Searching for America - still, again, always
Some years back, photo historian Sally Stein introduced me to the rephotography projects of Mark Klett and Bill Ganzel. Ganzel spent five years from 1975 to 1980 finding and photographing again the people and places photographed during the depression by Roy Striker's team of FSA photographers. Mark Klett initiated in 1977 a team effort, the Rephotographic Survey Project, to photograph again the sites first documented by the geological survey photographers following the Civil War (see here: http://thirdview.org/3v/postcards/index.html).
The acts of return in these projects proliferate: in Ganzel, we can return to Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the legacy of the depression and depression-era policy, to the American geography, the great plains, and California's central valley, and to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and the FSA documentary style so cultivated by chief propagandist Roy Striker. And, in Klett, we find Manifest Destiny, our relationship to the land, the western suburbs, and Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and the complex figure of the American landscape photograph -- and even in there the history of painting.
What is America -- and American photography, American politics, American self-actualization -- if not this obsessive, compulsive, iterative search for itself?
(Consider the endless issuance of photo books with 'America' in their titles. Alec Soth notes this on his blog -- http://alecsothblog.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/the-ballad-of-good-and-bad-titles/ -- though he doesn't explore here the insistent role that 'America' plays in the arena of photographic dreams.)
The photo archive, like the themes in our politics, is insistent. What's past is prologue?
Bill Ganzel, interview with Errol Morris: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-7/
Darrell Coble and family by Arthur Rothstein (Library of Congress)
Darrell Coble by Bill Ganzel
