Working the Room. Geoff Dyer

is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm.

      Like DeLillo, Parr is not scathing or moralistic about this perceived failing. He enjoys it too much for that. There’s too much mileage in it.

      It is as hard for photographers to be funny as it is for a critic to explain a joke (this probably has something to do with the medium’s defining quality of reproducibility; how many jokes can withstand infinite repetition?) but they can be witty. The wittiest photographer was Henri Cartier-Bresson (with Winogrand a close second), who, if he had worked in colour, might have relied on some of the same devices as Parr. Ironically, it was at the opening of Small World in Paris in 1995 that Cartier-Bresson told Parr that he must be ‘from a different planet’. One sees what he means but one also sees that, at some point in their orbits, their two planets are thrown into unexpected alignment. In the random accidents of colour Parr contrives to find a version of the rhymes and puns that Cartier-Bresson discovered in the fleeting symmetries of pictorial geometry.

      Are Parr’s visual jokes at the expense of the people depicted? Is he fair? In the context of a world in which war photographers are snatching images of death, maiming, grief and suffering Parr’s trespasses are easily forgiven. (Having mentioned war it’s worth remembering that, since Parr works in some of the most intensively photographed spots on earth, he can probably claim immunity on the grounds that they are, to use a phrase from Vietnam, free-fire zones.) I suspect, also, that the people in the photographs would recognise themselves and their fellow-travellers. They would agree that, although they have chosen and paid to come to these places, sightseeing in particular and holidaying generally are often the opposite of fun – partly because of all the other tourists. (Like car drivers moaning about traffic, the discerning tourist often complains that a place is ‘too touristy’.) And the money, even in supposedly cheap places, slips through your fingers like water. Forty years on, my father is still traumatised by the extraordinary price of the choc-ice we almost bought outside Madame Tussaud’s during that trip to London. In this respect he has something in common with D.H. Lawrence, who, in Sea and Sardinia, is in a state of constant fury about being overcharged: ‘I am thoroughly sick to death of the sound of liras … Liras – liras – liras – nothing else. Romantic, poetic, cypress-and-orange-tree Italy is gone. Remains an Italy smothered in the filthy smother of innumerable lira notes: ragged, unsavoury paper money so thick upon the air that one breathes it like some greasy fog.’

      There is no way round it: to travel, either as backpacker or package tourist, is to be forced into being an incessant consumer. Factor in queues, hassle, jetlag and tummy upsets and it’s a wonder, even now, when travel has become so easy, that people still want to do it. Philip Larkin certainly didn’t want to, but he did consent, every year, to take his mother away for a dismal week somewhere in England (he didn’t believe in ‘abroad’). The experience led him to develop ‘a theory [that] “holidays” evolved from the medieval pilgrimage, and are essentially a kind of penance for being so happy and comfortable in one’s daily life’.

      That’s what the pictures in Small World depict: the form and state of modern, faithless pilgrimage. I think, next year, I might try Mecca.

      2007

       Joel Sternfeld’s Utopian Visions

      One of the most moving photographs I know is also one of the dullest: an empty, uninteresting-looking room with a brown carpet and beige walls. It comes at the end of Joel Sternfeld’s book On This Site (1996). On each of the previous recto pages is a colour photo of an ordinary bit of America: a street corner, a rural grocery store (reminiscent of ones photographed by Walker Evans in the 1930s), an urban hotel, a deserted highway. On each of the facing pages a brief text explains that this is, respectively: the place in Queens where a woman was stabbed to death outside her apartment; the store in Mississippi where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till addressed a white woman as ‘baby’ and, as a result, was kidnapped, tortured and killed; the hotel where presidents of the major tobacco companies decided to begin an aggressive advertising campaign to counter scientific claims that cigarette smoke caused cancer; the road in Oklahoma where Karen Silkwood died after ‘crashing’ her car. Devoid of obvious ‘interest’ these apparently random places become freighted with invisible narrative and, as a consequence, are changed, utterly, into sites of hideous violence and atrocious corporate greed. Crucially, the photos are not of memorials. The photos are memorials which then turn the places into memorials.

      The picture I referred to at the beginning is a kind of postscript; it comes after the Afterword, after the Acknowledgements etc. The dull room is in the Masjid-Al-Rasul mosque in Watts, where ‘members of the Bloods and the Crips, rival Los Angeles gangs, negotiated and signed a truce on April 26, 1992’. In the aftermath of all that has gone before the promise of this picture is all the more immense for being tentative, provisional. It offers simple documentary proof of Maxim Gorky’s belief that ‘Life will always be bad enough for the desire for something better not to be extinguished in men.’

      There is something distinctly Russian about progress being negatively affirmed in this way. An American version would reverse the emphasis: however good life is it will never be so good that people stop wanting something better. Implicit in the foundation myth of America, the utopian impulse is etched into the country’s history and geography. On hearing of the lure of California one of the Polish emigrants in Susan Sontag’s In America remarks on how American it is, the idea ‘that America has its America, its better destination where everyone dreams of going’. Often this ambition operates simply at the level of endlessly mobilising consumer demand. An alternative expression of the same impulse explicitly rejects – or, in the testaments of Emerson and Thoreau, seeks to transcend – a version of satisfaction which generates insatiability. The other key part of the American estate, pragmatism, has sought to make the utopian yearning tangible, not through revolutionary overthrow of the existing order (as advocated by Marx and Engels) but by establishing small ‘communities of common purpose’. Some of these have survived into the era of triumphal capitalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some … Well, we’ll come to them in a moment.

      Sternfeld identifies three periods in which experimental communities bloomed. The first, in direct response to the dehumanising blight of the factory system, occurred between 1810 and 1860. Thereafter communities were set up sporadically – particularly in California – but it was not until the 1960s and the mushrooming hippie counter-culture that there was another peak in utopian activity. The third phase, under way for about fifteen years, has seen the spread of eco-villages or co-housing communities.

      The companion volume to On This Site, Sweet Earth, deploys the same format. On one page are photographs of the grounds of a community or of one or more of its members. On the facing verso page Sternfeld tells the story of the pictured community. In some instances all that remains are ruins, visible signs of poor planning or corrupted ideals. The stories of the failures are often hilarious. Here is what happened during the terminal phases of Biosphere 2 in Arizona: ‘As conditions worsened … tensions mounted among the crew. On the first anniversary of the experiment, Jane Goodall visited to observe the inhabitants. Allegations of food hoarding and food stealing abounded, and the Biospherians had splintered into two antagonistic groups. Though most had televisions in their apartments, they reportedly found it too torturous to watch because of McDonald’s advertisements.’ Where the founding principles are polygamy and free love, jealousy and sexual abuse have a habit of flourishing. At the other end of the spectrum celibacy – popular among the first, religiously inspired wave of settlements – is a mandate for self-extinction.

      Many of the places founded in the 1960s fell victim to their own success, attracting people who would lead, ultimately, to their collapse. This is what happened in Drop City, both the real one (or all that’s left of it) photographed by Sternfeld in Colorado