More of the Same

So, as a photographer I completely understand the lure of photographing the Salton Sea. Many photographers have documented the Sea, the most notable being Richard Misrach, and the subject of the Sea seems to verging on cliche these days.

However Kim Stringfellow has a book that really adds something to the library…

Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape 1905-2005

© Kim Stringfellow

I really liked the book and all the historical information that was included about the sea itself. I really wish the publisher hadn’t printed the images across the gutter though (imagine the above image split across two pages). However the book provides a thorough history of the sea. The countless mistakes that led to its creation, it’s heyday as a recreational destination, and its demise into an ecological disaster.

I’ve just started reading Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local, and it is blowing my mind. The book brings together everything I’ve ever found interesting in Photography and Art and relates it under our sense of place (as Americans.)
The connections it reveals are really enlightening. So far, it has discussed issues such as regional art versus a more international art like what comes from New York. Regional Artists such as Dan Higgins who has documented the struggling city of Winooski, Vermont for the past three decades, through his Onion portraits:

© Dan Higgins

© Dan Higgins

The top image is of local residents in Winooski in the 70’s and the bottom is of Iraqi refugees in the 90’s. These multiple portraits of struggle and individuality in this small town remind me of Mitch Epstein’s Family Business, which documented another struggling town Holyoke, Massachussetts through the frame of his father’s failing furniture business.

© Mitch Epstein

These two projects seem like a really good introduction to this sort of documentary photography. But more importantly for me, provide a contrast to a trend in contemporary art and films, something Alec Soth discusses in a recent post “Art + Borat” on his blog. I’ll let you read his post and won’t try to synopsize it, but the most important line for me was:

“While I laughed along with everyone else at Borat, the movie left me sick to my stomach. The fans at the rodeo are a part of America, but they aren’t America. Same with Prince’s biker-chicks. As much as I respond to the work, I hesitate to give myself over to it. Pamela can have Richard Prince (and Kid Rock and Tommy Lee). I’ll take my wife, please.”

After I read this I came upon this quote by Louise Erdrich in Lippard’s Book:

“We are part of a social ebb and flow, people washing in and out of suburbs and cities. Like hunter-gatherers, we must go where we will be fed, where the jobs are listed…Whether we like it or not, we are bound together by that which may be the cheapest and ugliest in our culture—[brand names and Golden Arches and celebrity recognition]. These symbols and heros may annoys us, or comfort us…at the very least they give us context.”

This idea that these celebrities represent our culture is a sickening one.  The work of these “local” documentarians has something infinitely more interesting:  a sense of the place.