Nothing at all to do with photography, but who gives a stuff...
To all born in the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's & 70's
We survived being born to mothers who smoked and drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC or Subway .
Even though all the shops closed at 5.30pm and didn't open on the weekends, we didn't starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K..
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY ,
no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no
lawsuits from these accidents.
Only girls had pierced ears.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time...
We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Mum didn't have to go to work to help Dad make ends meet!
RUGBY and CRICKET had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on merit.
Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and bullies always ruled the playground at school.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of, they actually sided with the law!
Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla'
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO
DEAL WITH IT ALL !
And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!
30.7.09
NICE FIRM BUTTOCKS.
In my early printing days when my pants had muffin tops and my thighs filled my Farrah's I started to collect odd prints from various clientèle. After my most recent house move I opened up a box of prints which had remained taped shut for some ten years or so complete with dust as thick as a woolly sock. I had hoped that upon opening the box a bright golden light would shine in my face and all my troubles would be over but instead a fruity firm pair of buttocks filled my gaze and I tried to remember the name of the model I had used on that particular day. After a few more buttock variations I was delighted to come across a Richard Averdon image I had stashed away and completely forgotten about. What struck me was not so much the print quality, which was of course wonderful, but the overall perfection of the image. The composition, the quality of the lighting, the 'Averdon grey' background, the pin sharp detail from a 10/8 neg, so on and so forth. There was no retouching of any kind yet the image was flawless. A truly great image by a truly great photographer. But my friends of the dark cloth I believe that today there are no great photographers...
Todays photographers are not great, they are Grand, their shoots are Grand, their content is Grand, their budget and fees are Grand, their books are Grand, their shows are Grand and not forgetting their prints are Grand. I do believe that Grandeur has replaced greatness that once was. Think of all those Great photographers that died without a penny in the bank. Today with have photographers with day rates over $100,000 dollars (imagine the cost of the entire shoot). There are galleries that sell prints by the meter thanks to new technology, but does a big image really mean it must be a Great Image.?
And so I wonder what would happen if all this grandness was taken away. What if Mario Testino was paid fifty quid to shoot a new face model without the benefits of heavy retouching and then exhibit the prints in a local bar? What if Annie Whats Her Face was given a tenner to do a shoot without assistants, or an array of thirty lights or an elephant prop? Take away the grandeur and do you really have greatness..
It costs nothing to take a great photograph, but its expensive to produce one with grandeur!
And now for some more firm buttocks...
28.7.09
Jeff Brouws.
Picked up this very informative piece over on American Suburb X.... Brilliant..
I’ve been photographing the American cultural landscape for the past twenty years. Utilizing different series that I’ve done involving the everyday urban and suburban places we encounter, I’ll strive to make visual and verbal connections between these overlapping territories of American life while sticking to our theme of how sprawl has affected inner city environments.
Along with my other work, I’ve been specifically exploring inner city America since 1995, documenting urban landscapes impacted by racial segregation, white flight, and deindustrialization in the northeast. For many Americans these landscapes — mostly defined by abandonment, poverty and minority populations — don’t exist; they’re below our collective radar. Over this time-period I’ve come to believe that all photographs can have a social and political meaning when viewed within a certain context. Feeling kinship with the New Topographics Movement from the 1970s that documented the impact of the constructed suburban world on the natural one, I wanted to invert that premise — looking at the urban core instead of the periphery — and ask how suburbanization after World War II affected city centers. What were the consequences as we went from an urban, city-dwelling lifestyle — based on mass transportation, high density living, and production — to a suburban, car-dependent, low-density lifestyle based on consumption?
I. Transportation Modes - The Rise of the Interstates
Prior to the 1930s there was no organized infrastructure of highways across America; unmarked roads and scarce services for the motorist were the norm. As automobile usage exploded in the United States a cartel of lobbying interests including the oil, tire, auto makers, insurance companies, land developers and the Federal Government came to the realization that roads and freeways were a vital component of infrastructure that would help foster suburban development.
When Eisenhower signed into law the The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956, construction of a freeway system linking all major cities began, fueled by this idea of growth. In addition, Eisenhower’s experience as a young soldier during WWI informed his commitment to the freeway system. According to Phil Patton’s book The Open Road, Eisenhower had witnessed how inefficient road systems hampered troop and supply movements and reasoned that in the case of an impending nuclear attack — this was the Cold War era after all — urbanites could exit cities quickly with freeways in place. Essentials necessary to sustain them could be transported everywhere over these arterial roads as well. In this way, decentralization became a guiding principle for not only developers who owned land on the periphery they wished to sell, but for a federal government who in the final analysis thought a low-density lifestyle, dispersed population and scattered infrastructure would be less vulnerable to a paralyzing nuclear attack.
Another factor to consider in any discussion about sprawl: urban development between 1890 and 1930 had been characterized by centralization as Americans moved from rural environments into cities. Crowding occurred and this, too, became a factor encouraging decentralization — movement of human beings, materials, capital, and goods away from the city center. Freeways, cars and trucks coupled with the aforementioned political theories and social relations were all important agents fostering this spatial rearrangement of the American landscape, a rearranging that would have devastating effects on the urban core.
Freeways also helped the trucking industry take freight away from railroads, railroads that couldn’t deliver goods everywhere highways went. Freeways also fostered the growth of national chain stores. These chain stores used the “freeway” — a form of cheap transportation across vast distances — as a circulatory system to distribute consumer goods. These eventualities fueled the growth of sprawl.
On an emotional level freeways had an unintended consequence on the American psyche, contributing to an atomization and isolation of the population, making us a nation of lonely drivers who perhaps wondered whether our passion for movement on these ribbons of highway made us free or simply enslaved us to a myth of (upward) mobility.
The Demise of Railroads and Mass Transit
Railroads in the urban core were also impacted by sprawl’s growth. Railroad terminals around the country lay fallow, suffering at the hands of suburban build out, as more and more Americans moved away from the locked-in, scheduled routes of the passenger train and chose instead the supposed independence, privacy, and freedom of movement the automobile engendered.
Many inner-city urban freight yards now lay dormant after a 30-year decline in manufacturing. Line side industries previously generated boxcars filled with American products. No more. Freight trains today consist of containers filled with goods produced overseas. The container, loaded onto a ship in China, gets transported across the sea, unloaded onto a railroad flat car here, which is then moved to an inter-modal freight yard on the metropolitan periphery.
Off-loaded as a truck trailer it’s driven to a distribution center geographically situated in the middle of the country. Eventually it ends its journey parked at a Wal-Mart loading dock for its “just in time” delivery. Much of the freight forwarding and handling that use to take place in city centers has been eliminated. Thus we see how mechanization, automation, rationalization and decentralization are primary forces shaping the growth of sprawl.
II. Industrial Zones
Besides giving facts and figures about the socio-economic and historical relationships between city and sprawl environments, perhaps a brief discussion about urban morphology will aid us in understanding what happened spatially and architecturally in and around inner city America as suburban build-out occurred. First we’ll look at a few specific industrialized and commercialized zones that were commonplace in many mid-western and northeastern cities.
Warehouse Districts
In the late 19th century as cities grew, different types of business activity like retailing, wholesaling, manufacturing, and office activities were confined to separate areas of the city. Warehouse districts were no exception and were usually located adjacent to transportation systems. In the early 19th century these systems of transport were river networks, which became railroad networks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the warehouse district neatly integrated into rail lines this kind of urban district was a classic railroad landscape characterized by railroad spurs and mainlines directly adjacent to warehouses, factories, meatpacking districts, and stockyards.
Consumer goods had to be stored at, and shipped from, central warehouse districts because of this transportation configuration. With the advent of the Interstates and growth of sprawl freight shifted from trains to trucks: trucks could deliver goods to more places more efficiently. All of a sudden distribution points became decentralized, could be located anywhere, and these types of multi-storied urban warehouse districts fell into disuse and were supplanted by long horizontal buildings on the periphery which we now call big box stores. As you can imagine freeways and railroads now mostly bypass urban warehouse districts.
