V E B A H O O D

Mark Steinmetz Greater Atlanta ISBN: 978-1-59005-259-4 Hardcover, 12” x 13”, 88 pages, 73 duotone plates. Nazraeli Press, 2009

Here is my take, a review of sort, on the latest book of photographs by Mark Steinmetz titled Greater Atlanta. It is an unlikely book, containing beautifully printed black and white images, which at first glance visually testifies to the contemporary American society. However, the work seems to be blanketed by some mysterious layer that transforms this visual testimony into a timeless visual poetry. It is this mysterious layer that I will try to discover and reveal here. Greater Atlanta is a third book in a sequence, preceded by South East and South Central, and contains photographs created over the period of 18 years in the area that is the photographer’s home.

Before the book even properly starts, before its title page and publishing info, we are confronted with a photograph: a car roof on which a heart is painted. It is a curious place for the heart to be. The car is functional, or it appears to be, and the heart will, as cars tend to do, travel around Greater Atlanta. Right after the title page that includes the artist name and the publisher, there is a page with a photograph of a Sphinx-like dark shape that could be the remnant of a hill scarred by men building a highway. Thereafter, a poem Recent Archeo News by Linh Dinh.

The poem, which seems to stand for an artist’s statement or a missing critic/historian’s introductory essay, starts with the line:

“20 February 3006 – Ancient toilet

Discovered in Boston, lid missing”

And later finishes with the line:

“15 December 3005 – Nasty skull hookahs

And dead head bongs excite experts.”

After the poem, in which time goes backwards, the title page repeats itself stripped of the names of the artist and publisher and then the photographs follow, set one thousand years in the past.

In the next Millennium, when and where the opening poem is set, our contemporary civilization will exist only when the people of that time will think of us. It is unlikely that in 1000 years from now anyone will hold this book; its first edition is of only 1000 copies and the future of possible new editions is very uncertain. But what the opening poem does, it situates us, the viewers, in some future time and when we hold this book and investigate the images it contains we cannot help but look at it as some ancient visual testimony, something familiar yet buried in the past. But that past is now since now is the future. It is a play with time just like, perhaps, W.G. Sebald would imagine it. In his novel Austerlitz the lead character finds time somewhat ridiculous, “ a mendacious object” that can be bypassed, and its justice avoided “in the hope, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments in time have co-existed simultaneously”.

This play with time reaches far and not just influences the way we look at this work, but it defines it. Often, when looking at the images of people and places we find on the edges of American cities, where poverty and feelings of loss are vividly present, we refer to it as the subject on the fringes of society. This is possible only because it is evident that there is a society, the better, more prosperous, happier side of it, therefore the fringes exist. When looking at the images in Greater Atlanta though, it is as if this is all that the world is; there is nothing to fringe from. To find the other society, perhaps the better one, to which the world as depicted in Greater Atlanta is an off-product, we have to travel through time and not through space. The artist in creative process often stumbles upon things beyond his/her understanding or things that would, even if understood, serve the work better if left out. In Reading Pictures Alberto Manguel tells us a story: “The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the first to recognize the genius of Paul Cézanne, wrote about a still life in which a master had left half an apple unfinished (in reserve, as it were), that Cézanne had painted only the parts of an apple he knew; the parts that were still a puzzle to him, he left blank. “He only painted that which he utterly understood,” Rilke concluded.” Studying Greater Atlanta it seems as if the world it depicted is the half apple Mark Steinmetz understands or the only half he is interested in.

To quote Walter Benjamin: ”Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only by nature but by history.” With no ability of predicting what those modes of existence will look like and how our perception will operate millennium from now, we have to rely on our perception and reasoning of today when discussing a contemporary work of art.

The sequence proper in Greater Atlanta starts with an image of a shut door lit with a setting sunlight, the knob missing. That other world mentioned above, the missing duality or the half apple unfinished, stayed locked behind that door and we are set to encounter the civilization in transition, the world where gas stations are abandoned and cars look old and tired. Along the road we get to see the days that are not much different then nights, the visual layers insensitive to the daily routine of nature. As if saying, the grey is grey, and the bleak remains bleak whether one wraps it up in sunlight or in the darkness of the night. It is a peculiar atmosphere that encloses every image in this book individually, and consequently the book as a whole. It might not be only the visual language Mark Steinmetz is using but also the time distance introduced by Recent Archeo News at the very beginning that creates this atmosphere; it is as if aura has been reestablished around something that is the remains of the world from which aura, as discussed by Walter Benjamin, had previously evaporated.

There are three main categories in which we could classify the images in this book: environment, people and animals. Now, this is very speculative classification, since some images with animals and some images with people carry more important environmental info than some images classified as such. This is an old problem we face every time attempt is made to classify art, especially photography. Geoff Dyer, at the beginning of his book The Ongoing Moment, amusingly talks about it: “One of the features of photographic taxonomy is that there is a great deal of seepage or traffic between categories. No sooner had I established hats and steps as organizing principles than I saw that some of the pictures that had engaged my attention had both hats and steps in them.”

