Richard Ansett AMERICAN ROAD TRIP by Dima Sergeev

INFORMATION PAGE:

ARTIST

Richard Ansett CONTACT: richard@richardansett.com richardansett.com Blog. http://richardansett.blogspot.co.uk Twitter @richardansett Instagram: @richardansett Facebook: Richard Ansett Editions

DESIGNER

Dima Sergeev CONTACT: dima.sergeev@izolyatsia.org dimasergeev.com Instagram: @dimixxl

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

DEDICATED TO:

PUBLISHING DETAILS:

Kevin Pilley Equal Justice Initiative LaGrange Police Department Hertz Rentacar Stephen McClaren Brand USA Kentucky Tourism Alabama Tourism Tennessee Tourism Explore Georgia Curtis Brown Mykhailo Glubokyi Francis Jones Callaway Walter Dowell Foundation IZOLYATSIA. Platform for cultural initiatives David Campany

Austin Callaway

Richard Ansett

AMERICAN ROAD TRIP

richardansett.com

INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN MCCLAREN

Why shoot projects on an American Road-Trip? Haven’t countless self-indulgent photographers taken on the road trip out for lack of better ideas on photographing America?

An invitation to travel across the US was the catalyst to explore that very idea. A journalist asked me if I would like to drive from Cincinnati through to Atlanta, passing through Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia. It felt like an opportunity to explore the road trip as the most overworked of genres.

Did you travel from the UK with any specific imagery in mind or was your mind a blank?

I choose often not to overthink how I will respond to any project. I am most driven to create on arrival in any new landscape before my mindseye becomes accustomed. The result of over-planning can result in a lack of genuineness in any final work and this genuineness is the vital component in whether a final work is ‘successful’. All the work that I consider my ‘best’ is very often evolved responding with the camera to the moment informed by my immediate research and life experience . I trust that I will find a unique personal connection to an event as a response to a fear of walking that fine line between success and failure. There is a continual vigilance for the source of any emotional response and this influences any decision to create the image.

I am continually vigilant of the desire to frame an experience through the definitions set out by the past and I observe many of the cultural references in the US as deeply ingrained, the original source lost in the pre-determined definition ‘Americana’ that has become the default reality. It feels like a pre-packaged process of engagement that helps to make life (and in this case) the otherwise intensely boring distances of mindless road, more bearable. Without vigilance it is easy to slip into the common denominators of aesthetic expression defined by the great artists and writers of the past accidentally contextualising my experience in relatively palatable and comprehendible terms. These are cultural norms but they are in fact only markers that aid our safe engagement with any new space and can be a block to seeing the world clearly as it is now.

How did your project ideas form once you had arrived and were mobile? My first observation is that if any romanticised notion of travel as set out by the great artist of the past is stripped away, the experience on the American road is mostly tedious. This is further evidenced by my car, the appropriately unimpressive and very ‘present’ Honda Subaru (generously supplied by our friends at Hertz Rental). There are huge swathes of featureless, banal landscape and wide stretches of road for many hours. beyond this, my perception of the US has always been this sense of the size of things and a frightening lack of permanence, nothing feels real. When I do see something which might initially inspire I soon associate the artistic reference that has led me to perceive it as valuable and then I discount it. It is fascinating how bombarded I feel by the influence of movies, art and writing at this early stage and step by step I strip these references away and then consider what is left to work with. There is a point where all cultural sources (I am aware of) have been identified and I am faced with a rather bleak objective reality of concrete and metal, I start to see compositions of chaos passing through the frame and am excited by this developing critique of the consumerist palette and then I recall the work of Lee Freelander. Lee Friedlander is the most inspiring and therefore most infuriating of artists and in my progress in finding a route through this nightmare landscape of obstructions to the contemporary aesthetic, Freed-

lander’s work is the closest to seeing the world as it is, a brutal, unemotional, view; nothing of sentimental value to cloud the objective vision of tarmac, lamp posts and wires passing through the images and beyond the frame. I have progressed to the post-modern aesthetic god forbid and then despair at the ironic realisation that this has been done too. This doesn’t sound like progress but I have knocked away some of the most obvious crutches that make experience palatable and I am left with a space to build on my own terms. One epiphany at this point is the recognition that the great artists who have helped to make shapes in this mass of molecules are less to be feared and avoided but now they feel as much a part of my journey as the drunk journalist slumped on the back seat of my rental. I am not disabled by doubt, my endemic fear of failure and anxiety is an engine that drives my quest for new work. In Kentucky I pull over to photograph some people selling junk by the roadside and I am threatened with a “knife through your heart” by this southern redneck cliché, so I withdraw back to the relative safety of the Subaru.

