David Graham: Declaring Independence
The automobile’s profound influence on the American landscape is revealed in David Graham’s 18 color photos at Catherine Edelman, most from his latest book, Declaring Independence. Never condescending, these often humorous images document roadside attractions and other outdoor scenes with a care that presents them as more beautiful than kitschy. Still, Graham articulates the disconnectedness that travel by car creates: viewing the land at high speeds from a ribbon of concrete, we’re struck not by continuities or relationships but by momentary attention getters. A pumpkin field in Near Watsonville, California needs the giant fake pumpkin in the middle to announce what it is. In an introduction to one of Graham’s books, postmodern architect Robert Venturi (who three decades ago praised a restaurant shaped like a giant duck) suggests that Graham’s work celebrates “vitality within vulgarity” and “the everyday American experience involving ranges of mess.”
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In Solly Brothers Farm, Richboro, Pennsylvania [Bedroom], furniture and home decorations sit outdoors: a bed and dresser against some fake walls hung with pictures, a mirror, and a crucifix. Graham told me this surreal scene is part of the setup for a “haunted hayride” in which “a figure leaps out of bed at people as they ride by.” His explanation didn’t make the scene any less strange. Rather it’s an apt metaphor for the ostentatiously fake theater that dots our roadsides. That theater can be mobile too. In Jesus Saves, Grants, New Mexico a truck whose side is painted Jesus Saves in bright red serves as a backdrop for a portable altar with rows of benches facing it, all presumably just unloaded from the truck. Beyond the truck is a suitably random representation of our transformed landscape: a shed and some parked semitrailers. As Jane and Michael Stern, who’ve written about odd tourist sites, said in an introduction to another of Graham’s books, he portrays American civilization as “a loopy spectacle of passions and advertising promises, where everyone wants to be noticed and everything has been created to look as big and important as possible.”
The quietest image in the show was the one I liked best. Westley, CA shows what Graham calls a “happenstance intersection of objects”: a nondescript rural crossroads with a water tower in the background and some posts, a pay phone, and a fire hydrant in the foreground. Just behind the phone is a rather tawdry sign that reads Rocket Muffler Repair, with a white top coming to a triangular peak in a weak hint at a rocket. The squat sign juts into a gorgeous sky nearing sunset–a suggestion, perhaps, that advertising isn’t always the attention getter it’s meant to be.
Mann was born in Snowflake, Arizona, in 1978 and grew up there and in Albuquerque. He says he was influenced by Bernd and Hilla Becher, photographers known for their typological grids of industrial structures such as water towers–an influence evident in his taxonomic approach and grid arrangement. But where the Bechers’ water towers are often spectacular, with notable differences between them, Mann’s stores are almost pathetically unimpressive and unvaried. Indeed it seems a feature of American mass culture that the “differences” between products can be meaningless.
