Let's Keep It Nice #8
An occasional series of posts prompted by pictures of the USA that have sat in my loft for 30 years.
Is this a vision of Utopia? I’m still not sure.
For some reason I decided to stand behind the porch post and red sequinned dress to photograph this seated mobile home owner, sheltering from the Texas heat beneath a large Cottonwood tree. I probably had the unconventional compositions of William Eggleston in mind. Having found a second hand copy of the first edition of The Democratic Forest in an Austin bookstore for $10 in 1994, I’d been studying his pictures for a while. Apparently, 20,000 copies had been optimistically printed by Doubleday and many of them had been remaindered. Eggleston is now so admired that it’s useful to remember how difficult some of his pictures are and this is especially true of The Democratic Forest. Even with a Eudora Welty introduction, it’s no surprise that the book’s uncompromising pictures struggled to find a mainstream audience.1
I was an Eggleston fan but lots of the pictures left me scratching my head. When quizzed about his ‘practice’ he famously remarked that he had been “photographing democratically”:
I’ve been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.2
— William Eggleston
I was struck by the number of casually composed images, with slightly skew-whiff framing, seemingly random edges, strange perspectives and disruptions - lamp posts, telegraph poles, porch columns.3 Eggleston often seems to be dramatising the act of looking, simultaneously showing us a familiar scene - the way we might look at it with our eyes - and yet reminding us that we are looking at a photographic abstraction of that scene; flattened, with four edges.
The frequent decision to put something, an obstruction, in the way of the apparent ‘subject’ fascinated me. I’d noticed Lee Friedlander doing something similar, although with a greater sense of graphic design, I think. These obstructions remind us that we are looking at a photograph, rather than the thing photographed. We simply can’t move out of the way or change our viewpoint. We can’t get past the image. The thing obstructing our view is, to quote Solomon-Godeau, “stupidly there.”4
The title of this series of posts is taken from the sign at the entrance to the small Texas Hill Country town of Utopia. “Welcome to Utopia. A Paradise. Let’s Keep It Nice.” When I began scanning these transparencies, I was pretty certain that the red dress picture was taken there.
According to the Internet, the current population of Utopia is 124. It’s been as low as 99! It was 360 in the early 1990s.5 I don’t remember why we decided to visit. We were probably in San Antonio, a favourite destination of ours, and saw the name on the map. Irresistible, I suppose.
How many times do you get the opportunity to visit Utopia?
I don’t think we spent very long there. There wasn’t much to see as I recall. Apart from the extraordinary proprietor of the local ‘antique’ store.
This is one of the few intentional portraits I took that year. As you can see, the owner of the shop modelled herself on the older Elizabeth Taylor. I don’t know whether she was a professional (or even amateur) look-a-like but the photograph of her with an Elvis impersonator suggests that she dabbled in this line of work. As I remember, she was very happy to chat about her appearance and collection of memorabilia, most of it for sale. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever asked anyone to pose for a portrait. I think this was made with my Leica Mini II and built-in flash. Her hair and make-up were perfect, complementing the Abstract Expressionist dress and Lone Star earrings, and she obviously enjoyed having her picture taken. What an amazing character to discover in the middle of nowhere!
I took a second picture of her at work in the store. It’s not as good as the formal portrait but I like the cover of the Killer Joe Orchestra album in the background. Absolutely Shocking! She seems to be holding John Lennon’s Double Fantasy album in her motion-blurred hands.
It’s an important clue.
I was pretty sure that I’d remembered correctly the location of these pictures but decided to take a look on Google Maps for confirmation. I found a place called Main Street Utopia. It had the right kind of verandah and sold collectibles but something about it didn’t look right.
I decided to go back through my archive to see if I had any other views of the store and, sure enough, I eventually found the picture below. Now I had a name (almost). Jac(kie’s) Old Records, Antiques and Collectibles? Try as I might, I could find no reference to it online. After all, it was 30 years ago.
However, I began to wonder whether I’d got really confused. Neither of the red dress pictures look like they were taken on a main street, even in a tiny town. The landscape looks more open, as if the store is on a country roadside.
Why didn’t I keep better (any) records?
Befuddled, I decided to ask my wife what she remembered.6 Kate is a poet (as well as a teacher) and has a great memory for places and food! She still has a folder of writing from our year in the States and managed to locate the following draft:
UTOPIA, TEXAS
Next to the gas station, a derelict restaurant, and next to that a junk shop,
A scarlet sequinned dress danced by the door in the brilliant glare, swaying
in the Hollywood emptiness of the next one hundred miles. She smiled,
skipping over the photographs of her with numerous Elvises, and led me
to the back of the room, a tomb of ancient vinyl. She asked why no-one bought
records these days, why some-one had shot John Lennon. I had no answer.
Images of Christ and the Dakota Building clicked in my mind like stills from
a half forgotten film, like places connected by an unknown route. Outside
a stray dog barked at the silence. The heat made her mascara glisten with the
sheen of her silver jacket, made the obsolete records warp in their sleeves.
I turned to leave. "Round these parts I'm taken for Elizabeth Taylor," she
said, as I opened the door to the wake of dust left by a disappearing car.Fantastic! Proof that I wasn’t imagining things.
Hold on. There was a second draft, a pose poem version titled, frustratingly, Llano, Texas. Same words, different lineation, different title.
The plot was thickening.
Which came first and which was correct? Kate reckons she may have retitled the poem to remove the association with the word Utopia. Too ironic? Sometimes titles get in the way.
I generally only take one picture of something. It’s strange that, in this case, there are two pictures of the red dress, two portraits of the Liz Taylor look-a-like store owner and two versions of the poem with different titles.
Double fantasy.
These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit by contributing to the film fund. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.
Here are my favourite Eudora Welty comments from here accompanying text:
Our own way of seeing may have recently ben in trouble. These days, not only the world that we look out upon but the human eye itself seems at times occluded, as if a cataract had thickened over it from within […] But the Eggleston vision of his world is clear, an clarifying to our own.
and,
Actually, what we have here is a set of visions. Like a magician, William Eggleston has raised them out of light, colour, smoke and absence of people. Visions or not, he remains a photographer who never trifles with actuality: he works with actuality, and within it - the self-evident and persisting world confronted by us all.
Quoted in the conversation with editor Mark Holborn in the back of The Democratic Forest.
I don’t mean “casually” as a criticism. There’s a remarkable and sophisticated ease about many of Eggleston’s pictures that I still find utterly captivating. Lots of them still cause me significant head-scratching though.
The desire for transparency, immediacy [...] is inevitably frustrated by the very mechanisms of the camera, which, despite the best intentions of the photographer, cannot penetrate beyond that which is simply, stupidly there.
— Abigail Solomon-Godeau
According to Joe Cummings, author of the Texas Handbook, Moon Publications, second edition, 1992.
In 1994 we’d both exchanged our jobs and lives with two Texan teachers as part of the Fulbright scheme. We spent 1994-95 based in Austin, Texas, teaching high school English and spent most of our spare time exploring central Texas and travelling to other parts of the USA.