Cassides' Diner.
Cassides’ Diner sits everywhere and nowhere; it could be on any number of city blocks around the Northeast, and at the same time, it’s hard to say from the picture where on that block it is situated. The building itself is also a little improbable. It carries the signs of both tough economic straits and real ingenuity, the result of someone taking what’s at hand and making something better out of it.
The richness of the picture makes it something of a focal point for Tom Peterson’s exhibit “Echoes of Silence” — now running in its last weekend at City Gallery on upper State Street until June 26 — which focuses on postindustrial cityscapes with an unusual eye that opens the door to fruitful questions about where we’ve been and where we might go from here.
Farrel Corporation.
Photographs of decaying urban landscapes are perhaps as old as photography, whether the people behind the camera trained their lenses on the ruins of Greece and Rome, on street kids in cities across the globe, or on factories and other industrial spaces slowly being taken apart by the elements. The photos in Peterson’s show — particularly because they have no people in them — are most akin to those works in the last category, but also distinguish themselves in the way Peterson approaches his subject.
About 15 years ago, taking photographs of decaying postindustrial cities — especially Detroit — became enough of a trend to spawn a certain aesthetic that its detractors called ruin porn. As the name implies, what some viewers found a little queasy about such images was the way they fetishized their subject. The pictures were taken in such a way as to draw attention to every detail and texture of the places photographed. Viewers were invited to gawk at every peel of paint, the crack in every brick, every piece of bent rebar. Its supporters would contend that the photographers were documenting an important time in a city, when so many once-grand places had fallen into disrepair. Whether such photographs are elegaic or just simply lurid remain a subject of debate.
Peterson avoids the critique leveled at ruin porn through his formal approach to his subjects — an approach he has practiced for years in realistic and more abstract work. His pictures ask us to see not so much the textures of the surfaces he photographs, but the strong geometric shapes at play. There’s the square door and the circular fan of the diner, looking almost like a face. Or the strong stripes of the overhead walkways at the Farrel Corporation. Or the sharp street corners and bold building faces of an intersection in Meriden.
That his photos come from a variety of locations — from Meriden to Ansonia to New Haven to parts of New York City — is important in the way it draws those places together, pointing out their shared history of experiencing economic prosperity with the rise of industry and decline with its collapse. It’s a story that echoes across the country, from Youngstown to Detroit. While some cities (like Portland and Seattle) have found their footing in a postindustrial future, and plunged into a set of new problems, other places are finding their way forward more slowly, and thus, perhaps can do so more thoughtfully, too. Peterson’s attention to the shapes of things makes the viewer pay attention to them more as vessels. Once they were filled with factory workers and those who relied on them. But widespread industry has now been gone long enough that an entire generation of people has grown up not knowing what it was like before; like Peterson, they take those spaces as they are, not as they used to be. What can those spaces be filled with now?
“Echoes of Silence” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through June 26. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.
An important exhibit to show people what we once were and what we have descended to in industrial America.