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The Weather and a Place
to Live:
Photographs of the Suburban West
by Steven B. Smith, winner of the second
biennial Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize
Ordering Information
Description
Photo Gallery
An Interview with Steven B. Smith
Exhibition Schedule
An Interview
with Steven B. Smith
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Christopher Sims, a prize-winning photographer as well as the
Web content manager at the Center for Documentary Studies, interviewed
Steven B. Smith about his photography and winning the Center
for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography
in August 2005.
WINNING THE PRIZE
AND WORKING ON THE BOOK
Sims: Steve, before you received
the Center for Documentary Studies Honickman First Book Prize, you
were honored for your photographic work with a number of distinguished
awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Having a book published
is an even greater milestone in a photographer’s career. I
know you were on press a couple weeks ago. Tell me what it means
to see your photographs come together as a book.
Smith: It’s been my goal,
as well as my dream, to get this work published. I knew that I was
trying to make the best individual picture every time I set up my
camera, but I also knew that I was trying to get them, as a group,
to speak to some larger ideas. Putting the book together has been
an important process—when it comes down to the actual editing
and sequencing, the project changes a bit, becomes more succinct.
It’s interesting what you have to edit in . . . or edit out.
And then seeing it fit together in a book—the first time I
saw it all, I don’t know, it made me pause. [Laughs.] It was
kind of scary, and yet a really great thing, an amazing gift.
Sims: I know when I’m putting
together a show, I’m not sure that the final product is it.
How do you know when the project is done?
Smith: I’ve put together
smaller groups of images for exhibitions—but never sixty to
eighty images, as in the book. I had the feeling, as I was photographing,
probably about two or three years ago, that it was time to stop
and move on. Get the pictures published. But right at the tail end
of that period, I stumbled upon an idea that rekindled my desire
to keep working. So I had a lot of fun shooting the last two or
three years, but it was a bit difficult to edit some of the later
pictures in with the pictures from the previous six, seven years.
Sims: What was the subject of
this last chapter, as you photographed it?
Smith: I started getting a little
closer to individual yards, and I started trying to make the images
more animated, a little bit more humorous. I had been afraid to
make things too funny, for fear of the work not being serious and
direct enough. When I let go of that, it allowed me to see new things.
Sims: When people look at your
book, do you think it will be clear to the viewer what your thoughts
are?
Smith: I’ve tried to make
as rich a statement as I can, somewhat pointed, maybe somewhat didactic,
yet make pictures that are not closed off by what I’m trying
to communicate. I don’t want these issues to overwhelm the
form and content of the physical photograph. The politics is in
there, but I’m trying to take a tone that isn’t accusatory.
There aren’t any easy answers. Sometimes it’s scary,
and beautiful, because the land is all torn up and being completely
reconfigured. But once the landscaping grows in, it looks like a
pretty decent, well-managed, well-thought-out place. And then there
are examples that are not nearly so nice. I’m trying to show
the complexity of what is out there, what these water and soil control
systems do to the land. One of my main issues, that I’ve tried
to point out directly, is how water is used and channeled, and how
water in these areas is imported. Water is a highly guarded resource—in
L.A. it’s even recycled—but at the same time, the land
needs to be guarded against excess water during the building process.
When I moved to Los Angeles I was fascinated with the constant flooding
and the landslides, but I deigned to photograph them—John
Humble has photographed them a lot, and I felt that was his territory,
but when I show water in my pictures, I’m alluding to those
kinds of events. Everyone knows about floods and fires and landslides
in Los Angeles. . . . what I wanted to show were the ways people
try to keep nature at bay, for this brief moment, while they tack
buildings on top of a hill.
PHOTOGRAPHING
THE SUBURBAN WEST
Sims: You mentioned Humble—I’m
wondering about your other influences. Robert Adams and Richard
Misrach came immediately to mind when I saw your work—they
both show us ugliness alongside beauty. How is what you’re
doing different from the photographers you admire, or who have worked
in a similar landscape?
Smith: In the earlier part of
my career, I mostly photographed people. I was very interested in
landscape, but the main thrust of my work was photographing people—candids
of people out in the world or formal portrait work. Then I moved
to Los Angeles, and some of the narrative ideas I had been working
with in my pictures of people, domestic tableaux I had been doing,
seemed to translate to these systems of water and soil control.
