Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
says the driver to a hitchhiker who has just announced where he’s heading. ‘You mean that hippie place? Isn’t that where everybody’s nude and they just ball and do dope all day?’ The Drop is doomed by its allure. As Sternfeld points out, however, every societal enterprise is marked by widespread failure. ‘We don’t do away with the institution of marriage or corporations simply because there are divorces and bankruptcies.’
In any case, the mistakes, farces and failures make the successes more heartening. Some places – like The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee – have not simply survived but thrived, keeping faith with their own varied ethics – self-reliance, eco-purity etc. – and generating wealth. Having learned from the heady excesses of the 1960s and ’70s, the current wave of settlement is marked by less radical declarations – no income sharing or cult-like dedication – of shared purpose. The modest ambitions of these eco-villages, Sternfeld suggests, may make them the most durable and viable models of community living.
Along with William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld was one of the pioneers of colour photography in the 1970s. (With a zeal appropriate to Sweet Earth he has referred to that time as ‘the early Christian era of colour photography’.) First published in 1989 his American Prospects is both a benchmark book in its own right and an important chapter in the ongoing tradition of photographers such as Walker Evans (American Photographs) and Robert Frank (The Americans) making visual records of their road trips through the country.
Few of the individual photographs in Sweet Earth have the totalising clarity, the weird quality of hermetic suspense, of those in American Prospects. Does the fact that the pictures do not speak for themselves – that they need to be seen in tandem with an accompanying text – diminish the value of the book? In a way it is an impertinence to ask, for this, precisely, was the question posed by Sternfeld himself in On This Site. It was we, the viewers, who were being interrogated, forced to answer the most basic of questions: Do you have any idea what you are looking at? The conceptual tension of the book was generated by the gap between the unseen (the words) and the seen (the pictures). Once the freight of invisible narrative was revealed the gap became a bridge.
Sweet Earth continues Sternfeld’s formal investigation into what he terms ‘knowability’, but the result, appropriately enough, is more accommodating. A history of endeavour, hope and resilience resides in these places, in these photographs; the texts offer a kind of hospitality, an invitation to step inside, to share in it.
2006
If I remember my A-level Geography correctly the Mississippi lumbers down through the centre of the United States, picking up a great load of dust and dirt en route, carrying it south until, becoming choked by its own weight, it runs out of steam and starts dumping everything in its southern reaches. As these alluvial deposits build up so the river fans out and detours in its search for the sea, forming a delta in the process.
According to Joseph Brodsky, the Neva, which flows through St Petersburg, provides the city with an abundance of mirrors. ‘Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it’s as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images.’
I see Alec Soth’s visual account of the Mississippi as an amalgam of these two processes, one literal, the other metaphorical.
The various tributaries of American photographic history flow together to constitute a tradition, a meandering history. An important part of that tradition is the trip across – or at least through – country. These expeditions could be said to have started with the photographers who accompanied and documented the pioneering surveys of 1860–85. They flourished again in the 1930s with work undertaken for the Farm Security Administration, the best and most personalised of which was made by Walker Evans. Then there were the post-war, Guggenheim-funded journeys of Robert Frank (in 1955–6) and Garry Winogrand (1964). Most recently and importantly for Soth are the trips made by Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld. (It was, apparently, a photo of the van that Sternfeld had used on his journeys that first made Soth fall in love with ‘the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things’.) The work produced in this ‘tradition’ has become less rigorously systematic, more personal, more serendipitous over time. In the wake of Frank the idea of the arbitrary became elevated to the level of an organising principle in its own right.
The first picture in Sleeping by the Mississippi is of a snowbound houseboat in Minnesota, with brightly coloured clothes hung out on a line to dry, like prints in a photographer’s studio (see plate 4). In the course of the journey that follows bits and pieces of American photographic history are picked up, taken elsewhere and set down. The accumulated weight of what has gone before obliges Soth to shift sideways, to move forward by drifting laterally. Traces of earlier photographic projects float throughout his work, changed by their journey, but not – as the phrase goes – beyond recognition. Maybe Soth didn’t have Evans or Frank in mind when he photographed Jimmie’s apartment in Memphis, Tennessee (with a hat propped on the edge of a chair), or the Reverend and Margaret’s bedroom in Vicksburg, Mississippi (ditto), but the fact of the matter is that in Evans’ picture of a Negro barber shop in Atlanta (1936) a hat is there, waiting for someone to pick it up. In the syntax of photography this needs to be re-phrased slightly as waiting forsomeone to pick up on it. When Frank photographs a hat on the desk of a bank in Houston, Texas, he is doing just that, tacitly nodding towards Evans – tipping his hat to him, if you will. Like the notes left by Arne Saknussemm in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, these hats indicate both that someone has been here before and show a possible way ahead. Perhaps these hats even served as unconscious triggers, subtly suggesting to Soth that pictures were there for the taking.
It is, in other words, not just a place that Soth is photographing; it’s also, unavoidably, a tradition. A tradition that extends up to the present. That autumnal chair in Sugar’s place, Davenport, Iowa, looks as if it is still warm from – still bears the imprint of – Eggleston’s sitting in it (photographically speaking). It doesn’t matter whether Soth is doing this by design; the point is that there is no getting away from the photographic precedents. (Many of the pictures in Sleeping by the Mississippi have photographs in them; the number of photographs glimpsed in this series of photographs exceeds the number of photographs by Soth.)
Artists have long felt that they are near the end of a tradition, closer to the mouth of the river than its source. Consistent with this, the picture by Soth (born in 1969) of Luxora, Arkansas, is suggestive of a place where the tradition seems to have washed up. Littered with bits and pieces of Americana, it looks like a spot where, over time, all sorts of American photographers have gathered for a picnic and moved on – without bothering to clean up after themselves. (Art history is the opposite of wilderness camping: you’re meant to leave a trace; that’s the point.) It’s in such a mess, this spot, you could be forgiven for thinking it had been left that way deliberately. It looks, that is to say, as if one of the photographers who passed through here might have been Jeff Wall.
This is not the only place where the Canadian makes his presence felt. Soth’s view of brackish waste land in Hickman, Kentucky, is strongly reminiscent of Wall’s ‘The Crooked Path’. In the background of Wall’s picture is the wall of some kind of food manufacturing place. In the background of Soth’s is the river. As the title of Wall’s picture suggests, this otherwise nondescript bit of landscape is identified by the path that leads into it. In Soth there is no path into the picture but, in the background, there is a way out of it: the river, leading on to the next photo – which happens to be of the walls of a room in Missouri, stuck to which is a picture of a river. The sequence, the flow, is all-important. ‘Anyone can take a great picture,’ Soth has said, ‘but very few people can put together a great collection of pictures. This is my goal.’
Beds play an important part in the rhythm and sequencing of Soth’s journey. The penultimate picture