An Emerging Landscape

Years ago, I’d hurtle home each evening on the 39 bus to Jamaica Plain. Bending onto South Huntington and passing the start-and-stop E-train trolley, we’d bypass traffic cones and cement barriers, construction-in-pause, sunk in a “wintry mix.” I would peer out the window onto the memorable street lit scene. Even before (and certainly ever since) those daily commutes, such construction and curbside traffic cones would consistently snag my attention.

Across the dull cityscape – upon concrete, asphalt, and bulldozer-overturned dirt – they would stick out like brightly painted brushstrokes; they are like graphic diagrams, three-dimensional yield signs. They seek to foretell of hazardous goings-on, sentinels that presage ambiguously, silently, at roadside.

This is their job, of course, but in the bustle of daily life, few really consider these meanings. For me, what they communicate spills over into the existential. I am attracted to these orange elements of construction, as well as plastic containers, instructional traffic lights, signs, and road markings, and lush green bursts of plant life. These have built themselves into an internal set of archetypes whose symbolic meanings I am in the process of discerning. And when these symbols begin to interact with one another, creeping into each other’s space, overlapping and confronting the natural world, their layered messages become particularly complicated, exciting, and striking.

This is work completed in 2007. This is an emerging landscape.

My wife and I adopted our baby girl, Carmen Laura, from Bogotá, Colombia. While the courts processed her paperwork, we spent two months in Bogotá waiting to take Carmen home. Carmen’s birthmother gave her a book filled with letters, pictures and poems. “I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity,” she wrote, “When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things.” With those words as a mission statement, I began making my own book for Carmen. In photographing the city of her birth, I hope I’ve described some of the beauty in this hard place.
                                                                    — Alec Soth

This book is Alec Soth’s Dog Days Bogotá (also viewable on his website). It is a portrait of a city the viewer probably doesn’t know much about — a collection of portraits of the people he has met, as well as quirky and dingy interiors, happenings on the city streets, framed drawings and photographs on residential walls, an image of a chicken sitting on a chair, and — most compelling to me — recurring photographs of the dogs of Bogotá.

The project and its aims come together in these dog portraits. That Soth has succeeded at creating compelling, “serious” dog photography is impressive indeed. Shooting an adorable dog portrait is like snapping a breathtaking sunset; it can so easily come off as just another postcard — Wegman cutsiness is eagerly waiting in the wings.

These scruffy, lonesome dogs (almost all seem to be quietly roaming the streets, lying in the dirt) are depicted with dignity. They have suffered and endured mistreatment, perhaps, but are nonetheless proud.

I’ve never been particularly moved by “travel” photography — without a certain contextualization (such characters, a point of view, a setting), travel images can come off as just another National Geographic special.

Soth’s simple introduction, citing a very personal and almost noble motivation, combined with a wise and understated collection of images, communicates the “hard” lives of these strangers, without expecting pity. The subjects don’t need pity so much as they deserve respect. This is probably the goal of every National Geographic photographer (and I realize that is probably unfair to use “National Geographic” as an epithet) to describe “some of the beauty in this hard place” but I think it is notable to see this aim executed with the influence of the contemporary art photographer.

The straightforward, carefully composed, large-format color image, combined with a very personal project documenting a far off place, is an exciting meeting of intents (one could even term them “genres”). The cold documentarian quality of large-format falls away with this subject matter, particularly when we know the story of what these dogs and people and homes have to do with each other, and with the photographer.

A gruesome narrative inevitably develops.

I’ve posted decontextualized advertising images here before — there’s something very alluring about a well-photographed object (with drop shadow) existing with no background, only blank, white space — particularly when the brand name and commercial bullying are removed as well.

So it was surprising to see a blood-stained towel, nicely folded and cleanly removed from any conceivable context, on an [instructional page] concerning the removal of blood stains from clothing. It could be from the pages of L.L.Bean, but for the vibrant blotches of violent red discoloring.