Grain Elevator Districts
Another common morphology in the industrial city was the grain elevator district like the one in Buffalo, New York—which at one time was the largest grain port in the world. Architecturally, these buildings played a key role in the development of modernism: I refer you to Reyner Banham’s Concrete Atlantis for the fascinating story of how German architect Erich Mendelsohn’s photographs of these elevators from 1920 circulated around Europe and influenced Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Despite their historic significance, with a downturn in business these terminal grain elevators fell into abandonment after the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, which completely cut Buffalo off in the shipping chain; the grain boats could bypass the city then much like the trucks bypassing the warehouses on the freeways now.
While the grain transshipment business was ending, Buffalo's animal feed industry was in a similar state of decline; there are feed and cereal mills within this zone as well. Between 1955 and 1970, decentralization brought a virtual halt to animal feed ingredients being shipped to Buffalo’s mills for processing. Instead, smaller mills constructed within trucking distance of the regions in which cattle, hogs, and horses consumed the animal feed became normative. With the feed industry gone, Buffalo suffered another stinging blow to its economy and a new round of job losses.
As you can see: ideas like standardization, economies of scale, mechanization, lower transportation costs, elongated supply chains, and the decentralization of manufacturing plants — which were all things that affected Buffalo’s grain and milling industry too — are the same processes that informed the spread of sprawl.
With the demise of not only the grain trade, but the steel, auto and railroad businesses too, Buffalo now has about 7,000 homes awaiting demolition in residential neighborhoods, former housing for workers who don’t live there anymore. This leads us to ponder other points about the inner city / sprawl dichotomy: Buffalo, along with Detroit lost 1/3 of its population between 1950 and 1970 with a similar increase in the suburbs; in 1959 33% of the American workforce was involved in manufacturing; in 2009 that figure is 12 percent. In the same time span, conversely, the percentage of service sector jobs increased by a similar amount. Many people who use to work in manufacturing are now employed as service workers out in the suburbs.
Steel Mills
This is an LTV steel fabrication plant being dismantled in Cleveland in 2004. The demise of this plant and many others across the country are the result of outsourcing, globalization, corporate takeovers, and flagging unionism — all structural elements of a political economy that also informs sprawl. Two years after shooting this image, developers reconfigured this part of the Cuyahoga Valley into a shopping mall anchored by a Target and Home Depot. The name of the shopping center? The Steelyard Mall. Joel Garreau in his book Edge City called this tactic — “to name a place for what is no longer there” — typical of developers. Many big box stores locate themselves on former brownfields (toxic industrial sites) because the land is cheap and the government often turns a blind eye toward remediation. It’s also interesting to note that corporations like Home Depot and Target are now making incursions into inner city areas as suburban land becomes too expensive. So this image represents a flipside to the equation we’re discussing: the periphery is migrating to the interior.
Auto Plants
The same forces shaping suburbanization (and later globalization) began to impact Detroit’s auto industry in the early 1950s. Many car manufacturers started to decentralize operations, moving front offices to the suburbs. Also, in an effort to destabilize the power of the unions (with a divide and conquer strategy), Ford and General Motors started moving parts of the manufacturing process out of urban areas to the rapidly suburbanizing Sunbelt regions of the US. Not only did cheaper land exist there to expand operations, but these regions also had a more compliant labor force, often hostile to unionism, willing to work for less pay. Some things still hold true: you’ll notice little union membership at your suburban Denny’s, Wendy’s or Wal-Mart.
And now looking at another characteristic of urban morphology: In the first half of the 20th century industrial plants located in the city had a vertical orientation which later shifted to a horizontal one as plants moved to suburbia. The brilliance of Henry Ford’s philosophy — Fordism — was the centralization, rationalization and integration of all operations under one roof. However, as corporations grew, and industrial processes became more complex, companies compartmentalized their operations at different locations and moved from the city because there was no room for expansion. They shifted instead to horizontal building configurations as it became less expensive to produce and ship goods in one-story buildings. This is why so much of sprawl has a horizontal look. It’s a very efficient building form.
III. Commercial Zones
Active Main Streets & Central Business Districts
These next images are from local downtown central business districts. They illustrate a commercial business atmosphere that existed prior to the growth of national chain stores — chain stores that brought with them a homogenizing influence on American consumer culture and the man-made landscape.
These business districts were vernacular “everyday” landscapes grounded in an economic reality having to do with simple utility and function, instead of rampant consumerism. At least that’s how I remember it. This universe, unlike the suburbanize one that supplanted it, was at a pedestrian scale and not necessarily centered on the automobile.
In addition, we need to think about financial and taxation issues. Historically, locally owned downtown businesses paid local taxes; money generated from that business stayed in town and re-circulated there. With sprawl and the growth of multinational chains the majority of what you spend at Wal-Mart today gets sent back home to a out-of-state home office or funneled through tax shelters in Michigan, Delaware or Nevada — states that charge no corporate income tax.
The big box store has also gotten tax subsidies and rebates from local and federal government, meaning they don’t contribute to local tax rolls or the maintenance of local infrastructure in any meaningful way, but you can bet the owners of local downtown businesses once did. It’s easy to see how corporate sprawl negatively impacts community networks and makes a mockery of civic responsibility.
The big box store has also gotten tax subsidies and rebates from local and federal government, meaning they don’t contribute to local tax rolls or the maintenance of local infrastructure in any meaningful way, but you can bet the owners of local downtown businesses once did. It’s easy to see how corporate sprawl negatively impacts community networks and makes a mockery of civic responsibility.
Suburban Strip Malls, Big Boxes, and Fast Food
So eventually we got here. As the suburbs grew in the 1950s and 60s along with a burgeoning consumer culture, Americans decided that they didn’t need to go downtown anymore. The suburbs became cities unto themselves, were predominantly white, and offered many of the same amenities as the city but without the congestion, crime and poverty.
The price we pay for all these shopping centers and outlet malls is that every day in America 5000 acres of undeveloped land — mostly agricultural — disappears under concrete and asphalt. This means about two million acres of open space are gobbled up by development every year in the United States.
This is a new Superstore going up on former farmland in Indiana. And here’s an image of more farmland adjacent to the superstore that eventually gets converted to yet another strip or outlet mall. Built space often expresses a society’s material and political priorities. I also wanted to include these abandoned drive-in movie theaters into our discussion; the land many of these sat on got converted into big boxes or shopping malls, which shows you how land use changes over time. A viable business supplants a failed one. This process is called “creative destruction.”
Here are more images of what I’ve termed the “franchised landscape” of sprawl. I’ve included them as a visual contrast to the older downtown environments you saw a few slides back and the other abandoned retail venues we’ll see in a few moments. Dolores Hayden makes no distinctions about sprawl having to be in metropolitan areas—it can be in rural settings too. She derides policy-makers that have no consideration for either the aesthetic or socio-economic costs of sprawl. You can also see how the shift of retail trade from urban areas to the periphery caused the desecration of some very pristine natural landscapes—an issue adeptly addressed by the New Topographics photographers.
Here in a narrow Colorado canyon with the Rocky Mountains all around, a group of big box stores had colonized the valley.
For the last 12 years, I’ve been actively incorporating sprawl’s everyday monoculture landscape into my work along with my inner city material. The garish semiotics of corporate America are the visual trademarks of sprawl but they also bear a direct relationship to these skeletal remains of signs from once thriving inner city businesses that have been supplanted by chain stores out on the edge of town.
Abandonment in the CBD: Zone of Discard
When witnessing abandoned central business districts like this one in East St Louis, Illinois, we ponder the impact the 50-year build out of suburban shopping malls, freeways and national chains has had on commerce in older city centers. In 1954 downtown retail sales accounted for over 50% of the nationwide metropolitan total; by 1977 that number had dwindled to less than 5%. It’s something like 1% now. Sprawl without a doubt sped the erosion of downtown retailing.
