February 21, 2008
Erin Harper Vernon
The second in a series on artists who explore the contemporary urban landscape Erin Harper Vernon discusses her austere photographs of the suburban Midwest.
10N: The series "Midnight Sun" seems very traditional in respect that light is the true subject of photography. In your statement you speak of "light pollution" but of course, this pollution is only made possible through the city. What is the subjects of this work?
Erin Harper Vernon: Certainly light plays an important role in these images, in someway it is the sole subject in this work, but secondary to the process of the long exposures. The warm glow of the horizon becomes a light that is perhaps as familiar as a sunset, however the light is not natural but a man-made perpetual twilight. I was very curious about this light at first and in part attempting to understand my own environment, or something I had ignored in my familiar night landscape.
The light that is in the photographic image translated by the lens is very different then human vision. Our eyes are perhaps even more sensitive then film, but we do not see the time or the compressed length of time the lens can record. This light reveals the landscape as familiar but also alien at the same time. In a small way I think of my camera similar to a lens of a satellite, and I want to map the landscape using light as a tool to draw an unseen line between the urban and the rural. This light then revealed a third landscape where this border was still expanding and the suburban land emerges in the foreground. For me the light pollution from the city becomes an axis or center point and the camera lens becomes a compass. I think of the stark horizon line the exposure makes similar to that of a line of a border in a map, a translation of the land that would in be otherwise unseen with the natural eye.
10N: Do you see then the subject of the work as that demarcation between developed and undeveloped land?
Erin Harper Vernon:I'm not sure I would say it is about developed and undeveloped land
because the farmland is tooled and developed for agriculture, rather I
think the demarcation is where the development is changing as the urban
pushes into the rural.
10N:In your images, it is not so much an urban environment, but a suburban environment. Is this conscious? How do you feel about suburban communities?
Erin Harper Vernon: I think suburbia replaces, or is deeply part of the American psyche to still live on the frontier. In someway it is a product of very bad urban planning and several issues that have shaped our land post WWII such as the automobile, baby boom, and fear of desegregation or white flight in the 1970's. Most importantly our love affair with the car is to blame, but our love for the road is I think part of our national identity - and in a small way - is part of a quest to still be a pioneer.
I just returned from Japan where I experienced perhaps the largest suburban communities I have ever seen in my life, but suburbia for the USA is very different because land is not a premium causing massive sprawl. I think suburbia in America is still part of the promise for free land or an attainable inexpensive quality of life. However I largely think that the way these communities are built can dilute the experience of what it is like to live in a community connected by sidewalks and not by driveways. But the promise of low property taxes, schools, and a garage big enough to fit an SUV is seductive to anyone who is working middle class. In someway I think it might even define what it means to be middle class in the States. I don't think this was the focus for this series unlike later projects such as NIMBY that have followed. My feelings of how I define suburbia have changed with travel over seas and a new project where I am interviewing and photographing families now facing foreclosure.
10N: Can you tell us a little bit about NIMBY? which i presume is an acronym for "Not In MY Back Yard". I have always heard that phrase in connection with something controversial or an referring to people or a lifestyle that is not homogeneous to that community. But your photographs seem so empty.
Erin Harper Vernon: NIMBY ("Not In MY Back Yard") is series started about
the same time, a daytime project of some of the neighborhoods in the
developments I was photographing at night for the light pollution images.
At the time I was making the work in a the county north of Columbus Ohio. It had one
of the highest rates for development in the country in the height of
the housing bubble a few years ago. Most of the images are of the
backyard or the land as it is being developed for new hosing tracks.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]