An idea popped into my head that I could create a body of work in
which these physical elements of control became a visual vocabulary,
a language I could use to comment on what was being done to the
land. So I switched abruptly—I really got excited about the
landscape.
I was aware of these other photographers, but as soon as I started
photographing the landscape again, I spent a lot of time reviewing
their work. I didn’t want to, you know, step on their turf.
I’m a big fan of Robert Adams, and a really big fan of Lewis
Baltz, especially his book New Industrial
Parks Near Irvine, California. Baltz, Carleton Watkins, Jan
Groover, and Garry Winogrand are some of my biggest influences.
That’s a strange mix, but they are the people who were kicking
around in the back of my head.
When I first saw New Industrial Parks,
I thought, wow, this is one of the smartest examples of making something
beautiful out of something ugly and having it really work. Those
simple, formal elements start to speak with a much larger voice.
He borrowed a form—it seems to me that he borrowed a lot from
minimalist painters—and used it as a scheme to hang beauty
on, while making social and political comments about the places
he was photographing. The photographs are beautiful art objects,
but they carry a loaded social meaning because of the reductive
quality of the beauty.
The idea I had of using conservation methods as my language helped
me step up to the plate and work with a subject matter that had
been explored a lot, and well. While I felt a little nervous about
photographing in a similar vein, I also felt there was something
more that needed to be said. The landscape continues to evolve.
The technology for restraining the land, as well as bringing in
water, has changed dramatically in the past ten years—in fact,
it changes every couple of years.
Sims: I know you grew up in Utah.
Did you grow up in a subdivision? Is this work a reaction to your
upbringing, or to what you saw in Los Angeles when you lived there?
Smith: I was raised in Springville
and Alpine, Utah. Two small towns along the foothills of the Wasatch
Mountains. At the time they were small towns, surrounded by farming
fields. So when I got to California, yeah, I changed my idea about
what a subdivision was. More specifically I started paying attention
to how subdivisions grew, where they started, how they branched
out, how they filled up a valley. A subdivision would usually start
up toward the top ridge of a valley and then work its way down.
People would want to secure the lots with the best views. And the
town was down in the center of the valley. The second and third
stages of suburban development would fill in below the view levels.
There was a strange hierarchical order to the construction.
Sims: How did you start photographing
these construction sites and neighborhoods?
Smith: I was living in Los Angeles,
and I started visiting a dozen or so housing developments under
construction, places I was interested in watching as they changed.
I would take trips and visit all of them. They were a collection
of landscapes or still-lifes that nature and man worked and reworked
over time. And I would re-photograph these places as they changed.
Or I would think, oh, this place would look great at dusk, or at
night, or on an overcast day, or on a contrasty day, or on a bright
sunny day, with the light coming from a particular direction.
I started trying to use the landscape as a still-life. I remember
reading about how Walker Evans would go on scouting trips during
the summer and winter, because he didn’t like the light those
times of year—he was very particular about the kind of light
that he wanted. He would make these elaborate maps of places that
he wanted to come back and revisit. I borrowed a page out of his
book. I started thinking of these places as still-lifes that I could
manipulate into the landscapes I wanted.
Sims: And it’s largely,
if not entirely, a landscape without people. Why did you chose not
to photograph the people in these environments?
Smith: One of the reasons I chose
not to include people was that I trying to make a portrait of the
culture, of the values of certain middle- and upper-middle-class
people in the West. I wanted to do that by showing the process of
how they changed the land, making it into something they thought
was valuable. Specifically, these developments where the land is
dramatically changed but in a way that supposedly takes the local
environment into consideration—you know, the manmade reflecting
and paying homage to the existing landscape. I was mostly interested
in the systems that people use to restrain the land and route water,
these elaborate systems of short-term control. The few people in
the pictures are hidden. I occasionally used them to give the viewer
a better idea of scale in some of the more abstract and structural
landscapes.
Sims: What sort of interactions
did you have when you were going around, visiting these sites? Did
people ask you what you were doing?
Smith: Getting access to these
places was sometimes difficult, sometimes not. During the early
part of this project I worked as a contractor, and a lot of the
places were near where I worked. I drove around in a truck, and
I would always wear my contracting clothes, or something resembling
contracting clothes, when I was photographing. I knew how to talk
to contractors, so I would say, “Oh, yeah, I’m over
here at blah-blah-blah jobsite, and I’m just taking a look.”