This is an abandoned streetscape of Gary, Indiana’s former business district on Broadway. Urban geographers call this a “zone of discard.” Here’s a neighborhood scene in Detroit that represents the disparity of how tax dollars are spent in cities and suburbs. By the way suburbs usually get the lions share of federal subsidy. You’ll also recall Bush’s infamous LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND program — public policy reduced to a slogan. Revenue for education is directly derived from local tax bases. In the inner city with its low-income population, depressed property values, and little to almost non-existent manufacturing or commercial activity there isn’t much of a tax base. In fact the city of Detroit, where this image was taken, is looking at a projected 200 million dollar deficit for fiscal 2008-2009. Interestingly, nearby white municipalities, like Ferndale and Grosse Point, both seven miles away, don’t have deficits.
Dolores Hayden again reminds us that although sprawl may be most obvious to the eye at the periphery of a metropolitan region—where speculative new construction is common — older downtowns also reveal sprawl because in an economy organized around new construction and rapid obsolescence, existing places are often left to fall apart. Many inner city mom and pop stores succumb to the forces of sprawl and disinvestment; abandon storefronts and small businesses abound in inner city areas.
IV. Residential Zones
Suburbia
New suburban housing construction in the 1950s also had a huge impact on inner city areas, fostering white flight from the urban core. This is Daly City, California. I’ve included this section for contrast as well. This was a suburb built by Henry Doelger beginning in the late 1940s. Doelger adopted industrial rationalization techniques: he graded his own land; employed in-house architects; milled his own wood; used standardized floor plans; and had an organized workforce based on assembly-line concepts. These technological innovations in mass production used for building homes for mass consumption were Fordism concepts applied to the housing market. In addition low-interest government-backed FHA loans, which came into existence in the 1930s, also paved the way for the creation of suburbia. People for the first time could buy a house on time and pay it off in 30 years.
Notice the garage integrated right into the design of the house; this type of home reinforced individual automobile usage and discourage pedestrian activity; people could drive right into their home without interacting with their environment, which is totally different then living in the city.
US population doubled between 1910-1960 so it’s understandable why suburbia happened — there was a need to house all those people. Home ownership increased in the US by 50% between 1948 and 1973; again there’s a direct correlation to these figures when we look at population loss in our cities over the same time span.
Dyer, Indiana is 15 miles from Gary, Indiana. These two places show the blatant economic and racial inequality that exists spatially in our country even in locations close to one another. Dolores Hayden thinks sprawl causes social injustice in America as it intensifies the disadvantages of class, race, gender and age by adding this spatial separation.
So much of the built environment of suburbia seems to be about order, uniformity and safety: the antithesis of inner city America — a place that seems to be about chaotic liveliness. Federal Housing policy actually favored whites over African-Americans when the FHA mortgage program was inaugurated in 1934. This policy had devastating effects in terms of segregation, as you can image given the fact that mostly white families could afford to move out of crowded urban areas to the periphery, essentially abandoning the inner city to African-Americans.
Inner City
Many urban areas were redlined; no bank would loan money to buy businesses or homes, and no insurance company would insure the property. Because of these discriminatory practices it was harder for blacks to get mortgages or borrow capital to start businesses. This negative impact of redlining affected upkeep — absentee landlords who saw real estate values plummet due to red-lining wouldn’t bother to maintain their properties. So began the long, slow decline of inner city America, a location filled with minority residents who lived in substandard dwellings, endured declining employment opportunities and faced severe housing shortages.
One of the solutions to the inner city housing problem, or so thought the government, was to erect public housing, like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. This was low-income public housing based on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City concepts. These concepts, when interpreted by city planners in the 1940s and 50s to house the urban poor, produced results that were the opposite of his intentions: the high rises were horrible and dangerous places to live. Social engineering factored into freeway construction in metropolitan areas during the 1950s also. The freeway, by its mere creation, became a barrier to cordon off one part of the city from the Other. Freeway’s also played a key role in urban renewal: many slum areas in cities (usually housing the urban poor) were systematically chosen as the pathways for the new Interstate system. This in turn also fueled inner-city housing shortages, which further enhanced white flight to new homes in suburbia.
Public housing came in several forms: this is in Atlanta, and here’s abandoned public housing in Cleveland.
And Detroit where it’s estimated there are 16,000 buildings awaiting demolition.
I want to point out, however, that it’s not all bleak. The demolition / renewal going on in the Hough district of inner city Cleveland these past fourteen years is part of a larger civic-minded revitalization saga that speaks to the relationship between suburbia and the urban core. It goes like this: James Rouse, who grew up in Cleveland was a principle developer of suburban shopping malls in America, building his first shopping mall in 1958 in Maryland. His intention was to create new town centers with these shopping malls, but instead his work hastened the build-out of suburbia across America, draining city cores of their retail trade and civic life while initiating white flight to new housing in the suburbs. Feeling deeply responsible for the unintended consequences of his development activities — and it’s nice to see a developer with a moral compass — he and his wife formed a non-profit organization in 1979 in Cleveland and raised millions of dollars, seeding partnerships with other community developers addressing the need for affordable housing in inner city neighborhoods. His legacy continues today.
Along these same lines sometimes new fortified homes made out of cinder block spring up in sparsely populated urban neighborhoods. Erected in the last few years, you’d term the owner an urban pioneer. As demolition takes place in the inner city more open space emerges and nature reasserts itself—a “green ghetto” develops, which was a termed coined by Camillo Vergara">Camillo Vergara, a photographer that has had a huge impact on my photography and thinking.
V. Further Impacts of Sprawl on Urban Morphology
County Jails
Often disguised as office buildings, inner city jails and prisons are often hard to detect. As you can imagine suburbanites often take a NIMBY or LULU position on this issue, not wanting anything to adversely affect local property values. NIMBY by the way stands for NOT IN MY BACK YARD and the lesser-know acronym LULU stands for LOCALLY UNWANTED LAND USE.
Placing jails and prisons in impoverished urban municipalities — where open land due to white flight and deindustrialization is plentiful and cheap — seems to be the new trend. Many struggling rust belt cities such as Youngstown, Ohio, have actively courted companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, which has built three prisons there, all to boost local tax revenue and create jobs. But that’s a head fake too: many of the prisons are so automated it takes few people to run them. Social justice advocates call this siting of jails in inner city areas “environmental racism” because these kinds of industries are usually placed in lower-income neighborhoods where residents have little political power to block their construction.
VI. Creative Responses within the Inner City Environment
Having photographed in inner city environments for over 15 years it dawned on me recently that — despite all the destitution and abandonment — there was liveliness there that’s missing in the more regimented suburban environments we encounter every day. In fact it is was a landscape filled with political and vernacular artistic expression. The first time my wife and I went to Detroit we found ourselves in the Ravenswood neighborhood, and noticed that brightly colored dots covered a lot of abandoned buildings. Doing research we later discovered this was the work of the artist Tyree Guyton. Moreover, Guyton’s dots blanketed the city, calling attention to abandoned buildings, dis-investment and neglect. These dots, for him, symbolized the notion that people of all colors are responsible for the landscapes we inhabit, the landscapes that comprise our society at all income levels.
In conclusion, I don’t think we can overlook sprawl’s negative socio-economic impact on urban America over these past 50 years. We’ve seen tax resources or rebates that favor suburban enclaves and institutions over inner city ones, and land-use policies that support new development in suburbia over true revitalization efforts downtown, especially in areas of chronic poverty and destitution. Inner city populations have had to endure bad housing, job loss, and under-funded schools for far too long. While not every inner city social ill can be directly traced to the advent of sprawl, so many of the properties inherent in late industrial and consumer capitalism that fueled sprawls’ contagious growth to begin with, have surely been contributing factors.
