Congress of Oddities

I’ve always had a fascination with carnivals, sideshows, local fairs, and the people that travel with these shows.

We have a small local fair in our town every year in August accompanied by parades and demolition derby and fireworks and all the excitement of kids and community. I remember going to the Topsfield Fair near Boston one year and watching the young barker who stood on the stage shouting to the scattered small crowd, “Cinema 1-8-0, come on in, 1-8-0.” We walked into the inflatable movie-in-the-round, no seats, standing on the dirt floor, to see a primitive version of Cinemax. About eight people standing inside, watching some poor quality action movie that was supposed to make you feel like you were there. It did sort of get you swaying with the action. It lasted about 5 minutes, then the show was over.

Back in 1973 I went out to the fair grounds in Atlanta where every year they held “The Great Southeastern Fair”. It was one of those days when everything sort of went right photographically. I shot only one roll of Tri-X and when I processed that one roll of film I liked just about every shot. That’s a rare thing. That’s a special day.

It was a large midway with plenty of rides. Atlanta had a fairly large wooden roller coaster back then. Nothing like Coney Island or the huge hang-beneath twisters of today, but enough to give you a thrill. I went on a Sunday morning, before the fair was open. I wanted the feel of the fair without the lights and the noise and the crowds.

I wanted the feel of the fair the way the carnies see it in the off hours, before the gates open. The litter from the night before still lay on the pavement. A small crew of prison inmates swept while a guard watched and supervised. Tents sat closed, rides idle. Banners rolled and ticket booths empty. There was no smell of cotton candy or grilling sausage or diesel generators. Barkers and ride attendants and short order cooks slept in their trailers and truck cabs after being up till early morning and probably hitting a few shots and cigarettes before turning in.

It must be a really hard life. Long hours, small pay, trying night after night to get people to stop and pay money to play games that look easy but are designed to help you loose. To win a stuffed animal for a girl friend or small child. The lights and bang and clatter of the rides, the hiss of the hydraulics and rumbling of the generators. Watching people pass time after time looking for something a little more thrilling, while selling, coaxing, goading them into letting go of one more dollar. Every night for two weeks, rain or shine, then tear it all down and drive it somewhere else, only to do it all over again. A gypsy life in a caravan of amusement and fast food and con games and freaks. It’s the world of Dianne Arbus.

I walked through the midways and thought about the sideshows, the people born with deformities and the performers of the odd and bizarre. How does a girl “go ape”? How can a person hammer nails into their head? Realities of life! Born Backwards! What would these lives be like if they had not joined a freak show? Is it a comfort to travel with a band of misfits so that one feels a little less like a freak and a little more like a star. Is it an ego boost to bring in a good crowd, or just a long days work resigned to the humiliation of crowds staring and pointing and talking under their breath like you were some zoo animal. Maybe it’s just the resignation that this is a productive job and a way to earn a living in a society that would pay to look at you, but not hire you or train you for anything else.

There were a few people about that day. The guy with the wooden leg, the black woman sweeping the driveway, the souvenir man, the cook having one more cigarette before firing up the grill, and of course, the prisoner chain gang. There were kids playing inside the public restroom building and a few people tending to animals in the farm sheds. But the midways were like a boarded up ghost town. A village that would spring back into life with the chime of the noon clock. In just a matter of hours, you’d be elbow to elbow with thousands of other people. But for now, it was ghostly quiet.

I love places like this. Places of imagination, a thousand stories, of texture and shadows, and people’s lives painted on the canvases. It’s rich with Americana. It’s a story waiting for a storyteller.

All images are copyright © George Cannon / All rights reserved.

Mall Walls

I have the privilege of working in an art museum at a university with a school of architecture. The building I work in was designed by I. M. Pei. He is probably best known for his glass pyramid at the Louvre. But he has done numerous other buildings of note including the Bank of China in Hong Kong and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. And of course, as I said, the building I work in, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. The Cornell campus is noteworthy for being quite old and having a range of truly wonderful architecture, but also some really questionable architecture that is not that pleasing to the eye.

When I was about eleven or twelve, I wanted to be an architect. I spent hours drawing and designing houses. I grew up in a two bedroom house on a dirt street with five other family members. Maybe it was the modest abode I grew up in that stimulated my desire for something more grand. Maybe it was the old Victorian mansions along Candler Road in Decatur, Georgia where the heirs of the Candler Coca-Cola fortune lived that gave me an appreciation for architectural history and design on a larger scale. I saw the city skyline of Atlanta growing higher and higher and always loved the drive to downtown through the posh neighborhoods of Ponce de Leon Avenue or the back roads of Buckhead.

