When I saw the anouncement from the Miller Art Museum’s new curator, Lisa Shoshany of an exhibition of photographs of New Deal Greenbelt towns by Jason Reblando, I wasn’t enthused.
Sounded like an essay or a book, but not the material for a show in an art museum. That view was shared by a few friends who attended the opening.
“Boring,” said one.
“I don’t like to read art,” said another who prefers images that speak for themselves.
I was right — the material makes for a good book which is on sale at the museum for $45 and includes a few useful pages about how the Greenbelt towns were created by the federal governing in the 1930s under the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. At a time when Door County Economic Development is pondering a study of
housing needs in the county, this would be a useful show for business leaders.
But after spending time at the Miller over two visits, I think the photographs fully warranted a museum exhibition. The prints are big — 34 x 42 with frames — and they engage a viewer emotionally, while the images in the book are more objects to study.
I like the size, which is a bit bigger than my own ink jet printer will produce. I don’t like photographers who make 5x7-inch prints in large mats and demand the viewer come close to see the precious object.
Reblando apparently agrees, as he wrote in an email to me:
“I like 30x40 inch prints because it's not too cost prohibitive to print at this size, and I have to take a step back from the work to view it. Granted, it doesn't seem very large compared to other contemporary photographers that you've probably seen, but to me, the 30x40 prints seems to fit this project well. Also, from a practical standpoint, if I were to print it any larger, I wouldn't be able to fit it in the back of my car. On the other end of the spectrum, I do enjoy the intimate feeling of the way it looks in a book-size format, too.”
An interview with The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm led me to a critic she likes, Michael Fried, whose Amazon bio contains this bit of interesting observation about photography and print size:
"From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Fried further demonstrates that certain philosophically deep problems―associated with notions of theatricality, literalness, and objecthood, and touching on the role of original intention in artistic production, first discussed in his controversial essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967)―have come to the fore once again in recent photography. This means that the photographic 'ghetto' no longer exists; instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before."
Reblando's prints have stunning clarity. Turns out he shoot with 4x5 film and then uses high qulaity drum scans at a nonprofit photo center in Chicago called
LATITUDE.
"The tech people working there are magical wizards," said Reblando, who has taught photography at at Illinois State University, Columbia College Chicago, and DePaul University.
The Greenbelt towns were conceived under FDR at a time when the federal government was open to many experiments to get the country out of the Depression. They were meant to provide employment and affordable housing along with a sense of community to promote a more cooperative and egalitarian society. Homes ranged from single family to attached to apartment buildings. The towns had lots of open space including playing fields and easy access to nature with forests and lakes. Intersecting paths brought people together while a pedestrian/biking underpass below a local roadway showed positively Scandinavian focus on safe and healthy living. Predictably enough, the Greenbelt project was often condemned as communistic.
The photographer, who has an undergraduate degree in sociology, said his project was “an opportunity to engage with a unique expression of the New Deal as we continue to grapple with the complexities of housing, nature and governance in contemporary American life.” He became interested in Greenbelt towns after shooting pictures of residents of public housing in Chicago.
"Government housing has its own history of success and failures." he said. "It's pretty shameful the way we treat people who need affordable housing."
Rablando said that residents of the Greenbelt towns told him they saw their communities in a new way after seeing the prints in an exhibition.
That makes sense. At their best, the photographs draw you in — my favorite is of converging, or perhaps diverging -- paths through a park with trees in the autumn. Roblando in this series is a photographer of calm, so while he does include some images of people standing, or boys straddling their bicycles, most are straightforward photographs of buildings, lakes, and stark interiors such as a microfiche reader with a black and white portrait of FDR on the wall behind it.
In the Greenbelt series A few glimpses of WPA artwork appear — a frieze in Maryland and distinctive mural above an otherwise bleak set of beige cabinets in the library in Ohio and an entire wall mural in a music room, also in Ohio.
He may be at his best with landscapes and buildings --a long (it extends beyond the side frames of the photo) three-story apartment building shot through trees that have shed most of their leaves onto an autumnal carpet in Maryland or a path leading through the woods to a partially visible house in Wisconsin or a bench swing in Maryland between looming shrubs which have grown untamed for years, provide a sense of the way planners mixed the man-made with nature.
In Gutter and Shadow he makes a foray into stark abstraction with a building’s dark uneven shadow cast across a lawn interrupted by a long white gutter designed to take water far from the foundation.
The politics can’t go unremarked, Since the Reagan area, where a standard laugh line was “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you,” Republicans have harped on the idea that the government is always the problem, never the solution. Reblando’s photos of the Greenbelt towns created by the federal government show that it worked with the best intentions and often with great results to create housing and community.
Through Feb. 25
For more of his work see “
Chicago Inside Out” in Places Journal. Here Reblando’s photography is paired with great reporting on Cook County, which is responsible for a lot of Chicago’s problems — prisons, hospitals — but is shortchanged by the state and federal governments. Some impressive leaders, including the sheriff and the prosecutor, are responding with imagination. His still pictures of government buildings and their interiors and a couple of wonderful portraits, work well with Maya Dukmasova’s writing.
“It was an exciting piece to work on as I enjoy working with writers with hopes that my images will complement the story,” Reblando said in an email. “I asked for feedback from the editor at Places and the journalist throughout the project to make sure I was on the right visual track. I hope there are more opportunities like this in the future.”
Reblando has also done photographs with the wet collodion process on tin types, taking pictures in Pembroke Township, one of the poorest spots in the country. This requires coating the plates, inserting them into a film holder, taking the photograph and developing it immediately, which Reblando did using the trunk of his Corolla with a dark sheet clamped onto it. See the story from
Chicago Magazine.
The process provoked some curiosity, which he could satisfy by showing people the pictures as he developed them. He did a similar set of images for the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and explained the process as it was caught on
video.
