Aperture's Blog, page 204

Latin American Photobook Exhibition & Saturday Symposium

“The Latin American Photobook: The best kept secret in the history of photography.” —Martin Parr

The Latin American Photobook presents a selection of volumes from the 1920s to the present, providing revelatory perspectives on the under-charted history of Latin American photography. Join us on Thursday evening for the opening reception of The Latin American Photobook exhibition, curated by Horatio Fernández, editor of The Latin American Photobook (Aperture, 2011), and again Saturday for a one-day symposium to accompany the exhibition, featuring a full day of discussion with photographers, curators, editors, professors, and publishers engaged with the Latin American photobook.

The exhibition, presented earlier in 2012 at Le Bal, Paris, and Ivorypress, Madrid, features work by great figures such as Claudia Andujar, Barbara Brändli, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Horacio Coppola, Paz Errázuriz, Graciela Iturbide, Sara Facio, Paolo Gasparini, Daniel González, Sergio Larraín, and many others.

The Latin American Photobook Opening Reception

Thursday, November 29, 6:00 pm

Aperture Gallery

New York
The Latin American Photobook Symposium

Saturday, December 1, 10:00 am–5:30 pm

Aperture Gallery

New York

FREE w/ RSVP

Related Press:

· The British Journal of Photography

· Wallpaper

The Latin American PhotobookPrice: $75.00

Paris Photo and Offprint Paris In Pictures

Last week, Aperture was at the photography fair Paris Photo, where, among many other things, the winners of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards were announced. Take a look at photos from the week’s events at Paris’s Grand Palais, and at the neighboring art publishing fair Offprint Paris.

Also check out Paris Photo’s video round-up of the fair, our video previews of the shortlisted titles for the PhotoBook of the Year and First PhotoBook awards, and Instagram pictures from the week on our Facebook page.

Photos courtesy Christian Gapp, Paris Photo, and Lesley Martin.

Anders Petersen – Finding a Fever

This conversation between Anders Petersen and J.H. Engström originally appeared in Aperture #198, the Spring 2010 issue of the magazine, as Petersen was editing the work that would become City Diary, the three-volume publication awarded PhotoBook of the Year during this year’s Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

One of Sweden’s most influential photographers, Anders Petersen has been producing bold and intimate black-and-white photographs since the late 1960s. His seminal book Café Lehmitz was published in 1978 and remains in print today. Shooting in a beer hall located in Hamburg’s red-light district over the course of three years, Petersen depicted in that project the drunken revelry of a rowdy cast of outsiders, and explored the boundary between ecstasy and desperation.
In the 1960s, Petersen studied with fellow Swede Christer Strömholm, famed for his highly personalized approach to photography. Like Strömholm, Petersen has not shied from engaging a wide spectrum of human experience in all its rawness, photographing in prisons, mental institutions, and a home for the elderly. The searing intimacy of his images is a testament to the amount of time—often years—he spends on each series. Petersen aptly describes his working process as “finding a fever: a kind of vibration between the people.” That fever, or psychological resonance, is one of the most compelling aspects of Petersen’s work.
Aperture recently asked photographer J.H. Engström, who once worked as Petersen’s assistant, to speak with him about the course of his career and his approach to the medium. The two recently completed the collaborative book project From Back Home, focusing on the Värmlands region of Sweden; the project was awarded the Contemporary Book Award at last year’s Recontres d’Arles. Petersen’s latest publication, the three-volume City Diary, was released last November by Steidl.
—The Editors

JH ENGSTRÖM: As I look at your new photographs, I’m thinking about the first book you did, Gröna Lund [1973]. What do you think connects these new photographs with the work in Gröna Lund?

ANDERS PETERSEN: The people. Meeting people, looking. New people. Always people. I like people.

JHE: But you have also said that there are too many people in the new book you’re working on now.

AP: Right now, in the process, there are too many people. If there are too many people I have difficulties finding a fever: a kind of vibration between the people. But if you connect the people to the landscape, to structures, to the sky, to water, to fire, then something starts to happen. Then you might have a fever.