And people usually wouldn’t hassle me. Sometimes, for insurance
reasons, people would want to kick me out, so I always acted with
authority, like I was supposed to be there, and pretended to be
doing something.
Sims: Wearing a hardhat must help.
Smith: Well, I hate wearing a
hardhat. I never wear one [laughs]. But I always wore work jeans
and boots, and I usually had tools in the back of my truck, or I’d
pretend like I did.
Sims: What was it like to talk
to developers—were they ever critical of what they were doing?
Smith: When I encountered developers
or other construction people, they tended to be pretty conservative,
and they’d let me know my views weren’t really appreciated.
[Laughs.] But I tried to avoid asking them what they thought—politically,
I’m not in favor of this massive expansion and development.
I haven’t got any answers, and some of the areas are more
ecologically respectful and sensitive than others.
THE WORKING LIFE
Sims: So you were a contractor
and a photographer. You didn’t become a teacher until years
later. How did you go about building a career in photography?
Smith: Well, [laughs] I’ve
been very bad at building my career! I mean, that’s somewhat
true, and not at the same time. When I went to graduate school,
I was lucky enough, upon graduation, to be given a part-time teaching
job at Yale. And teaching was what I wanted to do, but after the
job Yale ended, I had a really difficult time finding another job
that I was interested in. And I made a crazy decision. I was tired
of the East Coast, so I moved to Los Angeles to become a contractor-artist-bum.
The contracting I did was wall covering and painting—a bizarre
trade where you can make decent money.
Sims: Had you worked in that trade
before?
Smith: Yeah. I’d done it
ever since I was in high school. I put myself through college hanging
wallpaper. So I went back to it to pay off my student loans. I knew
that the only way I was going to get a teaching job I liked was
to work on my photography. At the time it was 1991, and I was the
wrong commodity, being male and white and all of that stuff. So
I knew the teaching job I was after wasn’t going to happen
unless I made something exceptional happen with my work. I finally
got the fulltime teaching job and though I find it harder to make
as much work, it’s a much more satisfying job.
Sims: When you were in L.A. and
separated from a ready-made art community, how did you sustain yourself?
How did you know that you were making progress?
Smith: I had a lot of doubts.
At the beginning, I thought I was out of my mind. It was 1993 or
‘94, and I wanted to make black-and-white straight landscape
photos. I thought, why don’t you just kill yourself? Why do
you insist on doing something that will never sell or be popular?
And then the Germans started becoming popular. All of a sudden it
was okay to do landscape, landscape was really hot. And then it
was okay to do black and white. Photographers like Toshio Shibata
were doing great. It was weird. I started out thinking that I was
out in the wilderness, and then slowly it became okay to do what
I was doing; I lucked into it.
As for an artistic community, I felt like I had to rely on my own
judgment. But I also sought out friends and colleagues from school,
and I would show my work to curators occasionally. Every two or
three months, making sure that I had new work, I’d go around
and bother people. That’s a piece of advice I give my students:
Make sure that you bother the best people you can, and keep after
them.
Sims: What is it about teaching
that you find so satisfying? Do you still think going to graduate
school is a good idea, given the story you’ve just told me?
What sort of advice do you give your students?
Smith: Yeah, it’s kind of
a crazy idea. I remember when there were just a handful of institutions
that offered an MFA in photography—now it seems like if you
throw a rock, you’ll hit an MFA program. I think it’s
a good thing, that people are going to grad school.
There’s a weird sense of guilt and responsibility that comes
with teaching. I’m trying to get these students to love what
I love—I’m sharing my passion as well as my knowledge.
But you also have to smell the coffee and say, gosh, what are we
selling here? What are these students going to do? And I don’t
know. I’ll tell them about my contracting period, maybe unfortunately
for them, and say that there are many different ways to reach their
goals. Not everyone is going to graduate, get a college-level teaching
job, and have a gallery representing them within a year or two.
It takes a lot of disciplined work and sacrifice. I tell them to
learn whatever the hot new skills are—it’s a good idea
to be able to do something else besides photography to make money.
The best advice I can give is to face the reality that you’re
going to have to finance your art career as well as the rest of
your life. It’s a tough time to be a young person and an artist,
but I think it’s an exciting time as well.
DISCOVERING
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE VIEW CAMERA
Sims: Steven, to go back to your
own education for a moment, I understand that you started out as
a painter. At what point did you discover photography, and the view
camera?
