just a brief comment comparing two recent readings we’ve had — dorothea lange and pirkle jones’s “death of a valley” from 1960, and camilo josé vergara’s ongoing online photography exhibition, “invincible cities.” as we’re all working on compiling our essays, it’s useful to look at how the unspoken traits of presentation can have a profound poetic effect on one’s work.
consider lange’s photoessay. the storyline (of the life and death of berryessa valley, now lake berryessa in northern california) is clear and straightforward, a temporal portrait. the spotlights on individuals in the valley are particularly heartbreaking and humanizing; and yet there is an undercurrent foreshadowing of the coming destruction: i find it objectively in the graveyard shot, and subjectively in the celebration of the pastoral (as a counter to the imposing industry).
but the presentation itself is nuanced and worthy of note. the relatively haphazard placing of type-written text offering “voices” and quotations from offical documents towards the end of the article echoes the photograph of two forgotten portraits in an abandoned house; in the presentation of the article itself, there is the rustic and the streamlined texts — co-existing rather than fighting.
in vergara’s online presentation, old photographs and new exist on one page, as dots on the same map and as equal members in a sequence. the online page offers a timeless home for these items, recreating the mental map of memory and reinforcing the notion that cities can be a collection of times IN places, too — in his collection, always alive.