It was this desire to be an architect, I believe, that started my growth as a visual artist. My mother was very artistic and sketched and designed, although her life did not allow for the full expression of her artistry except for, perhaps, through her flowers, her roses mostly. I took classes in drafting after high school, but the need to support a young family curtailed my ambitions for college. So my needs to express myself visually turned to photography. And as a result, much of what I shot then and what I shoot now revolves around architecture. I love the line and form, light and shadow, texture and presence of impressive buildings. But I also love the experience of architecture in disrepair, the abandoned house, the collapsing barn, the aging industrial complex. So, the urban landscape. I am intrigued by the juxtaposition of good architecture against bad, old against new, the craftsmanship of the past against the ticky-tacky mundane boxes of today.

I grew up shopping at Belvedere Plaza, a strip type mall outside Decatur. These were the shopping areas of the future. The large department stores of the South were still king then. Sears, Belk’s, Penny’s, Rich’s. These were the mainstay stores. And there were the dime stores. Woolworth’s, W.T. Grant’s, and Richard’s. I remember going, for the first time, to Lenox Square in Atlanta. It was the first big shopping mall in Atlanta, and probably in the whole Southeast, where all the stores were grouped together in the middle of vast parking areas. Lots so big that areas were numbered and color coded, pink 22, green 18, so you could locate your car.

The mall wasn’t enclosed then, but later would be. By today’s standards, it was small. Shopping malls today are huge compared to those days. They have grown in size, but in my mind, have not grown in style or design. Most are sprawling sterile architecture, huge in scale, and devoid of design. Warehouse type boxes dressed up on the inside, but poor visually on the outside.

And it is this very exaggerated staleness that attracts me to them as subjects for photography. I feel like they symbolize a lot about our culture, about what we find important. We drive to these massive parking lots, leave our vehicle, and move indoors to the controlled environment with facades decorated like a movie set.

They stand monolithic with little adornment short of giant colored signs while we stream in and out like a colony of worker ants. I love malls for their blandness. I love their minimalist imagery.

We have accepted dime store architecture as a standard. What will the architectural history books call this time? Where are the architectural visionaries of our current consumer world?

I have a category on my website I call Mall Walls. It is there that I am collecting my images of malls. I prefer to record them without people. The people are inside after all. I include large malls as well as individual stores. But they all fall into the same category as far as their architectural statement. This is an area with a lot of room for additions. So, let’s go to the mall!

All images are copyright © George Cannon / All rights reserved.

Waiting and Wishing for Spring

In upstate New York we’ve been in the grips of a deep freeze for about two weeks now and it just doesn’t want to let up. We’re fortunate here in the Finger Lakes that we don’t get that west wind off Lake Ontario and all the lake effect snow like they do in Oswego County. There’s been over 100 inches there in just over a week. But it’s cold. In the twenties today so somewhat of a warming trend, but will be back below zero on Tuesday night, so we’re not out of the woods. Our wood pile is getting low and will likely be exhausted in a week or two if I don’t call for another delivery.

My daughter is in Quebec this weekend for winter carnival with the French Club. The high there today is -10 degrees Celsius (about 14 F). She required a major wardrobe upgrade for winter attire before she left. She’s the kind of kid who wears flip-flops when it’s 20 degrees outside.

There was a blood drive in my town yesterday and I went to give blood as I usually do every eight weeks. And they told me my next eligible date is April 7th. I went to put that on the calendar this morning and realized that I’ll be in Florida by then, and Spring will be here. That’s only eight weeks away, 56 days. I can handle that. My wife’s amaryllis is blooming in the living room window. A beautiful trio of blossoms that remind us that this regeneration of life that comes with Spring is not far away.

The first color of Spring to show here, as in many areas, is the forsythia. I grew up in the South where my mother called it yellow bell. Banks of golden yellow against the drab gray left behind by the winter. A splendid feeling of warmth after months of chill.

And the bulbs come up. First the snow drops and crocuses, then the daffodils and the tulips.

The trees begin to leaf out and blossom. First the willows, that always seem to be the first to get their leaves and the last to shed them. The cherry blossoms and tulip magnolias and other flowering ornamentals. The colors so absent for months, now showering down around us with every warm breeze.

Then the maples leaf out and suddenly the woods are awash with that spring green that is unlike any other. There is almost as much color as in the fall, but in reverse, bursting with chlorophyll.

The gray and barren landscape littered with remnants of melted snow and sanded roads, wind-blown branches and leaves that seem so depressing in March, become transformed as the grass is revived and the trees bloom and the earth is renewed with life. A season of hope, of Nature’s promise. A time to breath a sigh and smell the air and shed the burden of winter.

I long for Spring this time of year. With every blast of cold wind I must remind myself, 56 more days. I can deal with that. In 56 days I’ll be walking the warm beach. In 56 days I’ll smell the jasmine and be ducking my head under the wisteria arbor. In 56 days I will have weathered another season of snow and ice and be on the other side, loving the rebirth of the planet, the red buds of the Shenandoah Valley, the dogwoods of Virginia and Tennessee, the warm sun and sand of the gulf coast.

Only 56 more days. I can handle that.

People of the Past – More Black and White

Most of the images that I post to my website or this blog seem to be without human presence. I don’t photograph people a lot and I admire very much photographers that shoot people a lot and do it well. It’s not as easy as one might think. Good people pictures usually require a connection between the subject and the photographer. My good friend, Frank Dimeo, is a wedding photographer extraordinaire and a great photojournalist. Frank knows how to shoot people. He knows how to bring out something from inside, how to communicate with them, how to get them to be their best for the camera. This is a real talent. It’s what made such people as Annie Liebowitz, and Arnold Newman, and Richard Avedon, and the like such stars in the photography world.

But I have shot people. A great many people. And occasionally quite successfully. I shot people more often in my earlier years as a photographer. And in going back over my black and whites as I have been digitizing old negatives, I’ve come across a number of people pictures that I had lost touch with. I said in my last post that I preferred to do my street photography when the streets were less populated, but that is not always the case.

A camera often makes you feel different when you carry it on the street. Assuming you aren’t in an area where you might feel threatened carrying a two thousand dollar piece of equipment around your neck, a camera can be a great tool for getting close to strangers. Some people feel you are intruding when you aim a camera at them, some don’t. Some like the attention. Some find you to be a curiosity. Some ignore you and allow you to become invisible. A camera often gives you an unstated license to go where you please, to approach almost anyone. I’ve seldom had people become irritated when taking their picture. Most take it as a compliment of sorts, that you find them interesting enough to make them the subject of your art.

Then there are those instances when people expect to be the subject of photographs, like weddings or large gatherings, parades, and sports events. These kinds of opportunities are the perfect place for candid pictures of people being themselves. Weddings in particular afford a festive crowd of people who’s inhibitions are down and who seem to revel in being the subject of any photograph.

When I lived in Atlanta, the Shriners held an annual parade on West Peachtree Street and such an event brings out the best in grown men who belong to clubs and organizations. There is a need for all of us, I suppose, to occasionally dress in costume and march in front of throngs of people. You’re never to old to play dress-up.

The 70’s were a time of hippies and free love and drugs and war protests and rock concerts. I missed Woodstock unfortunately, was too caught up being a responsible young married guy and trying to keep from being drafted. But music was everywhere and Atlanta was a big city with it’s share of concerts in the park and music venues of all types.

I made a trip one Sunday morning to the fairgrounds in Atlanta where “The Great Southeastern Fair” was hosted every year. The whole carnival atmosphere is one that has always intrigued me. It seems like such a hard and lonely life for the carnival people. I met a man who worked at the fair and photographed him there. He was a moving hand and, I thought, a truck driver as well as a food vendor when the fair was open. I guess a lot of the carnies wear multiple hats. It wasn’t until I got back to the darkroom and printed this image that I realized the man had an artificial leg, the pale white shin showing above his sock and the knee hinge visible through his pant leg.

I’ve always loved the farmer’s market or the local street market as a place for candid people photography. Boston’s Haymarket was such a place and was always teeming with ethnicity and interesting faces. The bustle and crowds make it easy for a photographer to capture faces of common people whose stories could fill one’s imagination.

But aside from candid photography or weddings or parades and fairs, I have also shot portraits and studio images of people. I worked in an area of Atlanta known as Buckhead in 1973 and had my haircut at a local salon there by a young woman. Susanne was about 19 and worked as a model when she could and cut hair the rest of the time. She worked with one particular fashion photographer in Atlanta and appeared on the cover of Atlanta magazine a couple of times. Young models, like young photographers are always looking for new portfolio material so with that mutual desire in mind, she and I did a couple of shoots together. Susanne was very natural in front of the camera so she made it easy.

I had a friend named Gene who wanted to be a fashion photographer. Gene knew many of the young models around Atlanta and introduced me to Melinda. Melinda did a lot of catalog work, but had been offered a job with Wilhelmina in New York as a hand model. She was looking for portfolio pictures that showed off her hands, so another great studio opportunity for us both.

Gene agreed to stand in for me when I needed an additional prop for Melinda’s hands. Sometimes it’s far easier to be in front of the camera than behind it.

I had the great privilege to work for a week as an assistant to Eliot Porter at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado one summer. Eliot had always been one of my idols and the finest example of the kind of landscape photographer I wanted to be. I subsequently traveled to New Mexico on a couple of occasions to visit him and there took a portrait of him and his wife, Aline, that is among my most treasured portraits.

Our encounters with people when behind the camera can be anonymous or can have an intimate connection. Regardless, they all touch our lives. They all have a story. They are all there at that moment in time, frozen by the camera and held forever. We are richer for knowing them. And they live on through our images.

All images are Copyright © George Cannon, all rights reserved.