Smith: Yeah, I went to undergraduate
school to study painting. And I don’t know, I think it was
just fortuitous that I had a really bad painting teacher and a really
good photography teacher. I fell in love with the immediacy of photography,
as well as the problem of representation—that you can photograph
something clearly, make it readily interpretable, and yet it remains
infinitely indefinable. I just got hooked.
I have always been a big fan of Jan Groover’s work. She came
from a painting background. She was an abstract expressionist, a
formalist—I think she would say that form is content. I was
interested in her for that reason, but also because her pictures
were so amazing. They are well considered, and yet daring. I spent
a lot of time, as I started photographing the landscape, looking
at her work. She uses the large-format view camera to extend and
play with the way the lens draws, as well as the way that film acts
as a canvas. She is one of the wildest practitioners of the view
camera I’ve ever seen. So I borrowed, and stole, some of the
things she did. She used the view camera on tabletops, and I took
some of the ideas, rules, or limitations of the tabletop and transferred
them to landscape.
And Walker Evans was incredibly aggressive and physical in his use
of the view camera. He had little regard for the sanctity of the
photographic image, and he would chop up a photograph to make his
specific visual and political point. A lot of what I stole from
these two people was how to use the view camera to make your point
more clear, and how to control and draw space in the way you want.
Sims: How do you think about framing
your photographs then?
Smith: My frames are very exact.
There’s a lot of work on my part to make a space look the
way I want, to confine elements within the frame in a certain way.
I try to be physical with the view camera as well—I use seven
different lenses—and I attempt to make the landscape conform
to my idea.
Sims: When I looked at your, say,
tighter shots, with more recognizable forms like houses and mailboxes,
it became clear how you framed things. I had a different reaction
to the ones that were more abstract, of landfills, or the early
stages in preparing the land for construction. I was mesmerized
by shapes, the formalness of the content. How the photographs are
sequenced would seem to make a big difference in how your work is
seen.
Smith: Yeah, that was a big issue
with sequencing the photographs, how to get the pictures to speak
to each other conceptually as well as formally. Early on I tended
to stand farther back and use a wider lens, a wider angle of view.
I still work the same way now, it just depends on what I happen
to be photographing.
I carry around a gray card, an 8x10 gray card that has a 4x5 hole
cut in the center of it. I love the control I get with the view
camera, the way I can redirect and control and contort space within
the frame, but I hate looking at things upside down. And I hate
working so slowly. I like the big negatives, but it’s a cumbersome
apparatus, you know. So I walk through an area and look at it a
million different ways, from a million different angles, and with
different focal-length lenses. If I hold the card 6 inches away
from my eye and squint a little bit, that’s like using a 150mm
lens, and if I hold it 8 inches away, that’s a 210 lens. I
can be physical with the view camera by just walking around and
squinting through this card. When I set up the camera, I have a
good idea where I want to go, what kind of lens I want to use, and
what I want to do with the space.
Sims: I just want to clarify for
people who read this and aren’t photographers themselves—when
you say you are physical with your view camera, you mean in terms
of not relying on a single lens and moving parts of the apparatus
around.
Smith: Yeah, I’m talking
about moving the camera around. I shoot 4 x 5 film, but I have a
5 x 7 camera with a reducing back on it. What this allows me to
do, as long as my lenses provide the proper coverage, is move these
things separately, the front element, where the lens is, and the
back element where the film is inserted. I can change the relationship
of objects in the foreground to the midground and background, and
I can shift the back of the camera in opposition to the lens, so
that I can, in some instances, create the illusion of looking straight
at something when I’m actually looking at it from a diagonal
angle.
PRINTING THE PHOTOGRAPHS
Sims: You mentioned that you thought
of this work a finding its final form as a book, but I know you’ve
had exhibitions along the way. What sizes are your prints, and how
do you present this work in a gallery setting?
Smith: I’m a fan of slightly
smaller prints. I don’t mean small and precious, but what
I consider photographic-size prints, say 14x18 or 16x20 or 20x24.
The pictures hold up, and start to take on a more artsy smell when
they get bigger. The largest prints I’ve made are 40 x 60,
and I enjoy seeing them big but generally I’m more interested
in conveying my ideas. Larger prints cut down on the number of prints
you can show, and the formal aspects of the photographs start to
take over. I try to use formalism and abstraction to comment on
the content; I’m not interested in form for form’s sake.
Sims: When you print at that medium
size, are those digital prints?
