A Eulogy for Landscape

The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West by Steven B. Smith

By Allen Jones, 2-11-06

Say you’re a landscape photographer in the West. Say you’d like to call yourself an artist. Aspire toward a body of work that is both original and emotive. You’ve picked yourself a hard row to hoe. At first glance, the entrenched visual vocabulary of big beautiful snowcapped mountains and Sensia-blue lakes disallows both originality and emotion. Does the world really need another calendar shot of the Tetons? The trick is always to find some new way of looking at the same old horizon. In this context, Steven B. Smith’s recent collection of black and white images, The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West (Duke University Press, $35), is a cool and cerebral compromise, a sharp spray of water, an artful kick in the ass.

His subject is development. The collision of suburbia with Western landscape, bulldozers versus sagebrush, camas against concrete. He’s interested in creating, in his own words, “A portrait of the systems of control which prepare the land for habitation and also guard them against nature." Very few of his images fail to contain both a construction project and an interrupted vista. With titles that include such phrases as “Debris catch 1," and “Heating coils"; “Jute Cloth" and “Sprayed seed and resin," his concern is to capture the process of suburbanification in transition, midstride. Hillsides of bare dirt, excavation in gopher-strewn piles, raw concrete. The politics is worn on his sleeve, his most obvious point being that we’re ruining the West by the simple weight of our presence. Tennis courts in the desert, rock walls and cement ponds.

And yet, digging deeper, the sensibility behind Smith’s images allows the work to avoid polemics. It never descends to propaganda. Deceptively simple, at times misleading, Smith’s conscience may have picked the subject but his eye has picked the shots. His skies are empty, desert gray slates devoid of the least bit of detail, an intentionally stark contrast to the complex foregrounds, his piles of excavation and blurred bulldozers, the snaked rolls of piping. He has a fondness for the juxtaposition of fluid shapes next to hard; a roll of barbed wire against a good curve of road. A bulwark of sandbags to knock you back on your heels even as a culvert tries to draw you in. He is, I think, very aware of the way a viewer’s eye tends to move around an image. A photograph of concrete footings arrayed like graffitied gravestones keeps your pupil pinballing, but then, a couple pages later, a hillside of terraced, concrete rows draws you smoothly in toward an appalling, smog covered subdivision, a visual dialogue of before and after.

Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, a Guggenheim and Aaron Siskind Fellow, the work in this collection won Steven B. Smith the Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The introduction, written by prize judge Maria Morris Hambourg (founding curator of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), places him “in the direct lineage of the nineteenth-century pioneers who photographed the same territories with a similar breadth, formal elegance, and concision." A native of American Fork, Utah, a sometime construction worker and alum of Yale graduate school, Smith relocated to Los Angeles in 1991. Hambourg writes, “With new eyes from his four years in the Northeast he now recognized the magnitude of the changes in the western landscape as phenomenal and cataclysmic. Abetted by his firsthand knowledge of construction acquired as contractor for his own company in L.A., and dividing his time between construction sites and road trips from southern California to various locales in Utah, this native son was perfectly positioned to apprehend how the desert in southern California, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah was metamorphing into a vast suburban frontier." Smith himself writes, “I was so astounded by what I saw happening to the landscape as it was being developed that I started photographing it immediately. The landscapes I saw were scraped bare, re-sculpted, sealed, and then covered so as not to erode away before the building process could be completed."

Paging through these images one after the other, being punched so relentlessly in the nose with the ruination of landscape, you find yourself resisting despair. It’s hard not to make a run for your third Scotch. Too many people + too much money = shitty, vinyl-sided McMansions. But here’s the thing, Smith’s photos, at least to my taste, manage a measure of redemption. Maybe the artist himself wouldn’t agree. But in his best images, we see the human intrusion on the landscape as complement rather than violation. Smith has a fine sense of shape, the appropriate Gestalt of things (horizon lines and S curves), and the art that arises from this sensibility somehow bobs around on its own waterline. He has created beautiful, complicated photographs from simple and ugly development.

In her introduction, Hambourg writes, “Smith won the prize for his intelligent choice of a subject hidden in full view that is of paramount importance." Hard to disagree. But then . . . paramount importance? To whom? It feels that way, but is it really? To live in today’s American West is, increasingly, an experience in persistent entropy, an exercise in gradual loss. All the Edens of our childhoods are being parceled out into twenty acre lots and unnatural, jade-green lawns. Consider the slow, cancerous spread of halogen yardlights across dark valley floors. The principal value of the West has always arisen from its landscapes. The vistas. The absence of people. Perforce, the more of us that come to share in the commodity, the less we all have. You finally find yourself aging into a kind of sad resignation. There are just too many goddamned people in the world and everybody has to live someplace. Laguna was ruined a generation ago and now we’re next on the list. Every new ridgeline home scratched into the landscape means another degree of separation from a life that you had once thought essential.

A book like Smith’s The Weather and a Place to Live is finally, and against all intentions, not political at all. Politics implies debate, it implies polarization with the possibility for compromise. But we can all agree that over development is bad. And what is there here that could possibly be changed? The swarming hordes, quick as flies on a carcass, are coming. Indeed, they’re already here. Look at all the people. Take a drive from Boulder to Denver, Missoula to Polson, Kalispell to Whitefish. While we were sleeping, they put up another Wal-Mart. A book like this, rather than being a call toward action, is finally more of a sad lament, a eulogy. A painful reminder that we are, all of us, in the midst of losing something essential. Paging through these artful, moving photographs, you’re forced to the conclusion that, in the end, the most beautiful thing about the West will be our memories of how it used to be.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.