The New Heartland: Looking for the American Dream

Description

In many ways, Ohio has become for America the quintessential heartland state, for what happens in Ohio happens over all of the United States. Ohio has been a bellwether swing state for the winning candidate in every presidential election since 1944 except one. It's also the place where fast-food companies test-market new products and the place where chewing gum, Teflon, and the first cash register, first vacuum cleaner, first airplane, first traffic signal, and first gas-powered automobile were invented. You can't get more heartland than that. Even the state's Division of Travel and Tourism has relied on "Ohio, the Heart of It All" as its popular motto since the Reagan years to attract visitors to the state. Yet everything seemed to change after the 2004 presidential election, when political scientists and long-time journalists looked more closely at the election results: Ohio was changing, just as America was changing. Big differences were noted between voters who lived in the cities and those who lived around the cities who aligned with voters from rural areas. Andrew Borowiec, an eminent photographer based in Akron, took notice, and he headed out with his camera to take a closer look at the electoral map on the ground. And what he found was astonishing. The once rolling farmlands that used to surround the cities and define Middle America were rapidly giving way to vast suburban housing developments of nearly identical, hastily built mini-mansions with enormous garages and fancy yards. These were new bedroom communities for long-distance commuters to the cities where there were jobs. And the traditional Main Streets of yore were being eclipsed by "lifestyle centers": shopping malls filled with national chains whose commercial architecture is a cacophonous blend of multiple periods and styles somehow blending into a fanciful display in which every detail is reproduced out of extruded foam and all of it designed to evoke an imagined past era of luxurious consumerism. Distinctive architectural and landscape styles of the region had given way to a ubiquitous culture of global marketing in which J. Crew was a more familiar name than James Joyce. Homogenization and conformity had won over the American dream. In the tradition of other famous interpreters of American land and life---among them J. B. Jackson, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and the New Topographics photographers---Andrew Borowiec has used his keen eye and dedication to field work to give us a fresh, at times humorous, and ever razor-sharp view of what is going on in America today. There is a new heartland, a new American dream, and it can be found in the new residential and commercial landscapes of Ohio, and the rest of America, if we choose to open our eyes and take a look.

"Andrew Borowiec's photographs take stock of contemporary life in America's heartland and explore how the way people shape their surroundings expresses our prevailing social and environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values. The book is not simply a critique or an analysis of current American culture; the specificity of Borowiec's work reveals a sweet, simple, and irrefutable humanity that connects what we see with what we have experienced ourselves and insists that these pictures and the trends they describe belong, somehow, to all of us."The New Heartland" recalls other landmark books in the history of photography. Robert Adams's "The New West" (1973) leaps to mind, because Borowiec's title echoes that of the earlier book and because both books wrestle with dichotomies: myth and reality, beauty and ugliness, gross social trends and real needs of ordinary people. Together, these two books demonstrate that the issues they address, however specific and local they may seem in the pictures, are as universal as they are persistent.The other books that seem to lurk in the background of "The New Heartland" are Walker Evans's great "American Photographs" (1938) and the four-volume "The Work of Atget (1981--1985)" by John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg. The strong affinity I see among Borowiec, Evans, and Atget has mostly to do with their faith that simple facts about how things look, stated clearly and economically in photographs, possess a unique poetic power. Borowiec contributes to this tradition of careful looking, with photographs of supreme intelligence and wit. "The New Heartland" gives us a fresh look at American culture that partakes in an important artistic tradition."