JHE: The photographs in your books Gröna Lund, Café Lehmitz, and the three that followed were all made in single spaces, limited by four walls. But in your more recent work, such as Du Mich Auch [Same to you] and Close/Distance [both 2002], this isn’t the case.

AP: No, it’s not the case in my later work. I now photograph under freer circumstances. I don’t have that spatial limitation in my more recent work. If I were to stay within four walls, as I’ve done so often in the past, I would only repeat myself. I’m not attracted to such repetition.

JHE: Knowing your work and your photographs, I think on the one hand that there is a big difference now that you’ve left the four walls. But on the other hand maybe the difference isn’t that big. The biggest change, maybe, is that the limitation of the four walls is gone. Were the four walls a way for you to simplify your work?

AP: Of course, yes. It was easier that way: you had a consistent light, you had almost the same people coming every day. And if you build up a kind of communication with the people, it’s even easier. But after a while it’s also more difficult, because you do repeat yourself. I have played so much with different sets of four walls. I have to be freer now. No more limits—or rather, only my own limitations now.

But people do still interest me. I have two different ways of shooting. One is when I meet people; the encounter can go on for one hour or three days . . .

JHE: . . . like when you go home with someone, and stay there . . .

AP: Yes—and then you leave. And my other way of shooting is just snapshots. Cutting is a good word for it. I cut . . . that’s what it feels like, because it’s so fast. Then I peel away layers.

JHE: The first of your books that reached a wider international audience was Café Lehmitz. That book consisted of photographs taken in a beer hall in Hamburg, in the Reeperbahn neighborhood— Hamburg’s red-light district. You once told me that the process of doing those photographs “tattooed” you. What did you mean?

AP: There was the fantastic feeling of belonging to something—belonging to the people I was photographing, and to the mood, and to the atmosphere. You could sit there and feel absolutely alone. On the other hand, you were accepted as you were. And that was really a relief.

JHE: When I look at your photographs, and also when I make photographs myself, it makes me think: when does it all start, really? The photographs themselves don’t make the living more intense; it’s the act of photographing that makes life more intense. . . . People sometimes say that one can hide behind the camera. But I don’t agree. I think it’s the opposite.

AP: For me, it’s more intense to be with a camera than without. I talk more to people with a camera in my hand than I do without one. But all this is of course very individual.

JHE: After Café Lehmitz, you went back to Stockholm and started a trilogy that includes photographs from a prison, an old-people’s home, and a mental hospital. Those three books took you ten years to complete. Three years for each book, all done in very specific places. It’s a long journey. Was it your decision from the beginning to do this as a trilogy?

AP: No, not from the beginning. The decision to make a trilogy came to me after some time. The prison project, Fängelse [Prison; 1984], was a clear decision. I’m not interested in prison, really. I was interested in the feeling of being locked in. The feeling of it. It took a while for me to be accepted there. . . .

JHE: So the prison project was kind of a method to get closer to specific existential questions?

AP: That’s right.

JHE: What did you find out, being locked in?

AP: That there is no freedom. The word freedom and what it stands for is a bluff. The only way to relate to the word freedom is when you’re locked in: freedom is never bigger than when you’re locked in. But when you’re outside in the so-called free world, there is no freedom. So it’s all connected with longings. And that’s also true of photography, isn’t it?

JHE: I agree. To me, all your work has a very strong existential side. It’s not so much about describing your subjects. There’s more to the photographs than that.

AP: Yes, and this comes very much from the fact that I always keep going with what I’m photographing. I never stay for just three weeks and then go away. I stay for years. After a while things start happening, when you do that.

JHE: After the “issue of freedom,” you moved on to the “issue of death.” The second book in the trilogy is Rågång till Kärleken [On the line of love; 1991], with photographs made in an old-people’s home.

AP: Yes. That work made me feel very alive. To be close to death is a way to feel alive. A lot of people died while I was there—I think that twenty or twenty-five people died during my three years working on that project.

JHE: Did that scare you?

AP: Of course it scared me.

JHE: Did it scare you because you were starting to think about your own death? Or about how it is to get older?