Smith: Yeah. I love the process
that I’ve settled on. I shoot with 4x5 film and develop it
myself. Occasionally I’ll make a few silver prints, to make
sure that I’m processing things correctly. But I scan my images
on an Imacon scanner, which is a high-quality film scanner or a
drum scanner, and then I work on the files in Photoshop. I print
the photographs digitally using quadtone ink on archival cotton-rag
paper.
Sims: That’s with the Epson?
Smith: Yeah, with the Epson. I’ve
been intimately involved with quadtone-ink printing since its inception,
and I’ve suffered these last three years. The last year and
a half to two years, the technology’s really come into its
own; it’s much more stable and reliable. And it’s getting
better. I find that the print quality is better than anything I
could produce in the darkroom.
One of the things that led me to digital printing is that I started
being a little too meticulous about my darkroom prints. I started
making unsharp contrast masks, and was using very elaborate dodging
and burning techniques, not because I wanted to be a darkroom geek,
like Ansel Adams or whomever. I was trying to get the image to match
my idea of the scene, my idea of the light. When I started photographing
in Los Angeles, I had a bizarre film and developer combination.
I used Ilford FP4 and a modern version of the pyrogallic acid developer,
which is a compensating developer. All in the name of trying to
render the light in these high desert communities in the proper
way. Every photograph has a component of flat, blow-out white light
as well as bright and high-contrast light. I found that using the
pyro film helped me keep the highlights from getting out of control,
and still preserved decent contrast throughout the image. And then,
with a little tweaking in Photoshop and printing on an inkjet printer,
I was able to make the places look how I wanted them to look.That’s
how I got stated working in digital—I was tired of the extreme
lengths that I was going to in the darkroom.
Sims: Do you use a RIP?
Smith: Yes. Right now I’m
using an Epson 7600, as well as John Cohen’s Piezography quadtone
inks, selenium color, printed on Hahnemühle photo rag. I use
Roy Harrington’s quadtone RIP, and it’s the bomb, a
lot better than the previous two generations of software that were
running these same inks. I’m finally happy with how the prints
look.
Sims: Do your students jump on
board with you, or are there people still wedded to working in the
wet darkroom? Do you have a strong opinion about how people should
working?
Smith: I think people should,
you know, find their own way. That’s what Harry Callahan used
to say [laughs]. But I think people should understand the materials
and experiment. Things are changing rapidly. When I first started
teaching digital photography here at RISD, I encouraged students
to do their basic proofing and contact-sheet-making of color negatives
in the color darkroom, and to do their fine printing and scanning
of finished work with the computer, making lightjet or inkjet prints.
And I find that students set up their own workflow. Some people
do quick and dirty production work in the color darkroom, but most
of the color photographers gravitate to the computer. And I push
them toward the computer, if they’re color photographers.
If you’re serious about making a decent print or controlling
your color, it just makes sense to do it digitally, whether you
want it to look like an inkjet print or a regular color print. It’s
a rather nasty discipline to learn, but it’s also freeing.
Only a few of my students work in black and white, and they go half-and-half
with digital. Some hang on to the traditional darkroom, and there
is a good handful who are even anti-digital [laughs]. But most of
the students are realizing this is the future.
THE NEXT PROJECT
Sims: Is this body of work wrapped
up? Do you have a new body of work in the hopper?
Smith: I’ve just started
shooting an extension, let’s call it, of this work. More corporate
landscapes.
Sims: Is this out West, or closer
to where—
Smith: Yeah, I’m in the
Northeast now. It’s up and down the seaboard here.
Sims: I remember a comment by
Paul Shambroom—you know, he photographed the nuclear weaponry
and had to get all sorts of permissions from the army and the air
force to do that. And then in between that project and when he did
his—
Smith: City council?
Sims: Yeah. He tried to shoot
a lot of interiors and corporate offices, and he got nowhere. He
said it was far easier to photograph nuclear weapons than get inside
boardrooms. . . . But you’re interested in exteriors?
Smith: Let’s just say I’ve
been photographing a lot on Sundays. Access is still an issue. It’s
getting increasingly difficult to photograph in this culture. Not
only is it almost impossible to photograph people out in public
without someone becoming ultra-sensitive or defensive—and
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be—but everything
is copyrighted, protected, and under surveillance. [Laughs.] It’s
difficult to just go out and look around and try to investigate
things.
banner image:
Photograph by Christopher Sims
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