shuttle 20: singing (faith & peaches)

'A song ain't nothin' in the world but a story just wrote with music to it' (Hank Williams, 1952)
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Rebecca Solnit: - ' ... there is no adequate response in our vernacular to this landscape, nothing can touch the authenticity around it - thus the neon of Vegas, the motels of Flagstaff, the diners of Elko, the pink flamingos on the banks of a river named after a German who never saw it [the Humboldt].

At the most breathtaking landscapes of the West, people usually say something profoundly banal or trivial, not so much because they are not impressed, but because they know their words can't measure up to it, and it is more respectful not to try. In some way, banality becomes a refuge from fear of the sublime, overwhelming scale of the land.

Only the splenetics of country music seems to describe it: The eternal story of country songs is about someone who took refuge in the house of love, only the house fell apart, and so the singer is lost in the vastness again, and alone. Never mind their obsessive boy-girl front - they're songs about the pain of freedom, the loneliness of independence, about aftermath, irretrievable loss, fall from grace. If you don't believe the lyrics, the violins and guitars will tell you so.

Like pastoral poetry, country music (before positive thinking ruined it in recent years) is usually about the past, though the past seen more through bitterness than pastoral nostalgia. The singer is leaving, being left, or looking back, and the lyrics are full of midnight trains and lost highways, rambling men, walking after midnight, coming back to see their sweetheart wed another. A passionate love for geography is buried in all this bile, so that the songs of loss are rich too, rich in place names, travels, and atmospheres ...

The basic gesture of American society is a kind of atomisation, an expansion into what was always imagined as an expanding universe. That expansion was tragic in all Old World narratives, and America was settled by outcasts for whom tragedy became opportunity. Even framed as 'progress' and 'manifest destiny', that gesture is one of loneliness, and of conflict resolved by space rather than society - room to swing your arm. Tragedy, our ability to fall out of society and into the landscape, has been the content of American optimism'.

Extract from Rebecca Solnit, 'The Name of the Snake', in Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 199, 184-5
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For today's driving music, the  14-minute looping heartbeat and visionary minimalism of Gillian Welch's 'I Dream A Highway' (from Time: The Revelator), listen here. For lyrics, see here

Gillian Welch: - 'Our palette is so minimal. We have four microphones, two voices and two guitars. That's how we make records and it freaks people out. I've come to believe that there's this other element, which is the sum of its parts - things like the air, the room, the atmosphere. These things enable us to make these little landscapes and soundscapes, which is interesting to us. Once your frame of reference adjusts to the fact that there's so little going on, the music can become very rich and panoramic, at least that's the hope'.

On driving across the USA: 'We were watching the road signs go by, which is a beautiful lesson in American poetry. You forget how beautiful the place names and the words are that you see when you're driving around. It's a great crash course in language'.

On her diverse audience: 'Those guys [hippies, country folk, hardcore rock & punk enthusiasts] say ours is the only folk music because they see the kind of gnarly, dark shit in there ... We sent the lyrics for this record [The Harrow and the Harvest] to the artist who did the cover - he's a metal artist, quite well known, and his covers usually have decomposing skulls and stuff, and he was like, "Man, this shit is dark!"'
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Photographs below: William Egglestone

shuttle 9: night

'Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time' (Richard Misrach)

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John Paul Caponigro: There was one thing that you said that I found very poetic. You said, when we were talking about photographing at night, "It just lead me to it. I learned that there’s a new language of working photographically at night; I just fell in love with the language." The notion of a language of night is beautiful. Tell me more about it. 

Robert Misrach: Well, thanks very much. I can only go back to when I worked at night, earlier in my career, very early. I found it really liberating just to be able to work at night because there hadn’t been that much done in the history of photography. You know Brassai had worked at night, and there’s been individual photographs done at night, but there’s just so many other things photographed so thoroughly, it was hard to get away from that. It’s a trap in a way. Early on, working at night, there were so many things I didn’t know. Mistakes I made would lead to understanding new things. I guess the language evolved out of that ... 

JPC: It struck me that photographing the desert and photographing the night have similarities, both seem like spaces that when first approached can seem empty and yet when you spend time with them you realize how full they are. 

RM: Right, that’s very good. I was working exclusively at night and it’s only recently that I’ve come back to working at night again. But, as part of the Cantos, the way I’m approaching it now is conceptually much different.

JPC:  How so? 