You arrived in the States during a very turbulent political period with right wing riots in the headlines. Could you sense any of that as you met people along the way? I was conscious of America’s lurch to the right ‘obviously’ and my expectation was that the Southern States would be a hive of Trumpian resentment towards a liberal, fag, elitist. Apart from that single earlier threat, my prejudice was unrealised. I was entirely oblivious to the overflow of racial tensions nearby in Charlottesville, as at the time I had driven to a small town in Georgia and was immersed in a project documentation based on the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Community Remembrance project ‘Lynching in America’. This project could not have been farther removed from the violence, anger and hate expressed in front of the world’s media nearby. I had invited the descendants of a 16 year old boy, Austin Callaway who was lynched in 1940, to collect soil from the site of his murder for a jar that would be added to the EJI memorial planned for 2018 in Montgomery, AL. As the torches burned in Charlottesville, I was standing in a peaceful clearing in woodland outside of Lagrange, Georgia, a town that recently made the headlines for officially apologising to the black community for being complicit in the circumstances that led to his death. Whilst the unresolved historic attitudes still provoked such visceral conflict elsewhere, I was exposed to an attempt at healing, through a model of truth and reconciliation.

All those white picket fences must have dredged up some recollections of famous images. Did you find yourself “channelling” any famous photographers while you were working? Any Herzogian will agree that ‘if you turn up something extraordinary will happen’. I have experienced something similar in my development of previous projects especially in Ukraine, where the perfect imagined scenarios of people, locations and events seem to fall effortlessly and mysteriously into view.

At the time of my research, this unknowingly was the key that led to my development of the typology ‘Waffle House Index’ created hours before my flight back to the UK.

In accepting influence as inevitable, my research both limits my choices but occasionally can lead to pastiche and an opportunity to celebrate William Eggleston arose when I met an old boy selling tricycles at a road junction outside Albany. Ed Ruscha imagined himself on assignment, similarly challenged to bring back something no-one else had seen. Ruscha strips away the ‘dramatic and sentimental’ and in ‘Twenty Six Gasoline Stations’ the focus is on an objective reality in geographic order. I am inspired by the courage of Ruscha to produce work so free of aesthetic reference and conventional ambition (that it is seen as baffling in 1963). He explains that there is a form of truth in the inexplicable, which I empathise with and have always tried to bring in my own approach. The difference now is the aesthetic photographic element, which he regarded as “irrelevant”, is now a defined genre in its own right.

Eggleston tricycle, (Untitled , 1970) Egglston Artistic Trust

Road-side restaurants are an essential part of rural America’s iconography and almost demand to be photographed. Were you attracted to the Waffle Houses as a typology because they seemed quaint for a Brit who has never sampled their delights?

From TWENTYSIX GASOLINE STATIONS, 1963 Edward Ruscha

“No architectural form better expresses the socio-economic development of America at that time” (David Campany, The Open Road) and my interest in the Waffle House is partly in the overworked tradition of the prefabricated rest stop as Warholian critique of consumerism so eloquently portrayed in Ed Ruscha’s ‘Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, 1963’. The metaphor although obvious is as relevant today and this concept is both nostalgic echo and decent pastiche of Ruscha but there is a further contemporary narrative acting as a hidden glue that transcends any of the lazy cliché. FEMA is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland created for the primary purpose of coordinating the response to a natural disaster. The Waffle House Index is an informal device used to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery. FEMA uses the operating conditions of this resilient southern restaurant chain as a barometer for how well an area will recover from a hurricane, tornado or other hazard. The Waffle House USP is that it is open 24/7, the menus are identical as are the prefabricated brightly coloured yellow, red buildings. The compact spread

of restaurant locations across the southern states (sometimes literally only a mile from each other) offers a relatively accurate barometer of the destructive power of any major natural event by recording the effect the storm has on the structure, opening times and menu available. “If a Waffle House is closed because there’s a disaster, it’s bad. We call it red. If they’re open but have a limited menu, that’s yellow,” FEMA “If they’re green, we’re good, keep going.” This narrative implicitly lends itself to a typology and the 9 outlets documented were recorded within 4 miles from my hotel in the space of 2 hours.