AP: Not really. I was starting to think in more existential terms. I asked myself questions like who am I, and why, and what am I doing with my life? . . . One thing became obvious to me: you’re in a hurry—you’re not supposed to sit on a sofa, waiting around.

JHE: The clock is ticking.

AP: Absolutely. If you have visions, if you have a goal—then you’d better hurry up. It’s up to you. You make the choice to act; you can’t blame anyone else if you don’t. You think about this when you walk those corridors, when you sit down with these old people. What became very distinct and present for me were the dreams, the secrets, and the longings that these old people had. It was like coming home to a family of children. They were so innocent, so vulnerable.

JHE: Had they “let go” in some way?

AP: Yes. Maybe you could say that.

JHE: The third part of the trilogy, Ingen har sett allt [Nobody has seen it all; 1995], was made at a mental hospital. I was working with you then, as an assistant, and I remember you had a rough time.

AP: I know. You saw me collapse. Everything I did was very bad. I stayed away from the mental hospital for a while. Then I finally realized I had to do just the opposite: I had to live there, sleep there, together with the patients and the people working there. And they let me do that, because they had seen me there over quite a long period, and they saw how I was working—giving away photographs and so on—I always do that. Living and sleeping there changed my way of approach. I got closer. Because many things happen at night at the hospital. People communicate then; you can talk a lot with people. You see a lot of things. And of course, sometimes you can also take pictures. But many of the photographs I took there were censored, by the patients’ relatives and so on. When you take pictures in a mental hospital the result is always just the tip of the iceberg of the work you actually did there.

JHE: Often when I hear people talking about your photographs, I realize they don’t understand the amount of work you put in to them. And it’s not only the actual act of photographing. You are really with the people you’re photographing in these projects. For a long time.

AP: That’s totally right. Photography is not just about “photography.”

JHE: So how has all this work with people changed your way of thinking and feeling about your main interest: the human being?

AP: There is not a big difference between life and taking pictures. That’s my approach. The answer lies in that. But questions interest me more. You’re in the middle of life, you’re living, making love, eating, sleeping—and photography is part of it. And I don’t say this because I’m being romantic. I say this because that’s just the way it happens to be.

JHE: I sometimes say that I don’t go to places to photograph, I photograph because I am at places.

AP: Yes, but when you get older you have to focus. You have to really say to yourself: this life is interesting; these people are interesting. You have to stick around and see what’s happening. Sometimes you have to dominate the situation and really make clear that you are a photographer. This is a way to direct yourself. Pictures, like birds, never come to you; you have to move your ass to get them. You can’t just stand there and say: “Excuse me, I’m a photographer.” You have to be in it and be a part of it.

JHE: So, as you continue working, do you think this is what you will keep doing as long as you have the strength to lift the camera? Some photographers slow down when they get older. But you’re working even more now than you did ten or fifteen years ago.

AP: It’s like jumping on a trampoline . . . I have a lot of fun. I meet a lot of people. Actually, I would like to do even more.

JHE: I think that’s because you’re not thinking so much in terms of specific projects anymore. You live and you photograph at the same time—and suddenly you have this pile of contact sheets, and you didn’t see them coming, so to speak.

AP: This is true.

JHE: Every time I come down here to your lab I’m overwhelmed by the amount of production. The pictures lying around here are for your new book, coming out from Steidl.

AP: Yes, it’s called City Diary. But it’s not finished yet; there is still a lot to do. Always.

Aperture 198Price: $18.50short

Barney Kulok – Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island – Now Available

Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island, a new photobook by Barney Kulok, is now available online.

In September 2011 Barney Kulok was granted special permission to create photographs at the construction site of Louis I. Kahnʼs Four Freedoms Park in New York, commissioned in 1970 as a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The last design Kahn completed before his untimely death in 1974, Four Freedoms Park became widely regarded as one of the great unbuilt masterpieces of twentieth-century architecture. Almost forty years after having been commissioned, it is finally being completed this year, as originally intended.

Kulokʼs black-and-white photographs function as a meditation on the materiality and formal underpinnings of Kahnʼs theories. As architect Steven Holl writes, “Kulokʼs photographs free the subject matter from a literal interpretation of the site. They stand as ʻEquivalentsʼ to the words about material, light, and shadow that Louis Kahn often spoke.”

