American Ruins: Ghosts on the Landscape

Rating:
Summary: Poetic as vision, as truth
Review: American Ruins is far more than it appears. On the surface, it is a very well designed and exquisitely photographed essay on the vanishing farmsteads of the northern plains states in the USA. That's like saying the Mona Lisa is a woman.

On the next plane, the photographs-panoramics mainly, in black-and-white on infrared film-are beyond photography. They are a spiritual experience on paper that comes as close to the experience of truth as can be done without becoming it yourself. They are haunting, wistful, emotional evocations of the pain of time and loss, the invisible presence of people in what the picture does not, cannot, show, in the way that only black-and-white can push you out of "that" into "thisness." As the foreword puts it: "... as if the camera has recorded something going on inside your head and projected it onto a wall." Small wonder many feel black-and-white is the most difficult image recorder to work with, and also to many the most sublime when done well.

Sublime Mr. MacKenzie is. This is one of the most remarkably photographed books to come off the presses in a long time. Not just well done, but literally beyond compare; the sole occupant of its category. The photographs are closer to poetry without a pen than to the interaction between film and lens. Songs without words in an A-4 landscape book. The only thing to match them is the writing excerpts that "captions" them. (The captions in the conventional sense are Notes at the end of the book.) Mr. MacKenzie chose the excerpts himself, and he certainly did his homework well. Wallace Stegner is here, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Henry Miller, Frank Lloyd right, and two writers who would probably be surprised to find their sentences thrust alongside the eloquence of this book. But here they are, and no the less eloquent:

"When family love is displaced onto land, every change that happens there has meaning: the calibre of the light and the texture of the clouds in a day, the big changes of the seasons, most of all the slow transformation of the infrastructure of the place itself as the decades pass. When the deflection of love is also a deflection of pain, the gradual decomposition of such a place can be excruciating, a kind of lifelong torture, and yet, at the same time, a hypnotic, unfolding story. As the place declines, layers of meaning are revealed."

=Suzannah Lessard, "The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family"

To which Annette Atkins adds, in "Harvest of Grief: Grasshopper Plagues and Public Assistance* in Minnesota, 1872-78":

"Minnesota lost settlers during the dark days of the 1870s . . . but thousands remained. Some could afford to stay; some could not afford to leave. Debts held some. Others wanted to hold on to their investments of time and energy. Some held different attachments; as one man explained: 'I have lost my all here, & somehow I believe that if I find it again, it will be in the immediate neighborhood where I lost it . . . I have a child buried on my claim & my ties are stronger & more binding on that account.'"

In between is writing that calls our attention to what the unrushed eye can see: ". . . leaning barns and windowless houses, jutting up like wreckage in oceans of furrowed wheat and sorghum, architecture that looks more like a visible absence of something, like a missing tooth, than it looks like a presence of sun-curled clapboard and tatters of tar paper. It looks like ruins . . . of dreams that didn't work out."

Then he goes beyond all that, to the lives unseen in these pictures, flesh long gone but souls still there, a kind of spirit of determination to match this spirit of place: ". . . boredom, bad luck, debt, despair; about the blizzard that leaves you burning your inside walls to stay alive because if you go outside for firewood you'll vanish; about a summer erupting with wheat until the grasshoppers darken the sky and eat everything-wheat, vegetable garden, even the leaves on the trees; about a husband who tells his wife he'll be right back after he rides out to round up two cows-she watches him ride around the cows and keep going and he never comes back."

Beauty of a special kind, these-of death, decay, the falling to ruin-but life of a kind all the more: eonic, seasonless as a century, brutal cold and brutal heat, wind vying only with grass for endlessness, and to the human who endures these and thus surpasses the self, transfiguration. Into this, the Great Plains, families came, filled with grit and ambition and not a few starry-eyed dreams. They are still here, here in these pictures. Look around the corners and there they are, in the boards of the barn they nailed, among the leaves in the trees they planted. With all that's in this book, we can see what we never would have before, the eyes of dreams become the last remains of a rainbow.

That said, this is what books used to be in the highest sense of the craft. And still are, if only we seek out and buy the work of presses like the Afton Historical Society.

Rating:
Summary: The best landscape photographer in the world
Review: This is the book for people who didn't think that they liked landscape photography. MacKenzie takes you through a voyage to the abandoned worlds of farms, schools and other building in the middle of the nowhere lands of midwestern America. Here we find that ruined farmhouse, strangely sculpted by the winds and snow of many winters, but not depicted as some quaint, picturesque image, but as a stark vision in long Puritan panoramic views that work to make the landscapes appear as through they are suspended in time, a strange reminder of once active places, now abandoned and ruined, but notheless spectacular in their setting. This is the photographer that will make you throw away your Nan Goldins and your Cindy Shermans and discover what is it that makes photography the newest vibrant member of the visual fine arts.