Can there be new government policies implemented, and infrastructure projects started that aren’t just window-dressing, that will help reinvent our cities as vibrant realms of the public sphere? Can cities rebirth quality jobs and educational facilities that once helped create a robust middle-class culture — a middle-class life that expressed its collectivism via unions and a “street life” — the antithesis of suburban alienation and isolation? Without a doubt some industrial cities of the Northeast have made a comeback in the last decade; but the lingering social and economic injustices — especially for people of color — still need to be addressed in a real way.
Beauregard, Robert A. When America Became Suburban,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Hayden, Dolores. A Field Guide to Sprawl, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Ingersoll, Richard. Sprawltown, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Equality in Postwar Detroit,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Banham, Rayner. Concrete Atlantis: U. S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989
Vergara, Camillo. The New American Ghetto, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1995
Brouws, Jeff. Approaching Nowhere, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006
Jeff Brouws is the author of seven books including his most recent Approaching Nowhere published by
W. W. Norton in 2006. His photographs can be found in major private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Harvard's Fogg Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Henry Art Museum.
All images copyright Jeff Brouws
I’ve been photographing the American cultural landscape for the past twenty years. Utilizing different series that I’ve done involving the everyday urban and suburban places we encounter, I’ll strive to make visual and verbal connections between these overlapping territories of American life while sticking to our theme of how sprawl has affected inner city environments.
Along with my other work, I’ve been specifically exploring inner city America since 1995, documenting urban landscapes impacted by racial segregation, white flight, and deindustrialization in the northeast. For many Americans these landscapes — mostly defined by abandonment, poverty and minority populations — don’t exist; they’re below our collective radar. Over this time-period I’ve come to believe that all photographs can have a social and political meaning when viewed within a certain context. Feeling kinship with the New Topographics Movement from the 1970s that documented the impact of the constructed suburban world on the natural one, I wanted to invert that premise — looking at the urban core instead of the periphery — and ask how suburbanization after World War II affected city centers. What were the consequences as we went from an urban, city-dwelling lifestyle — based on mass transportation, high density living, and production — to a suburban, car-dependent, low-density lifestyle based on consumption?
I. Transportation Modes - The Rise of the Interstates
Prior to the 1930s there was no organized infrastructure of highways across America; unmarked roads and scarce services for the motorist were the norm. As automobile usage exploded in the United States a cartel of lobbying interests including the oil, tire, auto makers, insurance companies, land developers and the Federal Government came to the realization that roads and freeways were a vital component of infrastructure that would help foster suburban development.
When Eisenhower signed into law the The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956, construction of a freeway system linking all major cities began, fueled by this idea of growth. In addition, Eisenhower’s experience as a young soldier during WWI informed his commitment to the freeway system. According to Phil Patton’s book The Open Road, Eisenhower had witnessed how inefficient road systems hampered troop and supply movements and reasoned that in the case of an impending nuclear attack — this was the Cold War era after all — urbanites could exit cities quickly with freeways in place. Essentials necessary to sustain them could be transported everywhere over these arterial roads as well. In this way, decentralization became a guiding principle for not only developers who owned land on the periphery they wished to sell, but for a federal government who in the final analysis thought a low-density lifestyle, dispersed population and scattered infrastructure would be less vulnerable to a paralyzing nuclear attack.
Another factor to consider in any discussion about sprawl: urban development between 1890 and 1930 had been characterized by centralization as Americans moved from rural environments into cities. Crowding occurred and this, too, became a factor encouraging decentralization — movement of human beings, materials, capital, and goods away from the city center. Freeways, cars and trucks coupled with the aforementioned political theories and social relations were all important agents fostering this spatial rearrangement of the American landscape, a rearranging that would have devastating effects on the urban core.
Freeways also helped the trucking industry take freight away from railroads, railroads that couldn’t deliver goods everywhere highways went. Freeways also fostered the growth of national chain stores. These chain stores used the “freeway” — a form of cheap transportation across vast distances — as a circulatory system to distribute consumer goods. These eventualities fueled the growth of sprawl.
On an emotional level freeways had an unintended consequence on the American psyche, contributing to an atomization and isolation of the population, making us a nation of lonely drivers who perhaps wondered whether our passion for movement on these ribbons of highway made us free or simply enslaved us to a myth of (upward) mobility.
The Demise of Railroads and Mass Transit
Railroads in the urban core were also impacted by sprawl’s growth. Railroad terminals around the country lay fallow, suffering at the hands of suburban build out, as more and more Americans moved away from the locked-in, scheduled routes of the passenger train and chose instead the supposed independence, privacy, and freedom of movement the automobile engendered.
Many inner-city urban freight yards now lay dormant after a 30-year decline in manufacturing. Line side industries previously generated boxcars filled with American products. No more. Freight trains today consist of containers filled with goods produced overseas. The container, loaded onto a ship in China, gets transported across the sea, unloaded onto a railroad flat car here, which is then moved to an inter-modal freight yard on the metropolitan periphery.
Off-loaded as a truck trailer it’s driven to a distribution center geographically situated in the middle of the country. Eventually it ends its journey parked at a Wal-Mart loading dock for its “just in time” delivery. Much of the freight forwarding and handling that use to take place in city centers has been eliminated. Thus we see how mechanization, automation, rationalization and decentralization are primary forces shaping the growth of sprawl.
II. Industrial Zones
Besides giving facts and figures about the socio-economic and historical relationships between city and sprawl environments, perhaps a brief discussion about urban morphology will aid us in understanding what happened spatially and architecturally in and around inner city America as suburban build-out occurred. First we’ll look at a few specific industrialized and commercialized zones that were commonplace in many mid-western and northeastern cities.
Warehouse Districts
In the late 19th century as cities grew, different types of business activity like retailing, wholesaling, manufacturing, and office activities were confined to separate areas of the city. Warehouse districts were no exception and were usually located adjacent to transportation systems. In the early 19th century these systems of transport were river networks, which became railroad networks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the warehouse district neatly integrated into rail lines this kind of urban district was a classic railroad landscape characterized by railroad spurs and mainlines directly adjacent to warehouses, factories, meatpacking districts, and stockyards.
Consumer goods had to be stored at, and shipped from, central warehouse districts because of this transportation configuration. With the advent of the Interstates and growth of sprawl freight shifted from trains to trucks: trucks could deliver goods to more places more efficiently. All of a sudden distribution points became decentralized, could be located anywhere, and these types of multi-storied urban warehouse districts fell into disuse and were supplanted by long horizontal buildings on the periphery which we now call big box stores. As you can imagine freeways and railroads now mostly bypass urban warehouse districts.
Grain Elevator Districts
Another common morphology in the industrial city was the grain elevator district like the one in Buffalo, New York—which at one time was the largest grain port in the world. Architecturally, these buildings played a key role in the development of modernism: I refer you to Reyner Banham’s Concrete Atlantis for the fascinating story of how German architect Erich Mendelsohn’s photographs of these elevators from 1920 circulated around Europe and influenced Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. Despite their historic significance, with a downturn in business these terminal grain elevators fell into abandonment after the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, which completely cut Buffalo off in the shipping chain; the grain boats could bypass the city then much like the trucks bypassing the warehouses on the freeways now.
While the grain transshipment business was ending, Buffalo's animal feed industry was in a similar state of decline; there are feed and cereal mills within this zone as well. Between 1955 and 1970, decentralization brought a virtual halt to animal feed ingredients being shipped to Buffalo’s mills for processing. Instead, smaller mills constructed within trucking distance of the regions in which cattle, hogs, and horses consumed the animal feed became normative. With the feed industry gone, Buffalo suffered another stinging blow to its economy and a new round of job losses.
As you can see: ideas like standardization, economies of scale, mechanization, lower transportation costs, elongated supply chains, and the decentralization of manufacturing plants — which were all things that affected Buffalo’s grain and milling industry too — are the same processes that informed the spread of sprawl.
