Reading: Gone by Steve Fitch

We are experiencing, the media keep telling us, "the greatest financial crisis since the great depression." Or at least that's what they were saying all fall. Now that winter is upon us the comparisons between our teetering banks and plummeting home values and the teetering banks and plummeting home values of the late 1920s seem to have been abandoned. Not, I think, because editors and writers have spontaneously discarded such a resonant historical reference, no matter how over-worked it has become, but because most now believe that our crisis will turn out to be far worse.

In Eastern Montana, abandoned buildings have been repurposed as billboards displaying indigenous public service announcements.

Photography remains obsessed with time, and with the telling of stories. If a photograph cannot tell its own story and requires assistance, its use is restricted to illustration, to the role of assistant in some other kind of story, usually a written one. Hence one aspect of the inferiority complex that plagues the medium. This is why disuse, decay and collapse have always been fertile ground for photographers, because refuse and abandoned places are inhabited by the ghost images of their former owners. They carry the weight of time in their DNA, and a photograph of a rusting tool or a collapsing building implies a narrative. The house was built, and lived in--imagine all the things that went on here--and it slowly declined, became unlivable. Now it will gradually return to dust. The right photograph conveys all that.


It may be that we are entering a particularly fertile time for this tendency in photography. Wandering through Lemon City in Miami a month ago, it felt as if every other house was vacant. Foreclosed and abandoned, with locks punched out and sheriff's chains securing them, it was impossible not to imagine the ups and downs in the lives of the families who had once lived there.

I first came to appreciate some of the possible relationships between narrative and photography in the work of Steve Fitch. At Princeton, where I studied, photography was taught by two people. Emmet Gowin taught black and white, and for decades brought into the classroom, with a zen-like combination of intensity and tranquility, his captivating and infectious lifelong quest for aesthetic purity. From him I learned that photography, and by extension artmaking in general, are simply tools for demonstrating a way of being in the world. The images resulting from his process were objects in their own right, to be valued and appreciated, and he resisted commenting on their implicit narratives, even when choosing, for example, to make a series of aerial images of strip mines. Color was taught by a rotating roster of invited guest artists, who came for one year, or perhaps two, and then went away again. Color photography was a different species, a different medium, really.

While I was at school one of these transient color photographers appeared, with a stack of prints of campfires in the desert, his exquisite hand-made frames for cyanotype printing, and a disregard for archivism born out of his comprehension of time. Steve Fitch's capturing an entire night in front of the timeless bluffs of the southwest, on one very long exposure, was among other things a representation of man's inconsequentiality in the face of geologic eternity. (Maybe I'm projecting, but I must have come to understand this somewhere along the line). In any case, it seemed clear that worrying about whether a nice color print would still be around in a hundred years for others to look at was sort of beside the point.

I hadn't thought of Steve Fitch in some time, until I went to Santa Fe last spring, and saw his book in a shop window. Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains is a chronicle of the contemporary ghost town, or at least the ghost homestead. It's an archaeology of contemporary loss. As Evelyn Schlatter puts it in an introductory essay, the story of the West is "come and go, boom and bust." The photographs in Gone are of the interiors of abandoned houses, churches and schools. He made the work in that great swath of chilly, windy plains, striping down through the country, border to border, from eastern Montana to west Texas. Fitch's narratives here are on a more human scale. In the contemporary economic climate, these images look like templates for the broader collapse dawning on us today.

Fitch, however, has not abandoned geology. Some of the same stories, of an evanescent man passing in front of a campfire, are to be read in these pictures. The gutted couch, a flyswatter still hanging off the wall, a lonely piano: these suggest human stories of a different, happier time, but there is an architectural revelation here too, something that shares elements with Eduardo del Valle and Mirta Gómez's work in the Yucatan. Paint peels and reveals in its layers the many generations that inhabited these walls. One house appears to have been entirely constructed out of beer cans and straw. The crumbling adobe and the peeling masonite ceilings show us how these buildings were built. It's a cycle, the process of their erection revealed by their gradual collapse, and in these quite remarkable photographs the passage of time is marked by the radiating, tannic stains on the peeling wallpaper, the reversion of what once was a wall into a pile of mud, and by the accumulated height of a pile of swallow droppings on a kitchen counter.


Fitch's photographs are restricted to the interiors of buildings--rather than steal his images, I've illustrated this post with some high plains landscape exteriors I shot while driving across country last summer.

