An ornate staircase spiraling through a room of marble. Women in retro, glamorous ‘50s-era bathing suits painted on boardwalks. Busted-out neon motel signs.
These are the types of images that make up photographer Jim Dow’s new book American Studies, recently published by powerHouse Books and Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies. For the past forty years, Dow, who currently teaches at Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has traveled across the United States capturing small-town American life on camera.
“Even though ordinary objects are not expressly art, they are just as valid if not more because they are celebrations of ingenuity [of the American people],” Dow said.
Dow began by photographing in black and white, and ultimately transitioned to color photography
American Studies demonstrates this chronology: his black and white work from the 1970s appears at the beginning, but the book progresses toward a section with both color and black and white images that express similar themes or subjects. As a whole, the work echoes an evolution of American culture.
In this way, as Dow said, the book can be seen more as a novel than any sort of journalistic work.
“Pictures are a contemporary version of liberal arts,” Dow said. “They are visually wanting to do the same thing as literature: tell a story, but with no beginning or end.”
Considering the book’s visual narrative, the viewer can begin to pick up on Dow’s artistic philosophy. Many of the photographs create unrest due to their emptiness. As Dow says, it as though all the images’ inhabitants merely “went out for a cigarette break, or rather a coffee break in this day and age,” but never returned after realizing that their individuality and originality were lost.
Despite his interest in portraying the remnants of human interactions, Dow emphasized that it was the places themselves that are actually important and meaningful, and he hoped to illuminate them in such a way. In doing so, he created a specific and understandable story of American resilience.
The tangible result of this story is a carefully edited compilation of several images pared down from an overabundance of original prints. Iris Tillman-Hill, who edited American Studies, took on the task of arranging Dow’s unrelated works and streamlining them into a form accessible to all viewers.
“[Dow] never stops working,” Tillman-Hill said. “He had over 3,000 images to choose from, and then we all worked together to pare them down.”
The Center for Documentary Studies’ decision to publish the book marks a departure from their normal publications, which are most often reviewed in specialized arts and media or photography journals.
In the case of American Studies, which has already been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, the Center’s aim was to break both Dow’s work and their own into the mainstream.
Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies and associate professor of the practice of art and documentary studies, studied with Dow years ago and has since been following his work with interest.
“We’re glad to be making a difference by publishing it, but the book really propelled itself, and made people in the publishing world very interested,” Rankin said.
At a time when Duke begins its first MFA program in Experimental and Documentary Arts and increasingly funnels administrative support to the arts, American Studies represents, at a fundamental level, what can draw humans to aesthetic culture.
“We live in a time where popular culture is so homogeneous, it hardly varies from place to place and across countries,” Dow said. “But the most beautiful thing is when ordinary people express themselves through popular culture because it gives a sense of individuality.”
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