With the demise of not only the grain trade, but the steel, auto and railroad businesses too, Buffalo now has about 7,000 homes awaiting demolition in residential neighborhoods, former housing for workers who don’t live there anymore. This leads us to ponder other points about the inner city / sprawl dichotomy: Buffalo, along with Detroit lost 1/3 of its population between 1950 and 1970 with a similar increase in the suburbs; in 1959 33% of the American workforce was involved in manufacturing; in 2009 that figure is 12 percent. In the same time span, conversely, the percentage of service sector jobs increased by a similar amount. Many people who use to work in manufacturing are now employed as service workers out in the suburbs.
Steel Mills
This is an LTV steel fabrication plant being dismantled in Cleveland in 2004. The demise of this plant and many others across the country are the result of outsourcing, globalization, corporate takeovers, and flagging unionism — all structural elements of a political economy that also informs sprawl. Two years after shooting this image, developers reconfigured this part of the Cuyahoga Valley into a shopping mall anchored by a Target and Home Depot. The name of the shopping center? The Steelyard Mall. Joel Garreau in his book Edge City called this tactic — “to name a place for what is no longer there” — typical of developers. Many big box stores locate themselves on former brownfields (toxic industrial sites) because the land is cheap and the government often turns a blind eye toward remediation. It’s also interesting to note that corporations like Home Depot and Target are now making incursions into inner city areas as suburban land becomes too expensive. So this image represents a flipside to the equation we’re discussing: the periphery is migrating to the interior.
Auto Plants
The same forces shaping suburbanization (and later globalization) began to impact Detroit’s auto industry in the early 1950s. Many car manufacturers started to decentralize operations, moving front offices to the suburbs. Also, in an effort to destabilize the power of the unions (with a divide and conquer strategy), Ford and General Motors started moving parts of the manufacturing process out of urban areas to the rapidly suburbanizing Sunbelt regions of the US. Not only did cheaper land exist there to expand operations, but these regions also had a more compliant labor force, often hostile to unionism, willing to work for less pay. Some things still hold true: you’ll notice little union membership at your suburban Denny’s, Wendy’s or Wal-Mart.
And now looking at another characteristic of urban morphology: In the first half of the 20th century industrial plants located in the city had a vertical orientation which later shifted to a horizontal one as plants moved to suburbia. The brilliance of Henry Ford’s philosophy — Fordism — was the centralization, rationalization and integration of all operations under one roof. However, as corporations grew, and industrial processes became more complex, companies compartmentalized their operations at different locations and moved from the city because there was no room for expansion. They shifted instead to horizontal building configurations as it became less expensive to produce and ship goods in one-story buildings. This is why so much of sprawl has a horizontal look. It’s a very efficient building form.
III. Commercial Zones
Active Main Streets & Central Business Districts
These next images are from local downtown central business districts. They illustrate a commercial business atmosphere that existed prior to the growth of national chain stores — chain stores that brought with them a homogenizing influence on American consumer culture and the man-made landscape.
These business districts were vernacular “everyday” landscapes grounded in an economic reality having to do with simple utility and function, instead of rampant consumerism. At least that’s how I remember it. This universe, unlike the suburbanize one that supplanted it, was at a pedestrian scale and not necessarily centered on the automobile.
In addition, we need to think about financial and taxation issues. Historically, locally owned downtown businesses paid local taxes; money generated from that business stayed in town and re-circulated there. With sprawl and the growth of multinational chains the majority of what you spend at Wal-Mart today gets sent back home to a out-of-state home office or funneled through tax shelters in Michigan, Delaware or Nevada — states that charge no corporate income tax.
The big box store has also gotten tax subsidies and rebates from local and federal government, meaning they don’t contribute to local tax rolls or the maintenance of local infrastructure in any meaningful way, but you can bet the owners of local downtown businesses once did. It’s easy to see how corporate sprawl negatively impacts community networks and makes a mockery of civic responsibility.
The big box store has also gotten tax subsidies and rebates from local and federal government, meaning they don’t contribute to local tax rolls or the maintenance of local infrastructure in any meaningful way, but you can bet the owners of local downtown businesses once did. It’s easy to see how corporate sprawl negatively impacts community networks and makes a mockery of civic responsibility.
Suburban Strip Malls, Big Boxes, and Fast Food
So eventually we got here. As the suburbs grew in the 1950s and 60s along with a burgeoning consumer culture, Americans decided that they didn’t need to go downtown anymore. The suburbs became cities unto themselves, were predominantly white, and offered many of the same amenities as the city but without the congestion, crime and poverty.
The price we pay for all these shopping centers and outlet malls is that every day in America 5000 acres of undeveloped land — mostly agricultural — disappears under concrete and asphalt. This means about two million acres of open space are gobbled up by development every year in the United States.
This is a new Superstore going up on former farmland in Indiana. And here’s an image of more farmland adjacent to the superstore that eventually gets converted to yet another strip or outlet mall. Built space often expresses a society’s material and political priorities. I also wanted to include these abandoned drive-in movie theaters into our discussion; the land many of these sat on got converted into big boxes or shopping malls, which shows you how land use changes over time. A viable business supplants a failed one. This process is called “creative destruction.”
Here are more images of what I’ve termed the “franchised landscape” of sprawl. I’ve included them as a visual contrast to the older downtown environments you saw a few slides back and the other abandoned retail venues we’ll see in a few moments. Dolores Hayden makes no distinctions about sprawl having to be in metropolitan areas—it can be in rural settings too. She derides policy-makers that have no consideration for either the aesthetic or socio-economic costs of sprawl. You can also see how the shift of retail trade from urban areas to the periphery caused the desecration of some very pristine natural landscapes—an issue adeptly addressed by the New Topographics photographers.
Here in a narrow Colorado canyon with the Rocky Mountains all around, a group of big box stores had colonized the valley.
For the last 12 years, I’ve been actively incorporating sprawl’s everyday monoculture landscape into my work along with my inner city material. The garish semiotics of corporate America are the visual trademarks of sprawl but they also bear a direct relationship to these skeletal remains of signs from once thriving inner city businesses that have been supplanted by chain stores out on the edge of town.
Abandonment in the CBD: Zone of Discard
When witnessing abandoned central business districts like this one in East St Louis, Illinois, we ponder the impact the 50-year build out of suburban shopping malls, freeways and national chains has had on commerce in older city centers. In 1954 downtown retail sales accounted for over 50% of the nationwide metropolitan total; by 1977 that number had dwindled to less than 5%. It’s something like 1% now. Sprawl without a doubt sped the erosion of downtown retailing.
This is an abandoned streetscape of Gary, Indiana’s former business district on Broadway. Urban geographers call this a “zone of discard.” Here’s a neighborhood scene in Detroit that represents the disparity of how tax dollars are spent in cities and suburbs. By the way suburbs usually get the lions share of federal subsidy. You’ll also recall Bush’s infamous LEAVE NO CHILD BEHIND program — public policy reduced to a slogan. Revenue for education is directly derived from local tax bases. In the inner city with its low-income population, depressed property values, and little to almost non-existent manufacturing or commercial activity there isn’t much of a tax base. In fact the city of Detroit, where this image was taken, is looking at a projected 200 million dollar deficit for fiscal 2008-2009. Interestingly, nearby white municipalities, like Ferndale and Grosse Point, both seven miles away, don’t have deficits.
Dolores Hayden again reminds us that although sprawl may be most obvious to the eye at the periphery of a metropolitan region—where speculative new construction is common — older downtowns also reveal sprawl because in an economy organized around new construction and rapid obsolescence, existing places are often left to fall apart. Many inner city mom and pop stores succumb to the forces of sprawl and disinvestment; abandon storefronts and small businesses abound in inner city areas.
IV. Residential Zones
Suburbia
New suburban housing construction in the 1950s also had a huge impact on inner city areas, fostering white flight from the urban core. This is Daly City, California. I’ve included this section for contrast as well. This was a suburb built by Henry Doelger beginning in the late 1940s. Doelger adopted industrial rationalization techniques: he graded his own land; employed in-house architects; milled his own wood; used standardized floor plans; and had an organized workforce based on assembly-line concepts. These technological innovations in mass production used for building homes for mass consumption were Fordism concepts applied to the housing market. In addition low-interest government-backed FHA loans, which came into existence in the 1930s, also paved the way for the creation of suburbia. People for the first time could buy a house on time and pay it off in 30 years.
Notice the garage integrated right into the design of the house; this type of home reinforced individual automobile usage and discourage pedestrian activity; people could drive right into their home without interacting with their environment, which is totally different then living in the city.
US population doubled between 1910-1960 so it’s understandable why suburbia happened — there was a need to house all those people. Home ownership increased in the US by 50% between 1948 and 1973; again there’s a direct correlation to these figures when we look at population loss in our cities over the same time span.
Dyer, Indiana is 15 miles from Gary, Indiana. These two places show the blatant economic and racial inequality that exists spatially in our country even in locations close to one another. Dolores Hayden thinks sprawl causes social injustice in America as it intensifies the disadvantages of class, race, gender and age by adding this spatial separation.
So much of the built environment of suburbia seems to be about order, uniformity and safety: the antithesis of inner city America — a place that seems to be about chaotic liveliness. Federal Housing policy actually favored whites over African-Americans when the FHA mortgage program was inaugurated in 1934. This policy had devastating effects in terms of segregation, as you can image given the fact that mostly white families could afford to move out of crowded urban areas to the periphery, essentially abandoning the inner city to African-Americans.
Inner City
Many urban areas were redlined; no bank would loan money to buy businesses or homes, and no insurance company would insure the property. Because of these discriminatory practices it was harder for blacks to get mortgages or borrow capital to start businesses. This negative impact of redlining affected upkeep — absentee landlords who saw real estate values plummet due to red-lining wouldn’t bother to maintain their properties. So began the long, slow decline of inner city America, a location filled with minority residents who lived in substandard dwellings, endured declining employment opportunities and faced severe housing shortages.
One of the solutions to the inner city housing problem, or so thought the government, was to erect public housing, like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. This was low-income public housing based on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City concepts. These concepts, when interpreted by city planners in the 1940s and 50s to house the urban poor, produced results that were the opposite of his intentions: the high rises were horrible and dangerous places to live. Social engineering factored into freeway construction in metropolitan areas during the 1950s also. The freeway, by its mere creation, became a barrier to cordon off one part of the city from the Other. Freeway’s also played a key role in urban renewal: many slum areas in cities (usually housing the urban poor) were systematically chosen as the pathways for the new Interstate system. This in turn also fueled inner-city housing shortages, which further enhanced white flight to new homes in suburbia.
Public housing came in several forms: this is in Atlanta, and here’s abandoned public housing in Cleveland.
And Detroit where it’s estimated there are 16,000 buildings awaiting demolition.
I want to point out, however, that it’s not all bleak. The demolition / renewal going on in the Hough district of inner city Cleveland these past fourteen years is part of a larger civic-minded revitalization saga that speaks to the relationship between suburbia and the urban core. It goes like this: James Rouse, who grew up in Cleveland was a principle developer of suburban shopping malls in America, building his first shopping mall in 1958 in Maryland. His intention was to create new town centers with these shopping malls, but instead his work hastened the build-out of suburbia across America, draining city cores of their retail trade and civic life while initiating white flight to new housing in the suburbs. Feeling deeply responsible for the unintended consequences of his development activities — and it’s nice to see a developer with a moral compass — he and his wife formed a non-profit organization in 1979 in Cleveland and raised millions of dollars, seeding partnerships with other community developers addressing the need for affordable housing in inner city neighborhoods. His legacy continues today.
Along these same lines sometimes new fortified homes made out of cinder block spring up in sparsely populated urban neighborhoods. Erected in the last few years, you’d term the owner an urban pioneer. As demolition takes place in the inner city more open space emerges and nature reasserts itself—a “green ghetto” develops, which was a termed coined by Camillo Vergara">Camillo Vergara, a photographer that has had a huge impact on my photography and thinking.
V. Further Impacts of Sprawl on Urban Morphology
County Jails
Often disguised as office buildings, inner city jails and prisons are often hard to detect. As you can imagine suburbanites often take a NIMBY or LULU position on this issue, not wanting anything to adversely affect local property values. NIMBY by the way stands for NOT IN MY BACK YARD and the lesser-know acronym LULU stands for LOCALLY UNWANTED LAND USE.
Placing jails and prisons in impoverished urban municipalities — where open land due to white flight and deindustrialization is plentiful and cheap — seems to be the new trend. Many struggling rust belt cities such as Youngstown, Ohio, have actively courted companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, which has built three prisons there, all to boost local tax revenue and create jobs. But that’s a head fake too: many of the prisons are so automated it takes few people to run them. Social justice advocates call this siting of jails in inner city areas “environmental racism” because these kinds of industries are usually placed in lower-income neighborhoods where residents have little political power to block their construction.
VI. Creative Responses within the Inner City Environment
Having photographed in inner city environments for over 15 years it dawned on me recently that — despite all the destitution and abandonment — there was liveliness there that’s missing in the more regimented suburban environments we encounter every day. In fact it is was a landscape filled with political and vernacular artistic expression. The first time my wife and I went to Detroit we found ourselves in the Ravenswood neighborhood, and noticed that brightly colored dots covered a lot of abandoned buildings. Doing research we later discovered this was the work of the artist Tyree Guyton. Moreover, Guyton’s dots blanketed the city, calling attention to abandoned buildings, dis-investment and neglect. These dots, for him, symbolized the notion that people of all colors are responsible for the landscapes we inhabit, the landscapes that comprise our society at all income levels.
In conclusion, I don’t think we can overlook sprawl’s negative socio-economic impact on urban America over these past 50 years. We’ve seen tax resources or rebates that favor suburban enclaves and institutions over inner city ones, and land-use policies that support new development in suburbia over true revitalization efforts downtown, especially in areas of chronic poverty and destitution. Inner city populations have had to endure bad housing, job loss, and under-funded schools for far too long. While not every inner city social ill can be directly traced to the advent of sprawl, so many of the properties inherent in late industrial and consumer capitalism that fueled sprawls’ contagious growth to begin with, have surely been contributing factors.
Can there be new government policies implemented, and infrastructure projects started that aren’t just window-dressing, that will help reinvent our cities as vibrant realms of the public sphere? Can cities rebirth quality jobs and educational facilities that once helped create a robust middle-class culture — a middle-class life that expressed its collectivism via unions and a “street life” — the antithesis of suburban alienation and isolation? Without a doubt some industrial cities of the Northeast have made a comeback in the last decade; but the lingering social and economic injustices — especially for people of color — still need to be addressed in a real way.
Beauregard, Robert A. When America Became Suburban,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Hayden, Dolores. A Field Guide to Sprawl, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Ingersoll, Richard. Sprawltown, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Equality in Postwar Detroit,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Banham, Rayner. Concrete Atlantis: U. S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989
Vergara, Camillo. The New American Ghetto, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 1995
Brouws, Jeff. Approaching Nowhere, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006
Jeff Brouws is the author of seven books including his most recent Approaching Nowhere published by
W. W. Norton in 2006. His photographs can be found in major private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Harvard's Fogg Museum, Princeton University Art Museum, and the Henry Art Museum.
All images copyright Jeff Brouws
26.7.09
24.7.09
Hot Berries..
