The Real America Exposed; It Isn't Disneyland. It's Barely Even On the Map. But This Is the Usa's Heart. Now Meet the Photographer Who Made It Come Alive
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Summary
What do you think of when you think about America? Tower blocks and yellow cabs? The Golden Gate Bridge and the Hollywood sign? Mickey Mouse in Disneyland and hardbodies on South Beach? Familiar images all; all-American, certainly. But are they America? What do they say about the heartland of the nation, those places not sprinkled with touristy glitter or big-city bravura? What do they say about the nowhere-in-particular corners, what F Scott Fitzgerald once called "that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night"? What does that vast obscurity look like?
It looks like this: a picture of Second Street East and South Main Street in Kalispell, Montana. It is August 1974, and the streets are almost empty. There are four people in all, two trucks and one car. Otherwise the town seems deserted and, for all the parking meters, street lights and shop hoardings, oddly provisional. Maybe it's the baked, cracked road at the forefront of the image, or the looming dark cloud that fills the top of the frame, but there's something in this picture that suggests in the wink of an eye - or the blink of a shutter - that Kalispell could be blown away like so much tumbleweed.See the full content of this document
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The Real America Exposed; It Isn't Disneyland. It's Barely Even On the Map. But This Is the Usa's Heart. Now Meet the Photographer Who Made It Come Alive
Turn the page. Another image, this time a crossroads in California. It's 1976 now, December in the desert. Look closely and you can see a few low houses and even a couple of cars, but otherwise the only signs of man are the road signs.
Welcome to America. Or at least Stephen Shore's America, a world of empty roads and abandoned cinemas, strip malls and gas stations, motel rooms and diners, traffic jams and huge distances distilled from a decade of road trips around the US through the 1970s and early 1980s. "Uncommon places", Shore calls them, though at first glance they couldn't look more everyday. But look again. Shore's lens focuses on the extraordinariness of the ordinar...See the full content of this document
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