14 x 11 inches

80 pages, 40 duotone images

Clothbound

978-1-59711-225-3

Fall 2012

Designed by And Smith, LLC

Essay by Steven Holl

Afterword by Nathaniel Kahn

Barney Kulok is a graduate of the Bard College photography program and is represented by Nicole Klagsburn Gallery, New York, and Galerie Hussenot, Paris. He lives and works in New York.

Holiday Sale Save 30-60% Off Books and 15-20% Off Prints*

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Announcing the Winners of The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards

Paris, November 16, 2012—Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of The Paris Photo­–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. City Diary (Volumes 1-3) by Anders Petersen (Steidl, 2012) has been selected as the PhotoBook of the Year, and Concresco by David Galjaard (Self-published, 2012) is the winner of $10,000 in the First PhotoBook category.

A jury in Paris, including Els Barents, director of the Huis Marseille Museum for Photography; Roxana Marcoci, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and curator of the Paris Photo 2012 Platform; Britt Salvesen, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography and the department of prints and drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Thomas Seelig, curator and curator of collections at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; and Timothy Prus, curator of AMC Books, selected the winners for both prizes.

The thirty outstanding photobooks shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2012 are currently being exhibited at Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, after which they will be presented at Aperture Gallery in New York and other venues to be determined. The shortlist was first announced in The PhotoBook Review 003, Aperture’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook, and is also available at Paris Photo’s website.

The initial selection was made by Phillip Block, deputy director of programs and director of education at the International Center of Photography, New York; Chris Boot, executive director of Aperture Foundation; Julien Frydman, director of Paris Photo; Lesley A. Martin, publisher at Aperture Foundation; and James Wellford, senior international photo editor at Newsweek magazine.

In addition to the prize and the exhibitions of shortlisted books, Paris Photo at the Grand Palais is hosting the exhibition Livre ouvert, featuring prints by Bernd and Hilla Becher alongside the works from the exhibition Bernd & Hilla Becher-Printed Materials, 1964–2010. As always, the fair has dedicated a space to publishers and specialist booksellers presenting newly listed titles, old and rare books, and limited editions. Numerous signing sessions with photographers are organized during the five-day event.

PhotoBook of the Year Shortlist – VIDEO

PhotoBook of the Year Shortlist / Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

In this installment we’re highlighting the ten titles shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award 2012.

Stay tuned for the final announcement, to be revealed November 16 at Paris Photo and on The PhotoBook Review website.

First PhotoBook Shortlist, Pt. 2 – VIDEO

First PhotoBook Shortlist Pt. 2 / Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

With this week’s opening of Paris Photo, we’re highlighting the thirty shortlisted titles for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2012.

Stay tuned for the final announcement, to be revealed November 16 at Paris Photo and on The PhotoBook Review website. In the meantime take a closer look at the publications competing for the prize in the First PhotoBook category.

First PhotoBook Shortlist, Pt. 1 – VIDEO

First PhotoBook Shortlist Pt. 1 / Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

With this week’s opening of Paris Photo, we are thrilled to celebrate the thirty shortlisted titles for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2012, soon to be on view in a full exhibition in the Grand Palais at Paris Photo, November 14–18.

Selected by a jury in New York and announced earlier this fall in The PhotoBook Review 003, the thirty shortlisted publications now await a final round of judging in Paris to determine the winners in the First PhotoBook and PhotoBook of the Year categories.

Stay tuned for the final announcement, to be revealed November 16 at Paris Photo and on The PhotoBook Review website. In the meantime take a closer look at the publications competing for the prize in the First PhotoBook category.

The Neighborhood Ketchup Ad: Photography and Housing in Unzoned America

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 1998-2002.

This essay appears in Aperture #209, the winter 2012 issue of the magazine.

By Tim Davis

Photography used to be a blue-collar job. You were on your feet all day, out in the elements, hands in chemical baths. Now it’s white-collar; in front of a monitor. Still I went ahead and bought a digital camera, thinking it’d make my world time more fluid. I could walk faster than I did with the view camera I’d been shouldering all my life, and it would balance out the screen time (which I call “watching TV”). This was 2008, and the world was turning loud and ugly. I would stroll around the small cities within my reach, being the Bear Who Went Over the Mountain. Remember why he did that? To see what he could see.