I see your trip started in the mid-west where the locals are well-known for being hospitable and polite to strangers. Did you meet and photograph anyone who enjoyed your approach? Passing through these states I engaged with many people selling unwanted goods on the roadside, I had little interest in this as narrative per se but I used it as an excuse to approach and explore their lives in a way that would have been impossible otherwise. Mostly people were welcoming and seemed as interested in me as I was of them. I photographed the teenager ‘Briana’ with her kitten and the camera records her clumsy attempt at a persona that defines her age and her ambivalence at being seen and recorded. I look at this moment as a record of a meeting of two very different worlds and the space between us reminds me of what life can do to us in the journey to adulthood.

When you looked into this history of lynching in the South were you concerned about you being a white Englishman getting involved in a troubling racial legacy?

In tackling such a huge subject with such historic roots it would be deeply naive to consider myself worthy of representing the subject. Somethings feel so visceral that perhaps an outsider has no right to comment but we do perhaps have the right to ‘observe’ and an outside eye may sometimes offer a new or alternative perspective that may throw new light. Although my adopted psychology brings a certain detachment, even I cannot escape the subconscious influence on the record of these moments, of being ‘white’. Regardless, my interest is not to represent a conventional exploration of the history of Lynching in America and certainly not from a black perspective. I was drawn to the Equal Justice Initiative’s remarkable Community Remembrance Project as an opportunity to explore the different legacies of damage on everyone. As ‘whites’ we must consider the possibility of a form of emotional retardation from something akin to inherited bystander guilt. I am exploring ideas in my broader practice of the effect on our persona of previously unchallenged events where the source of anxiety from our generational past has been lost. The EJI’s soil collection project is shining a light on a previously ignored horrific time in American history in a process similar to the truth and reconciliation in South Africa that could lead to cultural shift in acknowledging a shared damage. The word recidivism comes to mind in the sense that there are inherent and inherited cultural behaviors associated with identities that are inevitably shaped by past events. These are the crutches that assist in our engagement with reality but are equally responsible for conflict; they are not natural or set in stone, they are continually evolving and shifting and can change.

Tell me about the soil pictures, what was going through your mind when you took those?

The sequence of soil images was taken at the Equal Justice Initiative offices in Montgomery, AL. where the jars from the community remembrance project ‘Lynching in America’ are being temporarily stored. I had access to this room during my initial research and discussions with the EJI and I photographed the different textures and colors of earth at that time. Each soil has the name of the victim with the date and location associated to it as a caption and I feel broadens the thought process from the intimate moment in the woods to a bigger picture and the horror of mass killings. I am at the same time exploring the connection of place and identity, I am interested in the notion of ‘Heimat’ most infamously appropriated by the Nazi’s. Recently the phrase best associated with it echoed in the chants of the mob in the streets of Charlottesville “blood and soil”. But Heimat (like any culture mis-appropriation for political purposes) has been corrupted from its original meaning as a valid and decent notion of belonging. It is however a basic right of all of us to feel self-assured in our connection to our homeland and it is in stark contrast to any sense of social alienation. Blood and soil, I feel the relatives of Austin Callaway have rights to that concept. The soil itself as an image and the descents’ interaction with the soil represents a form of literal, political and emotional reclamation.

Lynching in America

Unknown #7, Screamer, Alabama, September 7th, 1888

Jeff Rogers, Lafayette, Alabama, February 2, 1884

Doc Harley, Greenville, Alabama, January 4th, 1915

William Jenkins, Eufaula, Alabama, January 10th, 1922

JAMES WILLIAMSON

Waffle House Index

On The Road