I have been haunted now for the last three days by an image I was shown made by Maeve Berry who is to have her debut at DiemarNoble photography on the 29th of July. The image is from the show, but not on the gallery website (info here). Without giving too much away, the images work a bit like an inkblot image where each person tends to see something different. This is not to be confused with those naff 3D pattererns which were all the rage in the early nineties that you stared at and could see a spaceship or a bowl of fruit, oh no, these are something much more unique. Basically the image in question here looked to me like the face of the Devil made up of flames which is quite creepy given the content of the image. Wether or not this is a stroke of genius or just a fluke remains to be seen (not that either way makes any difference really). But if people are prepared to buy an image of the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast of ebay, then perhaps Maeve Berry will do very well..I wish her the best and would encourage you to pop along and see for yourself..
Tuff Titty..
Well the move is now over and everything is in its place. The negs are safe, Grandpas clock is ticking and the roses are pruned. I am still using someones wireless to conduct my business as the Sky man is having trouble getting a good signal here as I am surrounded by a forest of Chavs.. I was thinking of making the most of this free service by downloading some films or playing online poker, but my nights are sleepless enough without laying awake thinking I may need to wrestle some seven foot youth in a shell suit when he/she finds out I have been using their internet..I have been working on the Urban Landscape as a photography project for some time and now find myself right in the middle of a monumental Urban Sprawl. This is something I am sure to photograph once my businesses are in order but have decided to go back to my old way of working (dusk/twilight, 5/4 film, long exposure etc) and stop concerning myself with what everyone else is doing. As much as the series is a big part of photography these days I have always been more about the single image relating to a larger body of work rather than several images with only slight differences.
I also plan to stop telling people what I am going to do in terms of projects and at least wait until the project is shot before I run around saying how brilliant its all going to be. This is bound to upset the Agents but thats just tuff titty. I have spent too long trying to please everyone else and I believe it has hindered me from producing work..
I had almost forgotten about the allotment project I had recently shot due to killing off a few brain cells from paint inhalation, but I was pleased to see the results are rather nice and fit in nicely with my Urban Landscape themes. Above are two of my favorites.
20.7.09
More pork, more pies...
If you bothered to click on my last very lazy post you will have seen the now classed as 'fake' (well who kisses like that anyway!) image of of the Kiss by Robert Capa. This ties in with what I was saying a few weeks ago about all the porky pies being told throughout photographic history and the fact that most photographers 'expand' the truth in some form or other..
When I was at college in the middle ages a young girl who shall remain nameless claimed that the old fella wearing the berry and glasses in the background of the Kiss image was in fact her grandfather. I never did believe her, but now I am not so sure..
When I was at college in the middle ages a young girl who shall remain nameless claimed that the old fella wearing the berry and glasses in the background of the Kiss image was in fact her grandfather. I never did believe her, but now I am not so sure..
Oh Danny Boy
Theres a video of one of my old college pals Dan Holdsworth talking about his work here. Dan is a very intelligent and passionate (not forgetting) talented photographer, as you will see, and talks for an hour and seventeen minutes about his work. Dan begins with his early influences and talks fondly of his late father then goes into how his first projects began taking us through his wonderful images up to his most recent work Ghosts.
At the end of this most insightful talk there is an opportunity to ask questions. Now given the caliber of Danny Boys talk you would expect some intelligent questions not;
Whats your longest exposure?
Do you shoot film or digital?
Why are there no people in your pictures? Ever thought of putting some in?
Whats your favorite colour?
Do you like my dress?
Ok so the last two are not true but I have always found no matter how interesting a talk may be people will always ask the same questions and there usually technical (and usually photographers?). Personally I never ask such questions and prefer to enjoy the work. Its a bit like asking a magician how he makes a sexy lady float on air or catch a bullet in his teeth...
So if you happen to attend one of my own talks just enjoy the mystery..
At the end of this most insightful talk there is an opportunity to ask questions. Now given the caliber of Danny Boys talk you would expect some intelligent questions not;
Whats your longest exposure?
Do you shoot film or digital?
Why are there no people in your pictures? Ever thought of putting some in?
Whats your favorite colour?
Do you like my dress?
Ok so the last two are not true but I have always found no matter how interesting a talk may be people will always ask the same questions and there usually technical (and usually photographers?). Personally I never ask such questions and prefer to enjoy the work. Its a bit like asking a magician how he makes a sexy lady float on air or catch a bullet in his teeth...
So if you happen to attend one of my own talks just enjoy the mystery..
Julius Shulman, RIP
Julius Shulman, giant of 20th century architectural photography, has died aged 98.
The photographer’s work became synonymous with the laid-back glamour of the West Coast style, summing up the luxurious minimalism of mid-century Modernism. He completed more than 8000 architectural commissions in his 60-year career, including photographing key buildings for leading American-based architects of the 20th Century, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van de Rohe, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra and Oscar Niemeyer.
Perhaps his most enduring photographs, shot free-of-charge, are of the Case Study House Program (1945-62), which aimed to demonstrate the principles of Modernism and their sustainability for low cost housing. And if one photograph has become his signature image, it is Pierre Koenig's Case Study house #22, 1960 (also known as the Stahl Residence), which is said to be the world's most published architectural image. Featuring only a detail from the building, with two women chatting in a corner, seated overlooking downtown LA in dramatic backdrop, it is a perfect example of his combination of instinct and preparation.
He had asked two friends of his assistant to be at hand, if needed, to make the house appear inhabited. 'At one point in the early evening I was setting up inside,’ he told BJP’s Simon Bainbridge in an interview published in December 2007. ‘I walked outside, and the two girls just happened to be sitting in that corner of the house. I brought my camera outside and immediately set up the composition.'
He opened up the camera lens for several minutes - judging the exposure without a light meter - to let in the scene below. 'At a certain moment I called to the girls. "Sit up" and then to my assistant, "Turn on the ceiling lights"' - firing the flashbulbs mounted behind his camera and capturing the whole scene in one shot.'
Benedict Taschen, the publisher of many of his recent books, dubbed him 'One Shot Schulman' for this uncanny ability to judge the light and composition perfectly and get his shot first time. 'The secret to the success of my photography is to always create a proper balance of light,' he wrote the photographer in the introduction to his classic 1962 textbook, Photographing Architecture and Interiors. 'Put your camera down. Don't act like a photographer; instead, act like a human being reviewing a piece of sculpture and understand where you would like the light to be for your exposure.'
Shulman, who had been ill for some time, died at home in Los Angeles on 15 July.
Via BJP BLOG
19.7.09
A glass of scotch a ciggerette and a leica round my neck..
I watched old Willy Eggles on the I Player today here (hurry as its not on there for long). First off if you haven't seen The Colourful Mr. Eggleston you simply must. Its the most inspiring documentary I have seen in a long time. Here is a photographers photographer who may at first come across as a mumbling, bumbling idiot but by the end of it you realise he is a genius. I particularly like the comments made by Jurgan Teller and his quote "He just does what ever he likes!" and the story of how he tried to do his own Eggleston shot and it was just crap...
You can say what you like about his wealth, easy life etc, etc, but this guy just has a way of seeing things like no one else. Theres no fuss, no panic, no rush, no stress, no pretense, no waiting and no one quite like him.... Just a fag in one hand and a leica in the other.
Classic.
Thanks to Mark over on Manchester photographer for bringing this to my attention..
You can say what you like about his wealth, easy life etc, etc, but this guy just has a way of seeing things like no one else. Theres no fuss, no panic, no rush, no stress, no pretense, no waiting and no one quite like him.... Just a fag in one hand and a leica in the other.
Classic.
Thanks to Mark over on Manchester photographer for bringing this to my attention..
16.7.09
How moving...
Well I'm moving house tomorrow. The negs are packed, the print boxes taped, the framed prints bubble wrapped and the dustbins are in the street creating a space for the removal van. I know you will of all heard people saying "If there was a fire in my house the first thing I would grab are my photographs", well the first thing I packed up were in deed all my photographs (maybe it should of been my negs). Well whatever, and before you say digitze them all and then they will always be safe, well thats just nonsense because in twenty years time the Mac will be known as Cack and would be like using a ZX Spectrum today.
