The Weather
and a Place to Live: Photographs of the
Suburban West
by Steven
B. Smith
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006
128 pp., 80 duotone photographs. Trade,
$25.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3611-1.
Review by John F. Barber
School of Arts and Humanities, The University
of Texas at Dallas
jfbarber@eaze.net
At first look, The Weather and a Place
to Live, a new book by Steven B. Smith,
documents in compelling, often stunning
black-and-white photographs how the sprawling
suburban development of the western United
States is reconfiguring what was once
vast, unpopulated territory. More to the
point, Smith documents cheap prefabricated
and commercialized building overrunning
the historic, romantic idea of the natural
landscape. Smith's photographs, taken
at the surreal intersection of the American
appetite for suburban development and
the rolling, arid country of the desert
West, frame simple truths hiding in plain
sight. They show landscapes scraped bare,
re-sculpted, and then bolstered in some
way to prevent erosion before the building
process can be completed. Based on this
collection of photographs, Smith was winner
of the biennial Center for Documentary
Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in
Photography.
Smith's eloquent and award-winning photographs
show folly masquerading as progress, capitalist
venality defiling the land, a vision of
the future where the desire for home ownership
is pitted against development in epic
proportions, a vision of the earth as
property to be physically shaped, delimited
with boundaries, and viewed. As Smith
documents, the earth itself is material
to be managed, to be scraped and shaped,
to be overlain with concrete or asphalt
or boulders and pebbles that have no use
other than the support of decoration or
visual display.
These altered landscapes force us to consider
the consequences of human design battling
natural forces to produce a fragile and
contorted balanced equation in which nature
becomes both inspiration and adversary.
For example, Smith shows a concrete sound
wall edging a newly constructed roadway
through empty desert country. The wall
is painted to mirror the mountains in
the distance, the view of which is blocked
by the wall as one drives along the roadway.
Buttresses and berms, sometimes constructed
of natural stone, other times from concrete
blocks, terrace, shape, divide, and delineate
the landscape, often for the sole purpose
of providing car parking for new suburban
home owners. Irrigation control measures
become massive sculpted scars across the
landscape itself wrapped in jute matting,
waiting to redirect the inconvenient runoff
from rainstorms that might threaten cheap
houses built on bare hillsides.
These houses are not attached to the land
but are rather an occupying force, aliens
metamorphosing into a vast suburban frontier.
First, this frontier occupies the easy
valleys and, then, jumps up to the summits
for their views, then down to the less-desirable
slopes, filing in toward the center. The
greater the approximation between the
built and natural landscape, the more
rocks in the yard, the more dramatic the
retaining wall, the greater the self-satisfaction
of the amorphous intersection of human,
climatic, and geographical realms.
What Smith wants to show is what we consider
the underlying value of changing the land.
If human changes to the natural environment,
no matter how dramatic, reflect the local
environment, then homage is considered
paid to the existing landscape. Whether
or not homage is paid, however, the changed
landscape is more valuable than the original.
Smith's photographs of this constructed
landscape confront us with the beauty
of images as images, yet push us to reflect
on the massive devastation possible in
the act of choosing a place to live. The
deeper cumulative effect, as Smith shows,
is that this commercial and geographic
devolution leaves no sense of home, and
in many cases no plant or animal life,
only the weather and a place to live.