions of emptiness and of
solitariness.
In his latest work, Broken Manual, with which I will conclude, Alec Soth explores
a contemporary version of this solitariness. The project was initially prompted
by Soth’s research into Eric Robert Rudolph, also known as the Olympic Park
Bomber, who, after attacking the Atlanta games in 1996, lived in hiding for years
in the Appalachian wilderness. As Siri Engberg explains: ‘Intrigued both by
Rudolph’s infamy and his prolonged disappearance, Soth began to investigate the
notion of vanishing from civilization more broadly, seeking out reclusive
individuals - drifters, monks, survivalists – who chose to escape society for
spiritual, legal or environmental reasons.’6
Using contacts made through the internet, Soth found himself straying even
farther into the margins, meeting and photographing strange people. Equally
strange were their habitats, often extremely crude and basic but sometimes
providing odd disjunctions of the banal and the bizarre. A cave equipped with
coat-hangers, a mirror ball in a forest. It is a very disquieting world.
Again, Soth used a varied and expanded range of techniques – from infrared
photography to large-format. For the publication and exhibition, he produced a
special edition – a book within a book within a book, complete with strange
fictional episodes and models of imaginary hideaways. ‘What excites me about
the medium isn’t pure documentary or pure fiction:’ he says ‘I like exploring the
murky middle place in hopes of finding what Werner Herzog calls the ‘ecstatic
truth’.’
That same quest might be said to unite the photographer and his subjects, their
place at the periphery construed, by themselves at least, as the new frontier.
But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because
Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I
been there before.
END
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here and there, 47
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