B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

How shopping mauls nature
Photo show dramatizes spread of sprawl

By Hope Green

Whenever Thomas Gearty visits his hometown of Westwood, Mass., he mourns the landscape he once knew. During his childhood the local residents still enjoyed open space, with grand old houses surrounded by farms and fields.

"Now when I drive down there," he says, "the fields have been parceled out, and plunked down into them are these enormous houses on small plots of land, and they’re all the same." In the adjacent community of Norwood, strip malls on the fringes of town compete with the traditional, centrally located shopping zone where Gearty used to visit his uncle’s shoe store.

Adolfo Barandiaran captured this image of Caribe Lake Homes in west Miami-Dade County, Fla., in 1997. "He photographs what used to be open land where he played when he grew up," says Thomas Gearty, cocurator of the current Photographic Resource Center show Sprawl. "There’s a sense of land being replaced and an even greater sense of where it’s going, seen with a very wistful eye."

It’s been 38 years since songwriter Malvina Reynolds created a folk hit in "Little Boxes," a satire on middle-class conformity with a wry refrain about cookie-cutter subdivisions that are "all made out of ticky-tacky." Laments over the bulldozing of the wilderness, the loss of neighborhood character, and the spread of car culture are commonplace today. But a new exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) that Gearty is cocurating puts a fresh eye on the subject.

Lost horizons

Entitled Sprawl, the show is the second of four, two-month-long exhibitions in the PRC’s 2000—2001 program The Nature of Things. Sprawl includes work by seven photographers, each with a different approach. For instance, Alex MacLean pilots his own plane, and his aerial shots reveal perversely beautiful patterns in neat rows of rooftops. Peter Garfield attaches fishing line to a toy-size model home and twirls it overhead in one hand while operating the camera with the other, creating the illusion of an uprooted house twisting in the wind à la The Wizard of Oz.

Also among the more than 70 images are candid portraits of suburbanites hanging out at the mall, or posing for a family portrait in front of a Pontiac Trans-Am.

"When we put this exhibition together," explains Gearty, "we tried to select an array of photographers who each have focused on a certain way of seeing sprawl. When their work is grouped, a cumulative meaning takes place."

Gearty, a freelance photographer who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Art Institute of Boston, cocurated Sprawl with Henry Horenstein, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design who has written best-selling photography manuals. Each exhibition in The Nature of Things series has a different subtheme; Gearty and Horenstein were asked to focus on the commercialization of nature, which they were free to interpret however they saw fit.

The pair arrived at the phenomenon of sprawl because they saw it as a timely subject, given society’s growing environmental consciousness.

"I’m not really an issue-oriented photographer, and neither is Henry," Gearty says. "What we’ve done is choose photographers who aren’t necessarily issue- oriented either, but whose work gets at the heart of the matter. We tried not to be didactic about this."

The way we were

Some of the works in the show strive for artistic effect, while others are documentary-style. Mark Klett, who has spent his career photographing land out West, has returned to the exact locations where a commercial developer took pictures in the late 19th century. He has contributed several pairings of then-and-now images to the Sprawl show.

"In some cases there is a very dramatic difference," Gearty says. "Where once there was open scrub is now filled with houses and businesses."

Bill Owens roved with his camera through a California subdivision in the 1970s to produce his important book Suburbia, which juxtaposes inhabitants’ comments with their pictures. Some of these photos and their accompanying text appear in the PRC show.

Alongside the contemporary photographs, Gearty has mounted a group of vintage photos from the Smithsonian Institution archives spanning the past century. Depicted are bustling main streets, homes that were situated within walking distance of town centers, and early automobiles.

"I thought this would be a way of photographically setting the stage for this show without hitting people over the head," Gearty says. "I didn’t set out to condemn sprawl."

Nor do the photographers, necessarily. Gearty believes it’s best to take images such as the exhibition’s shopping mall portraits by Allen Penn at face value.

"It would probably be the easiest thing in the world to make people look stupid in shopping malls," Gearty says. "But Allen’s work doesn’t do that. These people are both familiar and unfamiliar, and I think that’s what this is about. If we all sit around and talk about sprawl, we say, ‘Isn’t it bad,’ and ‘Wouldn’t traditional development and everyone shopping downtown be better’ – and then we all hook up to the malls to do our shopping. So what we’re doing in Sprawl is not as easy as just decrying what’s going on. Nobody in this show takes the easy path."

Sprawl will be at the Photographic Resource Center, 602 Commonwealth Ave., through January 11. The center’s program The Nature of Things also features a yearlong exhibition of photos from the archives of the Arnold Arboretum. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m., and Thursdays from noon to 8 p.m. Admission is $3 general public, $2 students and seniors, and free on Thursdays. For more information, call 353-0700.

7 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations