Commute

 Uneasy feelings about new works of art are often elusive in character. It’s like eating a piece of chocolate that has authentic ingredients: more bitter than usual, yet containing something that satisfies the palette. Commute by Suzette Bross works in just this way. There is a lot that is familiar and pleasurable in this work, but there is an odd flavour to it. The work has a feeling of withholding something from us, while also being familiar. This combination of the uneasy, especially when it is not directly provocative, combined with the familiar makes for work that could be easily overlooked, yet the work has a conceptual and formal integrity. This integrity allows a sophisticated visual language to emerge which comments on much that is fundamental to the modern experience of life. Commute reflects the resulting ambivalence showing us the breaking down of boundaries in many areas of our existence and of the formal categories of image making.

Commute is a collection of images made from a moving car (sometimes in traffic). The images are made through the windows, usually with a sideways glance at the world with rarely any view of what lies ahead. The spaces are not of anything in particular, neither city nor landscape. They are not even particularly suburban in feel. There is little comfort evident in them.

The images exhibit a high degree of blur which comes from the speed of travel, or of the speed of the objects moving alongside. The images are obviously made with a digital camera, and the prints themselves are not photographs, but high quality digital prints. There is no attempt to hide the pixelation of the images, and as large prints, the process of production can be enjoyed. The images also seem throwaway, with little attention paid to the traditional qualities of the medium. There is a distinct lack of consideration for timing (the decisive moment) and of composition (the framing often seems arbitrary). There is also no conformity to the rules associated with contemporary snap shot photography.

The work leaves us with a suspended, liminal, feeling, the work being neither one thing nor another. This could be seen as a direct challenge to what we might see define as a “good” body of work and could be mistaken as incoherence, the product of someone who could not make up their mind. But with Commute this is far from the case. This work reflects the very difficulty that lies in defining places, objects, situations, points of view. In a world where we need to be flexible at every turn, this liminality might represent what we think and feel if we were to stand still for one moment. In an ironical way we are able to see with what speed our life passes by through the medium of a still image.

Bross was educated at the Institute of Design and has a heritage to draw on which often questioned what is interesting and exciting about photography. The school of German photography, especially the Bechers, has influenced her, and some of these influences are perceptible. The viewer’s attention is stretched, challenged. We are presented with these questionable roadside scenes, and indeed we might wonder why we are being asked to look at them. The Bechers also challenged our notions of what is appropriate subject matter through repetition and the choice of unexpected subject matter. Part of their project was to demonstrate the vigorous structures of photography but while Bross’s work does not exhibit (appropriately) this degree of control, we are made to think in the same way about what makes acceptable imagery. The symbolic form of travel connects with the degree of abandon used in the production of images. The romance of the car lies in the speed of movement, and to image this in the Becher’s style would have defeated the object. This very blurring of what is accepted as good practice in photography can also be said to be evident in other areas of the work. How we view travel, the landscape, the city, the car, are all questioned here.

The Car/Commute

             There is no doubt that travel captures the imagination. The speed and pleasure of being on the move, the opportunity to see new places and experience new cultures are an essential part of life. Car travel, however, has a strong association with speed. Kerouac, in On the Road, recognized this pleasure in this breakneck speed, and there are passages in his book describing the thrill of speeding, along with the frustration of traveling with those who were careful and kept to the speed limit.

            Baudrillard, a cultural critic known for his acerbic view of modern life, has also recognized the pleasure of speed. The pleasure of being on the move was discovered in America where the experience of being on the road was unique:

…freeways do not denature the city or the landscape, they simply pass through it and unravel it without altering the desert character of this particular metropolis. And they are ideally suited to the only profound desire, that of keeping on the move.[i]

            What escaped both Baudrillard and Kerouac for the most part though, is what happens when you get stuck in traffic. Neither writer discusses the daily grind of commuting, which greatly diminishes the joy of being on the road. The repetitive nature of the journey, the same old scenes and places, the pace dictated by the surrounding traffic, and the mundane reasons that exist for commuting rather prevent the abandonment of responsibility that is implied in the romance of the road journey.

            This ambivalence is precisely rendered in Bross’s images. There are images which are clearly made from a fast moving vehicle, and there are moments when the resulting blur achieves formal perfection. However, the mundane aspects of this travel are also present, and many of the images show how un-spectacular our commuting journeys are, and the pleasure of blur cannot disguise this. It is not the blur and the speed that make this work unique, however.