I didn’t make too many good pictures with that digital camera. It was almost as if, with every frame costing me nothing, I couldn’t make a picture matter. But it was okay for collecting. A digital camera makes a good Sherpa; it can carry your necessaries. I listened to the news on the way to these small cities: the Republicans were blaming the poor for the financial meltdown. Seems they had gone and bought a bunch of houses they couldn’t afford. Neil Cavuto on Fox News came out and said it: “Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster.’”

But on the achy streets of Newburgh and Scranton and Pittsfield and Troy, it became obvious that very few of these “risky folks” owned their own homes. Mailboxes were festooned with names and coated and recoated with paint as families moved on. People rented, and their mailboxes told tales of just how hard it can be to get housed. These streets were very far from Ronald Reagan’s imaginary “Cadillac-driving welfare queens.” There were gas stations where the corner store ought to be, bathing porches in troubling alien light. Instead of McMansions bought with WIC checks, a lot of this country lives in an unzoned miasma of the almost-commercial. America loves its flux, and where we live is rarely solid, rarely stable. And it’s always been that way.

Carleton E. Watkins, Hacienda, View East, 1863.

 

De Tocqueville noticed how functional America’s landscape was: “If they repudiate all ornament from their architecture, and set no store on any but practical and homely advantages, it is not because they live under democratic institutions, but because they are a commercial nation.” Carleton E. Watkins was the first great poet of the American practical landscape. No one doubts why Watkins was photographing. A childhood friend of Collis P. Huntington—one of the robber barons Ambrose Bierce would refer to as “railrogues”— Watkins worked for logging and mine companies making majestic mammoth-plate pictures of their claims and processing plants. In among the factories and log piles, you can sometimes see where people lived. In Hacienda, View East (1863), the sprouting hamlet of New Almaden, California, trails off in the distance like tailings of the quicksilver mine enveloping the foreground. Housing in Watkins is almost always an afterthought to commerce. Tiny clapboard houses cling to the San Jose road like remoras on the mouth of a shark, hoping for scraps. The landscape is so barren, the nonpanchromatic film emulsion blasting the blue sky white, that it is difficult to imagine anyone living in this place except to work. It had only been fourteen years since Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, where he noticed: “Men are as busy as the brooks or bees, and postpone everything to their business; as carpenters discuss politics between the strokes of the hammer while they are shingling a roof.”

It is difficult to look at this image without imagining all this activity burning itself out. Today the mine is the perfect American hybrid: a Superfund site and a museum. The village’s population hasn’t changed since 1863. Its most famous resident, Pat Tillman, died on a hillside in Afghanistan that would not look odd superimposed into Watkins’s photograph.

In America the landscape changes. And so house and home, the very seats of human stability, are always subject to alteration. Zoning is a relatively new concept here. There was none at all until the rise of the Progressive movement in the teens. So, in 1936, when Walker Evans and Peter Sekaer rolled through the South following an itinerary set by Farm Security Administration director Roy Stryker, they found natural clashes between the domestic and the commercial. Evans’s signature image, of two Atlanta frame houses bounded by a wall of billboards, perfectly describes the commercially contingent state of U.S. housing.

Walker Evans, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936.

 

The long lens on Evans’s 8-by-10 view camera helped to flatten the space between these Victorian houses—already decaying— and the rush of Hollywood advertising on the street. Just a few months earlier, in New Orleans, Evans had found a similar situation, photographing a two-story house with a ketchup ad for a neighbor. In the New Orleans image, the house is skittering with activity. Whole families lean out over balconies. The house is framed in its entirety and can be read like an advent calendar, with each columned bay revealing human activity. The billboard is cut off at the edge of the picture. In Atlanta, the houses are unpeopled, maybe uninhabited. The commercial hunger of Hollywood is outpacing the architecture.

Despite this clash between the residential and the mercantile, Evans’s picture-making style is, as ever, formally direct and solid. Its straightforward geometry makes it easy to look at this image and imagine the movie posters lasting as long as Roman inscriptions. Three years later, however, John Vachon, having started at the FSA as a file clerk, was sent to the Deep South for the first time as a photographer. He immediately tried to locate the houses in Evans’s picture. “I found the very place, and it was like finding a first folio Shakespeare. The signs on the billboard had changed, but I photographed it, and it’s in the file.” The two pictures together are a Muybridge-ish study of the ways an American house is as much a unit of measure of the country’s commercial climate as it is a home.

John Vachon, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1938.

Evans was delighted with his finds. Restlessly modern, he saw progress in old houses giving way to new advertisements. As the twentieth century rolled along, these piquant, ironic incursions into domestic life gave way to heady despair at the spread of the housing-industrial complex. Robert Adams’s What We Bought (1970–74) plotted the spread of housing as a metastasizing growth in the Denver landscape. In its opening image, a big square creosote bush sits in middle of the frame in the middle of the prairie. It’s white hot and timeless, except for the creep of prefab development deep in the background. From there, houses spring up on and are dug into the land. At the edge of the city, they struggle for space—both in the world and in the frame—in a jungle of convenience stores and service (Gigantic Cleaners, Birdie’s Hair Styling). By plate 51, beyond the final ring road, the new houses reign supreme, and it’s a wasteland of a kingdom. Houses are packed into lots spread soullessly to the horizon. It’s always midday. The housing itself has become industrial. You can’t imagine the buildings being built: they feel extruded or minted or mined. The photographer is angry at this development, and his pictures have some of the sentiment of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang: “These machine-made wastes grew up in tumbleweed and real-estate development, a squalid plague of future slums constructed of green two-by-fours, dry-wall fiberboard and prefab roofs that blew off in the first good wind.”

Robert Adams, Untitled (Mobile home park), 1970-74.

 

Photography is a complicated form of protest, though, because the camera is so accepting. Cameras are golden retrievers, and the world is a tennis ball. Adams is clearly horrified at the infectious spread of the prefab, but his photographs can’t help being moved by its patterns and symmetry and novelty. As photography moves to its new digs in the glitzy high rises of Contemporary Art, the seduction of American housing, even in its ticky-tacky suburban spread, tends to almost outstrip the politics and social concerns of its makers. Todd Hido’s series Houses at Night works are first-person accounts of life on the ground in this postpolitical neighborhood. The houses he photographs are exactly those Abbey described, barely able to survive their poor construction in the onslaught of car culture and the cul-de-sac. Hido’s pictures have a color palette all their own, an acidic roux of film emulsion and the color temperature of mercury- and sodium-vapor industrial lighting, in combinations no painter would stir up. And they are very much about this color, how photographic and how god-awful glamorous it is. Reasons and responsibilities, class and race and zoning and planning, fade into a sublime haze.

Todd Hido, #7373, 2009, from the series Houses at Night.

Larry Sultan’s series The Valley sums up the trajectory from house as social document to private fantasy beautifully. In Backyard, West Valley Studio (2003), we have landed back in Carleton E. Watkins’s California. Again housing slips to the background of a vital U.S. industry. But this one is designed to bypass sight and cognition, and head straight for the pleasure centers. The housing on the other side of the fence, which could have been cropped easily from an Adams or a Hido, is a scrim, put up to protect a pornographic spectacle from real neighbors in real houses. Someday, on this spot, there will be a Superfund site and a museum.

Larry Sultan, Suburban Street in Studio, 2000.

 

 

Tim Davis is an artist and writer living in Tivoli, New York. His new project, an album of songs with accompanying music videos, is called It’s OK to Hate Yourself. He teaches photography at Bard College.

 

Image credits:

Carelton E. Watkins, Hacienda, View East, 1863. Courtesy the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Walker Evans, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.

John Vachon, Houses, Atlanta, Georgia 1938. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.

Robert Adams, Untitled (Mobile home park), 1970-74. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 1998-2002. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Todd Hido, #7373, 2009, from the series Houses at Night. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Larry Sultan, Suburban Street in Studio, 2000. From the series The Valley. Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan.