Go to the Land and I Will Show You : Alana Perino

Andrew D. McClees (ADM): For those who aren’t familiar with you, or your work, could you introduce yourself?

Alana Perino (AP): I'm a photographer but also broadly a lense based artist. My practice and my work is occupied with the reconciliation (or lack thereof) of self, home, and belonging.
ADM: I've never been super clear on what a lens based artist is, I'm familiar with photographers, filmmakers, videographers, etc - but "lense based artist" is a label or classification that I've never quite wrapped my brain around, mostly due to lack of explanation. Could you fill me in on what defines a lens based artist, and possibly relate it back to your own work and practice?

AP: I’m glad you asked this question because I have been grappling with how to define myself as an artist lately. I fall back on the classification of “lens based” as a means to say that I work with cameras. Film cameras, digital cameras, videocameras etc. But the truth is that I’ve also been engaging with collage, casting, and installation for some time now. I don’t feel as proficient in these other fields, but one day I’m hoping to consider myself as an artist who is not media specific. Till that time comes, I use lens based to define the kinds of tools I engage with, tools with lenses.
ADM: We’re talking about your upcoming photobook project “Go to the Land and I Will Show You” - how did you start your project? And where did the title come from?

AP: I began the project on a road trip from New York to California. I had wanted to stop to see Gettysburg on the leg from Philadelphia to DC but no one else in the car was interested. We passed many heritage sites in that same fashion and I suppose I became a bit obsessed with them. After that trip I made 11 road trips over the span of 8 years to specifically see "American" heritage sites. I was interested in the struggle of trying to experience invisible histories and the ways that landscape creates collective memory. More specifically I was interested in photographing the illusions of how history imprints itself or is imprinted upon landscape. The title comes from the Bible. In Genesis, God commands Abraham to leave his home and go to a land that will be shown to him. Obviously there are many translations of this Hebrew text, but I chose this version. It felt particularly relevant to the United States mythologies that justify settler colonialism, indigenous genocide, manifest destiny, and the mechanisms that engage with tourism in the US.

ADM: 11 road trips over eight years is a major endeavor - I'm sure you've seen almost every major site (official and unofficial) at this point - however, did you find yourself gravitating more towards a specific set of sites, and were there any sites that you came away from either with a new understanding of American history, or that you found yourself making especially significant (to yourself, or otherwise) images at?

AP: There are so many historic sites, I’d argue that the functioning of American culture is very much embedded in the designation and curation of these sites. It’s impossible to see them all, but yes I’ve many of the “major” ones. Truly it was an obsession which began on my first road trip in 2013. I was with some friends who were less inclined to stop at these sorts of places. They were more interested in seeing friends and family. Gettysburg was on our trajectory but we didn’t stop there. My father isn’t a Civil War fanatic but he is emotionally invested in 1993 film about the battle. We used to watch it together when I was young. He knows every line. I had always wanted to go there, to situate my body where I had seen the bodies on screen, where the historic bodies descended on the hills or fell in the fields. When I finally went to Gettysburg, it was a culmination of that desire that was quite anti-climactic.
ADM: The project has undergone several really fascinating evolutions over the time we’ve been in class together - what’s influenced the changes in the book?

AP: A lot of the work I made over the years were nods to various photographers who engaged with the US landscape: Ansel Adams, Lee Frielander, Joel Sternfeld, Mitch Epstien. The editing process has mostly been a matter of distilling the work into a very specific vision, one that attempted to avoid the influences of other artists and relied on a personal conception of what these places look like. After a while it became clear to me that I wasn't even trying to tell a narrative as much as create an optical experience that triggered notions of place, memory, and history. The decision to not name the sites in the book felt crucial in this way, because it wasn't important to divulge where the pictures were made. It was only important to make the reader want to know, to question, and to want to see more.
ADM: When making photographs for the book, was there a particular thought process, or a specific intuition you followed?
AP: I suppose I photographed whenever I felt like I couldn't really see. The frustration would drive me to try to visualize in a different way, around a corner, through a viewfinder, from a different perspective. In this way, many of the photographs included in the book are instances of my seeing unsuccessfully, and the images where I achieved a certain amount of visual or narrative satisfaction were left on the cutting room floor. Seeing became a metaphor for knowing, for experiencing, and I wanted to create a world full of the unknowable and the unseen.

ADM: That's really fascinating - it's sort of like digging into the subconscious of American history - the "silent" history if you will? - are there particular aesthetic notes or semiotics you find yourself using or returning to (if you're not actively considering them at the time of shooting) for that take on history, and "seeing the unseen?"

AP:I think a lot about orientation, disorientation, and the ways in which our bodies and senses are engaged when we encounter these sites. I focus on sight as the locus of that kind of experience. There is a colonial emphasis on “discovery” at most of these locations, which suggests the possibility of a direct observation of the past. The suggestion being that if you stand in such a way on a certain mound of dirt, engaging your imagination and the “knowledge” of history that’s been offered, that you can have an experience in time and space that moves you to forget when and where you are presently. I suppose a lot of my photographs are trying to visually engage with this kind of exercise, and what I settled on more than anything is the impossibility of that experience.

ADM: What projects are you taking on next? What's fascinating to you outside your book?

AP: Most recently I’ve been engaging with personal histories and my relationship to family and home. I’m specifically interested in how inherited trauma is stored in objects, space, and ultimately the body. The first chapter of the work which I call “Pictures of Birds” focuses on my father’s side of the family in Longboat Key, Florida. The second chapter, tentatively titled “Adult Children,” is an exploration of my relationship with my mother. For these bodies of work, I am expanding my practice to include installation, sound, sculpture, and collage but the work is still essentially photographic in nature. It’s all very experimental at this point which means I’m not sure what shape it will take in its final form, but I’m finding that unknowability very exciting and generative.

ADM: Over the course of your investigations into the American Landscape via placing yourself in historical sites, what did you learn?- beyond what's pictured in the book, either about yourself or about the photographic process - that you'd be keen to pass on to others.

AP: Rest became something that I had to actively entrench into my practice, not just as a respite for carrying a camera or walking in the hot sun, but as a mode of engaging my body and mind in ways that exercised other muscles. This was not something I practiced in the first few years of this project but by the end it was essential not just to the work but to my well-being as an artist and a person.

ADM: From Eric Kaczmarczyk: What does a day in the life as a photographer, as an artist, as a person, look like for you? What time do you wake up, go to sleep? Outside of photography, what are some of your favorite hobbies?

AP: I work best at night. I've always wanted to be a morning person but I've come to accept that my "morning hours" will always be closer to 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, than 5, 6, 7 or even 8am, which is when I'm usually asleep. Late mornings and early afternoons are for meetings, paid-work, shoots, grant applications, sometimes rest or play. Evenings and nighttime are for my practice, and hopefully in the midst of all that I remember to eat dinner.

ADM: What question do you have for the next photographer? - you can answer your own question if you'd like.

AP: I'm always curious as to how other photographers know when a project is finished. For me, I can feel it in my body as a resistance to photographing. I become tired more easily, less motivated. It's very much a physical sensation as opposed to a mental or intellectual fatigue. This is how I know it's time to try something new.

Gallery to the above left contains images of the current maquette of “Go to The Land And I will Show You”

ADM: Do you have any parting words/shoutouts/recommendations?

AP: We don't have a solid ETA yet but I will be publishing Go to the Land and I Will Show You with Drew Leventhal under his incipient publishing house, Valley Books. So keep a lookout for updates on this and other titles he'll be publishing in the very near future.

ADM: Awesome! Looking forward to buying my copy when it’s out in the wild!

Walker Evans’ American Photographs: the bullet points, for idiots, like me.

When I announced the ongoing series I’m running of book talks on photographers and their key books, I promised to write up at least a one page essay, or something to that effect on the photographer, and the book, much in the same vein of a “What I Learned Shooting.” Like that series this shouldn’t be taken too deeply - I’m no expert and these are essentially my personal cliff notes, because I need to actually write out and think out anything before discussing them. Feel free to drop a comment if you have corrections or counterpoints - or just email me.

So now that I’m done the preamble, I’ve broken down my essay/recap/notes into a few segments, starting with:

History:

American Photographs was the first solo exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Evans was the primary curator of the exhibition, though he worked closely with Kirstein on finalizing his image selection in the exhibition, and later the book. This seems to have played a huge role in setting up the Museum as sort of the de-facto “Church” of photography in the US. Along with helping establish MOMA, the book was also an early lynchpin of the american photobook tradition, per Galassi. The book, and exhibition first ran in 1938.

Technical Notes:

Evans used an 8x10 view camera for the entire book. While this is not particularly impressive on it’s face - the book itself is not particularly large, so we can’t really appreciate the full size of the plates - even as contact prints - it is quite impressive in the first half the book where evans manages to capture quite a few candid moments with a strong degree of - a fact that Kirstein acknowledges in his essay that comes with the book.

Context of Book, Notes on Style and Construction:

Evans was noted for his commitment to documentary photography, and as one can readily see in the book itself the vast majority of the images were made from 1929-1936, across the Eastern US - Up and down the coast, and deep into the south. Newhall states that while Evans had a great eye for images, and created them consciously, many of the images were stronger in composition than the simplest possible document - though Evans frequently did employ very head on and straightforward compositions throughout much of the book.

The book is set into two halves - the first focusing largely on the American Populace, their local environments and scenes, and features which they surrounded themselves with. While many of the images are strict portraits of the scenes shot head on, when Evans steps out to document people, particularly in their environment, it tells a distinct story of people’s relationship with each other, and their place. Evans seems to have a particular fascination with advertising, both the ads themselves and how they’ve aged, as well as the placement of advertisements within those settings. Much of the best or most informative work in the first half are Evans’ environmental portraits - tying the scenes he documented to the people. This isn’t to say that his straight forward portraits are bad by any stretch, but that they don’t contain as much pure data or context as the environmental portraits. There are some vernacular landscapes in this first half, as well as interiors, but unlike the later landscapes, the factories, tenements and houses, these photos are very much portraits of place rather than comprehensive “landscapes.”

Newhall says of the second half that Evans was attempting to create “an Indigenous American Landscape.” Though, personally I’m a bit loath to say indigenous, as the book documents construction on the American, largely due to non-indigenous settlers. As previously mentioned these photos are more in the traditional landscape arena - and read much more as surveys of place or constructed photos. That said, the second half does reference the first half when the Evans documents many of the houses, and their architectural details - though I suppose these houses and their details make up the firmament of the towns and landscapes -

Many of the landscapes, and beyond contained in the second half of the book are of towns, and dwellings, and have more layered or complicated compositions than the first half - I believe this in part due the nature of landscape photography - unmoving, allowing the photographer to adjust and construct a frame based on their own needs - which Evans was not intrinsically against - though that approach did run contrary to much of his straight on mentality that he employs in the first half. I suppose landscapes which don’t move, and aren’t direct documents like many of the pure portraits, and there’s nobody to manipulate. The other half of this is that many of the landscapes and cityscapes that Evans photographed were themselves complicated, or more complicated than their surrounding environment. In the end, this tends to suggest Evans views a sort of odd entanglement between Americans and their environment - perhaps via the towns themselves or in some cases the job sites that overshadow the town and their environment.

Influences, Descendants, and Contemporaries:

Timothy H. O’Sullivan: O’Sullivan was a photographer during the Civil War, then went on to to document the west as a surveyor - I believe that, referencing the Beaumont Newhall quotation again, Evans takes influence perhaps indirectly throughout the second half of the book. Evans uses more contorted views of his landscapes where O’Sullivan’s are often very flat - and his images tend to give equal importance to everything in the frame - which makes sense given that he’s photographing essentially purely nature and natural topographies, which necessitate equal importance. That’s not to cut down the aesthetic importance of O’Sullivan’s Landscapes.

Robert Adams: Most likely the quickest “descendent” I could come up with - Adams’ work often dealt with similar entanglements between human suburban settlers and their topographies, and many of their compositions are really similar. Though Adams was much more the naturalist, where Evans focuses more on the human aspect.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Largely a contemporary, though they did overlap in new york - they both focus on similar subjects though their approach or fundamental viewpoint is wildly different. I believe Newhall noted HCB as being distinctly whimsical or french, as opposed to Evans’ simpler more straightforward approach. Bresson did have some landscapes and urban scenes, but they don’t tend to get quite the focus Evans puts on his.

Dorothea Lange: Lange was a fellow FSA photographer, though she leaned more towards people - and her constructions are more graceful, and less forceful. If you’re reading that as a put down, you’re an idiot. I’m tired and haven’t gotten a good book of hers yet, but I’m going off what I can easily google, because she’s frequently checked as a contemporary of Evans’.

For those like me - the intellectually disinclined (dumb observations):

1. The book is much smaller than I’d imagined. It’s a bit disappointing, because many of the images would likely benefit from a bigger display size, especially in the back half

2. The images throughout the book are relatively high in contrast - not comically so, though.

Softer contrast seems to be a relatively recent movement in photography.
I wonder when it became a “thing?”

3. Evans isn’t completely committed to sharpness, I believe he was a part of the “straight photography movement, and was a hardened documentarian, but a few of the images throughout the book are a little soft, showing a bit of motion.

If you’ve read this far - thanks for reading, I hope you found it useful, or if not useful entertaining, or just got a good hate read out of it. If you liked it, consider grabbing a zine in the shop, or donating (via the donate button) to us so we can keep the website up. We also are on patreon.

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