Many photographers have looked to the journey for inspiration, as the subject itself. Eggleston, Frank and Meyerowitz worked on the road, yet their work was not really about being on the road. Meyerowitz did makes images while driving his car, but you are left with the feeling that he was driving at 5 mph. In a connected but different vein, Eggleston imbued his images with nostalgia; they fill one with a yearning for the past. He also makes you appreciate the moment he took to look, to stand still, to appreciate what was there. Even the images taken from the road have this quality – he stopped, got out and looked at the scenery around him.

Frank had a very different approach. – his photographs captured the loss of direction America experienced in the 1950’s, but also caught much of the fun too. He also never seemed to be traveling alone, people are a fundamental part of his images, and this is one of the things that gives him such a strong connection to Kerouac. It is evident that Bross is traveling alone, and this is common to much of the commuter experience. Bross’s images are melancholy in a way that Frank’s are not as they are filled with emptiness.

Another striking difference between the photographers mentioned here and Bross’s work, is the abandonment of traditional photographic qualities, and this is all the more remarkable as Bross has a background in documentary image making. While Frank was initially criticized for his grainy, slightly out of focus images, he does have an eye for composition and for circumstance. Meyerowitz and Eggleston are also consummate image-makers and their artistry is highly developed. Bross’s abandonment of composition is striking, mimicking to some extent the snatched glances of the driver. As these are subjects and spaces which do not warrant our attention, it seems fitting that they are not rendered precisely, or with a view to making them feel exceptional.

The Country and the City

            Commuting is an activity, which is increasing in many ways, and by far the greatest commuting experience is suburban to urban, or from one city to another. In America, however, the number of people commuting from a rural environment to the city is growing rapidly. There has been a marked increase in the population living in rural areas, with a decline in the perceived popularity of the city and the suburb[ii]. There is an increasing number of spaces which reflect this change in living, with shopping malls appearing in the middle of nowhere instead of being the privilege of towns or cities. There are an increasing number of in-between spaces, where they are not suburban, the city or the country. These liminal spaces are increasing as the city itself decentralizes and the centre no longer exists.

Bross’s work reflects these changes; simple categories such as the country or the city seem remarkably absent. The suspended nature of the images, the connection between the conceptual and formal levels of the work ideally suits the dissolution of the city. Indeed, I am reminded of the film Los by James Benning. A series of thirty-five static shots, taken in and around Los Angeles, the centre of the city never becomes present. There are a remarkable number of liminal spaces in this film, with a feeling of everything not being one thing or another. This is hinted at in Baudrillard’s quote earlier, where the city is seen as a desert. It is no longer a place to stand and experience, but now actually requires driving through.

There is no doubt that this liminality also supercedes any romantic or heroic notions of the landscape. The road side scenes Bross has made include the snatches of land that are left to their own devices, that require maintenance once a year to make sure the grass does not grow too long. The absence of any landscape which could be called natural, even if one is prepared to stretch what one means by the word “natural”, is striking. America has celebrated its great natural beauty, and resisted many attempts to introduce manufacturing on home territory before succumbing to the consumer age. What this work suggests though, is that this landscape has been replaced and we are left with images which sum up our industrialized and organized ways of living. It has been noticed before, though, that the natural has always existed in relation to this industrialized process in representations of America. Leo Marx, in the Machine in the Garden demonstrates that writers such as Melville, Thoreau and Irving have written episodes where the narrator is experiencing some natural wonder, when it is interrupted by something very distinctly machine orientated. What characterizes their writing is their sophisticated realization that technology had the power to extend beyond the city and to become a part of the land, to change it so that a pastoral ideal could not be reconstructed. They celebrated the natural landscape, experienced sadness at the loss of the unspoilt land, satirized progress, but ultimately recognized the machine age.[iii]

Photography itself is a part of this industrialized process, and something which no practitioner can escape. To make an image of a natural environment is to make an image which takes the machine into the garden. Andy Grundberg has taken Marx’s assertion one step further, and this statement is fitting for Bross’s work: “Today there is no innocent space, no room to see the garden without the machine.”[iv] The loss of the landscape in its idealized form is also reflected at the construction level of this work. There used to be something “natural” about photography, and in the digital age, the “naturalness” of the process is diminishing. The machine aspects of the making of the work are becoming more evident, and this helps to realize the loss of this innocent space.

Digital Photography

Geoffrey Batchen argued in Burning with Desire that early writings on photography articulated both the artistry of the user (cultural intervention) and the action of light (where nature draws herself). The use of chemicals which were known to respond to light were the so-called natural aspects of the process, and this has been lost to some extent in the digital medium.[v] While digital photography still has to respond to light, its direct relationship with nature is not as consistent in the process. Once the digital file is recorded on the computer the “file” takes precedence in the process of production.