Transcontinental Gas Guzzle, part 3: High Plains Drifter edition

East of the Marais Pass and the continental divide, Route 2 follows the railroad tracks of the Hi-Line right the way across northern Montana, from one small single-stoplight town to another. Only the grain elevators stabbing up into the sky beside the tracks mark the skyline above the expansive plains of this endless state. At Glasgow we turned south, tempted by a remote campsite mapped on the shores of Fort Peck Lake, the enormous reservoir created by the first of the dams exploiting the power of the Missouri River.

Delightful lakefront solitude. Not another camper was to be found. The new tent has now survived two nights of use without being blown away or forgotten.

Grasslands on the shores of Fort Peck Lake, at Camp 5 inside the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge

North Dakota is said to be the least visited state. This is perhaps unsurprising, as only the true plains addict would appreciate its charms. Apart from the legendary hospitality: In Fargo, butted hard up against Minnesota at the state's easternmost edge, we stopped for a night with Allan and Hazel Ashworth. Allan is the geology professor who was kind enough to share his antarctican field camp with our film crew a year and a half ago. Despite those two months in the frozen wilds submitting to the indignities of sharing an open-air toilet, not to mention being filmed daily, Allan invited us, after a last minute call, to stay the night. We had a lovely dose of plains hospitality, ate our first Thai meal since Queens, and saw our first black people since Portland, the latter two things suggesting just how far Fargo has come since Allan and Hazel first arrived here, from Surrey, England, in 1969. Culture shock is too mild a term to describe their reaction to landing in what was then a diminutive, provincial, ice-bound town, something like a transplanted outpost of northern Scandinavia, with all its racial diversity. But Fargo is slowly changing for the better. At the restaurant the adjacent table held a large extended family of Indians, as in people from India, and a sizable population of resettled refugees from the horn of Africa now call the city home.

The story of the drive across North Dakota is one of a grueling three-hundred-mile battle against a constant forty-mile-an-hour headwind. Despite stops at the Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge and a few other select patches of preserved prairie, almost none of the ornithological specialties of this endangered habitat, once the natural state of huge areas of the plains, showed themselves. No surprise, since the few birds which lifted up off of the grasslands at our approach immediately wheeled off downwind, flapping as hard as possible to avoid being slammed back down into the matted grass by the gusts. With the bird trip list suffering from a distinct lack of prairie birds, Allan suggested a sort of last-chance stop just over the Minnesota border at a postage-stamp sized patch of Nature Conservancy land, Bluestem Prairie. He served up breakfast, scribbled a map on a sheet of notebook paper, and we said au revoir to Fargo.

Shortgrass prairie may not be everyone's idea of a must-see sort of a habitat, resembling as it does an unkempt, unmowed field. It has no majestic Redwoods, no epic stands of conifers or rafts of ducks to be glimpsed dabbling on shimmering lakes. Few people have seen pristine shortgrass prairie, not only because it is perhaps perceived as unspectacular, but because only one-tenth of one percent of the former prairie still exists. One out of one thousand acres of the vast western midwest. The other 999 are now used to grow corn, or wheat, or run cattle, or have been paved over to make Wal-mart parking lots. These various concentrated monocrops have gravely diminished the biodiversity of the region, for healthy, unaltered shortgrass prairie like the Bluestem preserve, harbors up to three hundred species of wildflower and many special birds.

Bluestem Prairie, near Glyndon, Minnesota

Violet Wood Sorrel Oxalis violacea

The delights of the prairie, varied and unexpected, but modest in scale, are to be found nestled in amongst its diverse grasses. Spring has come late this year, but purple, yellow, red and white wildflowers were blooming in clumps everywhere between the windblown stems of sedge. Mauve Pasque flowers, like tiny tulips; Marsh Marigolds, more like buttercups than marigolds, growing right out of puddles and the watery ditches; and Swamp Lousewort, a bizarre conate spiral protrusion dotted with yellow petals. A long-sought bird, the Sedge Wren, was common in the brushier patches of prairie, and another, the Upland Sandpiper, nests in its tall grasses. We found five of the latter patrolling the stubbly chaff of an adjacent field.


Not yet blooming: Prairie Smoke, Geum triflorum, aka "Old Man's Whiskers." When the plant flowers, clumps of hairy white tendrils emerge to wave in the breeze.

Heading for Duluth, the prairie and the plains imperceptibly receded in the rearview mirror, until, without quite noticing how it had happened, we found ourselves surrounded once again, for the first time since crossing the Rockies, with forest.

Plant identification consultation provided by L. F. Harmon.