RM: What’s different now is that I’ve become interested, in the last couple Cantos, with language and the way it shapes the way we see things. I’m working on a book right now. There’s a series of skies where I’ll pick a place on a map, like a Rand McNally map, and go to that place and photograph the sky. What’s in the photograph is not clouds, there’s no horizon line. There’s nothing in there. It’s really atmosphere, light. My idea was that the photographs become a rorschachs. What gives it its conceptual meaning is the name of the place. Each of the places is keyed by where I took it.

The night skies is a follow up on that in what I call the series 'Heavenly Bodies'. What I’m implying is the way that the night skies, the stars and the planets, have been named, is actually very Eurocentric. It’s based on Arabic language and Greek naming and mythology. All these different things that have been imposed on the American Southwest. Even though on one hand it’s sort of innocent, just a classification system, a naming system, it actually has a lot of bearing on how we understand ideas, sort of imperialist ideas about how one culture can lay its system over another – again relatively innocently but actually having a huge impact. Along with the skies which are based on place names, the Heavenly Bodies are based on constellation, star and planet names. What I’m doing is still looks very much like night photographs of the sky, it’s pretty straight forward in that sense. And yet, now with foregrounding the names and the language we use to describe those, at least the way Eurocentric culture does, it adds another element to the Cantos.

What I have done with the Desert Cantos is that each has a different strategy or approach to making images. Sometimes they’re very traditional. Others give you different ways to think about the overall picture, which for me has been the desert for these twenty years. 

JPC: I’m looking at Crimes and Splendors, it looks like there were eighteen Cantos at the time of publication. (In numerical order – 'The Terrain', 'The Event I', 'The Flood', 'The Fires', 'The War (Bravo 20)', 'The Pit', 'Desert Seas', 'The Event II', 'The Secret', 'The Test Site', 'The Playboys', 'Clouds (Non-Equivalents)', 'The Inhabitants', 'The Visitors', 'The Salt Flats', 'The Paintings', 'Deserts', 'Skies', 'Las Vegas' and several 'Prologues'). Are there any other themes that you’ve found since the publication of this book? 

RM: Well at the time of the book there were 18 plus what I call the metaprologue. Since then there have been a number of new Cantos; the 'Heavenly Bodies' for instance is the 21st Canto. And I’ve been doing the 22nd Canto – 'Night Clouds'. The 19th Canto is 'Las Vegas'. The 19th and 20th I’m still working on and I haven’t published any of those yet. The 21st and 22nd I’ve actually been publishing recently and will be doing a book on just those. 

JPC: Your work seems multi-perspectival, it’s almost as if a cubist got a hold of the theme rather the form. And I wondered if you felt that has a scattering influence. 

RM: I think that’s a really, really good analogy. One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound’s Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It’s epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you’d be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French--he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who’s not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something. It was very purposeful on his part to put these obstacles of language in there so that you become conscious of the whole system. You don’t get a neat narrative or a neat poem. Once you run into these obstacles of language you have to stop and think about other things. So, for me, in putting The Playboys or The Paintings or these language things in with these more conventional landscapes they inform each other. It does scatter, it does rupture, the way cubist paintings would. Each gives you a different way to approach something and sheds light on everything else. 

JPC: Right. In a sense, less authoritarian and perhaps a little more true to our experience of life, which these days is none too cohesive. 

RM: Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn’t fit into a grand narrative, the way we’ve been taught to read. Things just don’t work that way any more. [...]

JPC: I find the desert fascinating. It’s a very fragile environment. It also points to our fragility. We’re codependent with the land and when the land is so fragile we too are fragile. Many people see the desert as a place of death. When I first moved from Connecticut to New Mexico it was a pretty barren place to me. But I learned to walk out there and instinctively avoid the cactus, look for the lizards, watch the night hawks. You become accustomed to a different rhythm.

RM: Yeah. When I was kid growing up the desert horrified me. I used to go skiing and we’d drive through the desert. You don’t want the car to break down. You don’t want to stop. You don’t want to get out. You don’t want to do anything. Once you fall in love with it, that’s it. The light, the space, the solitude, the silence. Oh my god. It’s a really powerful place to be. You’re with yourself. But the problem is because people characterize the desert as a waste land that’s why military corporations like to dump their toxics out there, because they consider a place like Nevada a "national sacrifice area." Because it’s a waste land. It’s ugly. It’s barren. And yet it is a remarkable place.

Extracts from an interview with Richard Misrach by John Paul Caponigro, first published in View Camera magazine, September-October 1998; for an online version of the full interview, see here 

Photographs above: Richard Misrach, 'Night' series (1975-7)

For an earlier post related to night in England ('nightfall'), see here