Books |
Richard Rothman: Town of C
By
Published: Feb 22, 2022
Category:
Art and Photography
Richard Rothman doesn’t do anything in half-measures. For “Redwood Saw,” his first book of photographs, he left New York for Northern California’s ancient old-growth forests. There are splendid hotels and restaurants near those forests. Rothman pitched a tent and, with patience that rivaled the slow growth of the trees, made formal, intricate portraits of the forest. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here.]
For his new book, “Town of C,” he didn’t parachute in to a small Colorado town, and, like the Music Man, create relationships he could exploit. He stayed. And when he left, he returned. The book is intense, and I grimaced at many of the painful lives these pictures revealed. But here’s the thing: they revealed pain to my jaded New York eye. If I lived there, I might be more likely to see these pictures as portraits of my neighbors. [For a selection of Rothman’s Colorado photographs, the feature in Harper’s Magazine is a good introduction. For Rothman’s web site, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here.]
I know Richard Rothman slightly and socially. These pictures were cannonballs, announcing loudly that there was much I could learn from him. So we talked.
JK: You shot in a small Colorado town for more than a decade. Why a single location?
RR: I wanted to make a big book about America following in the footsteps of Robert Frank’s and Walker Evans’ seminal books, but I wanted to do it differently, and I didn’t want to make another road-trip book, which they both did. It occurred to me that the small town where I’d spent many years visiting family was, in many respects, a microcosm of many of the issues that I thought were central to the national questions I wanted to address. I had an advantage: I was known there and had access to residents at every social and economic level. And “Town of C,” as I called this town, is surrounded by undeveloped areas that attracted me — you can see what was there before we came along, and what we’ve done with it.
JK: Why a 4 x5 camera?
RR: The view camera offers possibilities for image-makers that single-lens cameras don’t. I won’t burden you with the technicalities but suffice to say they’re significant. In addition, the process of the view camera forces you to slow down, and that has made me a much better photographer.
JK: The myth of Colorado is “freedom” and “natural beauty.” I think of Vail and Aspen and rich people — in comparison, this is a harsh landscape. Do the people in your pictures feel they live in a place that has beauty — any beauty?
RR: When I think of Colorado, I think of mountains and rivers and high-altitude light, because that’s what I fell in love with when I first went there. Do the people there think they live in a beautiful place? Some do. There are many more for whom life is so challenging they don’t have the bandwidth to enjoy the beauty. Like other stressed Americans, they look down at their shoes and live month to month, taking one step at a time.
JK: I’m hard pressed to see joy — or even happiness — in these pictures. Is that the book’s large statement?
RR: The book is actually an attempt to find and chart the feeling of wonder and awe that the world can still engender — and to do that in the midst of life’s difficult realities. Happiness? We weren’t built to have that emotion last, but that doesn’t stop us from trying, and it doesn’t stop us from wanting art to deliver us to its shores.
JK: We all stand on someone’s shoulders. On what photographers’ shoulders are you standing?
RR: Many. Atget, Robert Adams, Friedlander, to name a few whose entire body of work is an inspiration. Avedon for his pictures of his father, Nixon for his photographs of human suffering and the people who care for those going through it, Jean Gaumy for his evocation of the sea and man’s battle with nature, Bruce Davidson for his masterpiece, “East 110th Street,” countless photographers who have created an encyclopedia of desires so vast that if you can think of it, someone’s already photographed it.
JK: Did the people you photographed want to see their photos? Did they?
RR: If you think people should have a say in how they’re represented, you can go straight to the internet and see an endless stream of shallow, uninteresting selfies.
JK: The nudes — how did you win their trust? Or were they easy to convince?
RR: Getting people to agree to take off their clothes off is never simple. It requires trust.
JK: In all those years, how did the town change you?
RR: The light and open space, along with the vistas the mountains afford, gave me a different sense of what it means to be in the world — that is, the nonhuman world that we’re from and that’s so different from us. It ignited my imagination and it made me think about the vastness of time and the universe, things I loved thinking about as a kid. There are moments of peak experience that can come to you in the presence of the grandness of the world laid out before you, like a magnificent stage set you’ve come upon by happenstance. And it’s all right outside of town.
JK: Update me: What changed there? Who died? Who left? Who succeeded? Who failed?
RR: I know people there who died tragically, and I witnessed a lot of failures. Success was rare. Over twenty years I saw a slow degradation of the town. It seemed to change in ways the country has changed: more giant chain stores sprouting up like mushrooms along the highway that leads to Main Street, more new suburban styled developments for large single-family houses on the outskirts, more signs of poverty in the center.
JK: I see a “big sky” in many photos. What interested you about it?
RR: Nearly everything. The fact that it was so large you could see different weather patterns in the same sky, the miracle of the atmospheric dome we all usually take for granted, the connection to the infinite.
JK: The final image: stars in a black sky. I read that as isolation, distance, coldness. Or…
RR: I ended there because I wanted to pitch it out into the universe. I wanted to make a book that was about more than America and the moment we are in, though it’s about that, too. I wanted to make a book that also took into account geological time and cosmic time, a book about nature and our place in it. The prologue, as well as the first image of the couple in the cemetery, is a reference to Genesis and the Fall of Man. It’s concerned with origins and our tragic relationship to the larger world. The book then takes you into town and some of the lives being lived there, and then back into the mystery we’ve come from.