Let us consider the first element, the photographs of the environment. “It is not boundaries that make a district but cross-use and life.” These words by Jane Jacobs come to mind when we look at Greater Atlanta. It recalls the boundaries created in many North American cities where highways besiege large communities to the point that they cannot function anymore, cross-use prevented, life choking. Of all the Greater Atlanta’s environmental pictures, and those include landscapes, cityscapes, roads and various details, only one does not carry any imprint of human activity. This imprint is often violent and if not, it is nothing less than ugly. The men have lost their way and nature slowly reclaims the land. The spaces captured on film are transitional; the scenes are mostly neither natural nor urban. This is difficult to read visually since we are trained to accept one or the other. The environment is evidently scarred by human intervention, but the intervention is unfinished as if the progress is an abandoned process and things start to unroll in reverse. What is left behind is cracked pavement with footsteps and car wheel imprints, automobiles wrapped in newspapers, tree trunks cut and stripped of branches, overgrown parking lots, abandoned gas stations, deserted or unfinished houses and incomplete roads. Nothing is explicitly disturbing in these pictures, they do not denote the act of violence, but there is a connotation of violence. Consequently, they radiate the feelings as if all the prospects have gone lost forever.

In the mist of all this environmental haze are people. Those we encounter cannot be the ones responsible for the urban/natural confusion shown in the landscape photographs. Mark Steinmetz portraits them in such a light, as innocent bystanders who happened to be there, and we are aware that the men responsible were left behind that door that opened the book. One man wears a hat that reads “Been There” which seems to reduce the involvement of those we witness in Greater Atlanta to mere bystanders. It also reads as a comment, or rather an emphasis, on the very essence of photography as discussed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: “In photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.”

The people in the book are as scarred as the landscape is. However, as there is no explicit violence to the landscape shown, there is no explicit despair in the look of those portrayed. In his interview for Conscientious, explaining his strategy while taking these portraits Mark Steinmetz says: “Sometimes I’ll give a little direction like “look over that way” but it’s never elaborate.” No matter how minimal his directing of the subject is it inevitably implies that the portraits were somewhat staged. This, of course, does not take away from the work but introduces another layer of meaning to it. Since these portraits are photographed, recorded on film by the camera, the scenes are essentially truthful to what really happened in front of the lens, but still not authentic in a traditional way of reportage since the scene was somewhat acted. As soon as we have hints of the staging process, we get into the frame of mind where the truth and fiction openly mingle and we get to question them both. Using as an example staged, choreographed and acted to the smallest detail, Jeff Wall’s work, Russell Ferguson argues that there lays the power of this kind of work, allowing the viewer to be aware of  “double consciousness unavailable to straight documentary”. Portraits in Greater Atlanta usually appear one after another in sequence, then disappear for long spells only to come back in groups again. As if the artist is trying to pull together these lonely people left out on the streets.

The third element consists of the pictures of animals. There might not be many, compared to people, but they are equally strong. Just like people, animals are not shown in action; they tend to flock together, they move and even sleep in crowds. They seem stunned by what surrounds them or by something they have just witnessed; or as if they are anticipating something large to happen, something only them can sense. Animals are stray, and are waiting. The closing picture is of a cat, only its head visible from the gutter by the road, staring back at the camera. We know this gaze; it is one of the broken friendships or of a lost opportunity. Finally, these three elements – the environment, people and animals – while part of the same entity, are not truly connected anymore. There are no means that could make a bridge from one element to another, they exist in the same space, and that is as far as their connection goes. It is an unbearable calm the photographs radiate while showing the scenes that should disturb us deeply. We must go back to the beginning, to that rooftop painted heart perhaps, to regain the hope.

Mark Steinmetz photographs near where he lives and this translates in the work that seems to be effortless. Curiously, no words are offered to pollute or infiltrate our imagination; none can be found in the book apart from the mysterious poem, no statement on artist website and no trace of any written material from the artist. In her book On Photography Susan Sontag points to the fact that photographs cannot speak: “What moralists are demanding from a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do – speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth. But even an entirely accurate caption is only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one, of the photograph to which it is attached.” Steinmetz spares us of yet another interpretation that, as Sontag discusses later, cannot prevent unavoidable argument on the meaning of photographs. As a viewer one can easily go through this disturbingly calm book of pictures, admiring their beauty, reminding us about “the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it”.

In Linh Dinh’s Recent Archeo News Mark Steinmetz found a perfect companion for his photographs, one that not only sets the stage and provides a mysterious protective cover for, but also ensures a long life for this work. From that very first page we know that Greater Atlanta will stand the test of time simply because we are already a Millennium ahead, and still riding in the car with a heart painted on its roof.