Sadly I am not moving To Carmel or Big Sur in California as so many greats have done before me (although that is the plan eventually) but its bigger, cheaper and I will have my own 'print studio' or in other words a garage with a big table...
15.7.09
VISIONS AND IMAGES.
Its almost thirty years old and old Meyerowitz has hair, but its a great interview although I have no clue about the show (Visions and Images). Theres lots of other goodies there too..
See it here.
See it here.
THE FIGHTBACK BEGINS HERE...
Reports of photographers being harassed or stopped using bogus interpretations of anti-terror legislation are on the rise. To help raise awareness of the issue and change public perceptions, BJP has begun a new campaign - and we're inviting you all to join us
Chris Steele-Perkins of Magnum Photos kicks off our campaign
BJP is launching a campaign to counter the rising paranoia that targets every photographer who shoot images in public places.
We are calling all photographers, amateur or professional, to join our protest by taking part in a visual campaign, designed to raise awareness about increasing restrictions on shooting in tFhe public realm, which together with abuse of police powers and increasing hostility from the public at large, is impacting on photographers every day, in the UK and abroad.
The 'Not A Crime' campaign has already got the backing of two of Britain's leading photographers, Stuart Franklin and Chris Steele-Perkins of Magnum Photos. We invite you to join them by posting a self-portrait of yourself together with a sheet of white card with the phrases 'Not a crime' or 'I am not a terrorist' (in your first language) to a Flickr group BJP has created. Details on how to do so can be found at www.not-a-crime.com.
'Increasing concerns about terrorism, paedophilia, health and safety, and personal privacy have resulted in a deep mistrust of photographers,' says BJP's editor Simon Bainbridge.
'Police routinely invoke anti-terror legislation to prevent photographers from carrying out their work, and photojournalists are constantly filmed at public gatherings and their details kept on an ever-growing database.
'Tourists, particularly foreign tourists, are also targeted by police, as was the case with an Austrian father and son recently who made the mistake of photographing a building of an extremely sensitive nature - Walthamstow bus station!
'BJP has always reported these abuses, but in the last couple of years the number of incidents has increased to such a level that we decided we should begin a campaign to draw attention to the fact that Britain is now becoming a no-photo zone. Having lobbied the Home Office and police authorities to take a more sensible to approach to public photography rights, and to honour existing agreements with press photographers, we found a lack of willingness to address the problem, which requires not so much a change of law, but a general recognition that photography is not a crime. If this issue matters to you, I urge you to join us in our visual petition, post a picture, and help spread the message.'
Turning pointThe campaign comes at a potential turning point in the public's perception of the issue. One consequence of April's G20 protests is that the police has come in for increased scrutiny about how it handles media coverage of such events, and is being compelled to address the larger issue of public photography rights.
Last week, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC) released the 'Adapting to Protest' report, which found that the police's treatment of the media had been inadequate. The HMIC also criticised the inability of police officers to recognise photographers' press cards.
The report follows Lord Carlile's comments earlier this year criticising the police for their wilful misinterpretation of the 2000 Terrorism Act to prevent photographers from taking pictures of them in public places, and there have been a string of complaints lodged by photographers organisations and individuals who have been subject to harassment or misuse of stop and search powers.
Over the next year the campaign aims to gather hundreds of self-portraits of photographers. We will use these images to gather a visual petition to protest increasing restrictions, and to help take out campaign to the public via Flickr and international photographer networks and colleagues in the media.
You can help us get the momentum going by taking a self-portrait and posting it to our Flickr group at flickr.com/groups/iamnotaterrorist. Or visit www.not-a-crime.com for further information.
14.7.09
12.7.09
MY BEST SHOT (naff title)
The Guardian is running a very interesting article called MY BEST SHOT where lots of photographers choose what they consider to be their finest image. What's always fascinating is that the photographers favorite image is usually no one else's.
Regarding my own work I often find people like work which I never consider my finest, in fact sometimes I really hate it, hence the importance of a third eye usually in the form of a Gallery, Agent or Neighbor/Relative...
Above are two images to prove my point. The now famous Hollywood Diner, my best seller and a big favorite amongst the populous. Personally though all I can see are ways it could of been better. I dislike the highlights on the tables and the colour in the print is never quite right.
The print below it (Melted Wire) is one of my most favorite images. Its the fact that it looks like a lily and I just find it quite extraordinary. I would even go so far as to say that it is reminiscent of my earlier work when I photographed lots of real lily's but sadly everyone else hates it, hates it I tell you..
Anyway, enough of this nonsense I'm off to smell my lily's...
9.7.09
Porky Pies..
I have been reading with interest a bit of a carry on regarding Edgar Martins and a project he done with the New York Times. Most of the details and pics are here.
Basically old Eggy has been claiming that his images are not digitally manipulated but others seem to think otherwise. I will let you judge for yourself although its pretty obvious they have been altered for balance etc, at least thats what I would say. Big deal you might think, but this comes after the NYT stated last year that if any of their images are digitally altered they would say so..
This could land Martins in a bit of bother simply because he has fibbed a bit, but we are all guilty of that are we not...
Personally I don't give a rooty toot hoot. I like Martins work and having never met guy would never say too much as he hasn't been able to speak for himself as of yet.
It always amazes me how people get so up in arms over such things. Sometimes I think its just plain jealousy.
If we are going get all high and mighty why not bring up someone Cartier Bresson, decisive moment my arse. Take the image of that fella jumping over the puddle shot, turns out they found a contact sheet with several attempts at the jump... He's a big fat lier, but who would dare say it after all these years..
We all lie about our work, myself included. I don't manipulate my images digitally and would say so if I did, but I didn't stand in quicksand for an hour to do that certain shot as I may of said, it was really thirty minutes.. (although it felt like longer)..
6.7.09
HICKSVILLE...
I have seen the odd Samuel Hicks image around from his 'On the way' series (above) and although nothing groundbreaking they are rather nice. I am reminded of what a joy America is to photograph, the freedom, the landscape and the light all add up to a photographers paradise which is why so many images like these (including my own) are in circulation today.
I will always feel the pull of the American landscape and look forward to the day when I return regardless of how many have photographed the West. Theres a feeling you get when shooting in the late afternoon of say somewhere like California that you just don't get anywhere else. But enough about me, Mr Hicks is showing here in Brighton which may be an excuse to walk along the sea front with the salty wind in your hair and stuff your face with ice cream.
Thanks for the link Bro.
3.7.09
Some photographers go out and want to make beautiful photographs. I think that puts the cart before the horse. Good photographs are the by-product of some other exploration, or some other intention. If I’m following through on those explorations and intentions, I can’t help but ultimately create what you’re referring to as the arc of an oeuvre — there’s nothing else, in fact, that I can do.
Stephen Shore.
Stephen Shore.
1.7.09
BJP Wednesday and an idiot..
Sitting in the shade avoiding the burn and while enjoying a froffy coffee at my local cafe, I surveyed my surroundings and noted a young chap on the table across from me reading a copy of baby monthly (or something like it). Not such a bizaar thing to behold you may say, but then after finishing off his cappuccino he walked over to his car, removed a baby from the back seat, put the baby on the front seat, opened the windows and drove off.
After trying to mop up the coffee stains from my shirt and almost chocking on my danish pastry I sat bewildered at probably the most stupid thing I have ever seen. I wouldn't do that with my dog, or even a cat or a bloody rat...
Why did I post this on the B, well I was reading this weeks BJP at the time.
After trying to mop up the coffee stains from my shirt and almost chocking on my danish pastry I sat bewildered at probably the most stupid thing I have ever seen. I wouldn't do that with my dog, or even a cat or a bloody rat...
Why did I post this on the B, well I was reading this weeks BJP at the time.
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