Grundberg also notes a direct relationship between photography and industrialized society, and this forms a basis for how we see the world:

… photography is itself a metaphor of the industrial process, a supplier of mechanically produced and reproduced images, its positive images functioning poetically and to some extent practically as exchangeable parts, and as weapons in the conquest of new territories and people.

 Grundberg’s context here is in relation to the landscape and landscape photography, and his colonialist hinting provides a clue for further explorations of Bross’s images. If photography reflected the machine in the garden, especially in America where the great natural landscape was combined with the acceptance of industrialization, then the digital medium can be said to reflect this distancing from the natural in our lived realities and in our processes by which we chose to represent them. If digital images are made with less emphasis on the “natural” aspects of the process, it seems fitting that in Bross’s images the landscape is not grand or spectacular, but are spaces formed by the intervention of man. This conceptual and phenomenological approach is especially important when considering that these digital images are not manipulated.

            Bross’s work forms an alliance with other practitioners who have decided to take what is “straight” about a digital image, and accept it for what it is, rather than use the computer to either manipulate or improve the scene. The possibilities of improving the imagery would be useful if there was an intention of improving the world around us, to sell us an ideal. This is clearly not the case.

Digital still photography has a closer relationship with video than it does with a small format camera. There is a moment where the camera pauses before making the image, which rather subverts any attempt at capturing a precise moment. The camera also is often not used as an extension of the eye, but the arm; the body makes a gesture in space to make the image. These aspects of movement and delay are not allied with traditional concepts of photography and again draw us closer to the suspended caught nature of the work.

            Another useful comparison is the surveillance camera. The images that this technology produces are infamous for being poorly rendered, and for capturing a lot of footage where nothing happens. The banality of the surveillance video is extreme, and there are clearly no artistic aesthetics considered in the production of the medium. This has not stopped people from using it creatively, or from commenting on the banal nature of the resulting images. Bross’s work has a close relationship to this type of work, the spaces and scenes are eventless, as is so much of our surroundings.

            There is one other way in which the digital forms an essential part of this work, and aids the liminal nature of the images. They are digital prints, made from a process which lays pigment down on the surface of the paper. Light is not used in the production of the images. The prints lose the luminosity of the photographic print, but they gain the beauty of the pigment. This pigment makes dense areas of colour which are pleasurable to look at. However, this fights against the views of the images in a very productive way. When looking at the images, it is clear that they were made with a slight telephoto lens, giving the scenes the feeling that what was far away has been brought closer. The scenes therefore look both close and distant and the use of the pigment allows the surface of the print to work as something which describes surface, shape and form while still clearly being a flat area of pigment. The images fluctuate between being “over there” and being “here” as the surface fights the perception of distance. The prints are not illusory, their ability to describe the scene “naturally” is not as convincing as a straight photographic print, but essential in describing how divorced our lives have become in the technology age.

            Bross’s acceptance of the difference between photography and digital is useful in this work, and our ability to accept this shows that we are now ready to accept the digital as a separate medium, not as a poor relation to photography. It undeniably has a relationship to photography, but it doesn’t work in the same way or even look like photography. The digital medium has come of age, is mature in being accepted for being different.

Quiet Pleasures

            Commute, at every stage of production and conception, reflects liminality. We are shown in this work how clearly defined boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred and how our representations are changing on every level. The work has the ability to switch between states as different images emphasize different concerns. Some express aesthetic concerns and visual pleasure, despite the daily grind of the repetitive journey, while others show how visually poor urbanized life can be. It is interesting to note that the exploration of these spaces has enabled the specifics of the digital medium to be explored, while some of these specificities are inherently liminal in themselves. 

            The breaking down of boundaries is an activity which has been practiced in many disciplines, including race, gender, religious and cultural studies. There has been a concurrent activity of reinforcing specificities, with a greater requirement of understanding and knowledge on all sides. There is a very real need for security in life, yet these boundaries often lead to liminal states. For example, mixed race or mixed nationality children often feel excluded from both parental cultures. This opportunity and ability to explore the many aspects of our lives is essential as increasing numbers of people experience liminal feelings. To think of liminal states lacking definition is not helpful, in that every state helps to define others.

Commute, while exploring an activity that many millions participate in, also examines an isolating experience which reaches into other aspects of contemporary Western and specifically American cultures. This state of isolation, like the act of commuting itself, often escapes our attention, and can be dismissed in a simply negative light. These images by Bross, imbued as they are with an uneasy familiarity, offer us an opportunity to reflect more fully on this complex experience.