springfieldfolio.terencebyrnes.com

Representation:

Robert Lecker Agency

www.leckeragency.com

Montreal, Canada

514  830-4818

  
 

Springfield, Ohio

A Stop on the National Road

 

“Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.”

Bertrand Russell, “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed”

 

 

All images copyright Terence Byrnes

This project was begun in Springfield, Ohio, in the fall of 1966, on the day when I watched a woman make a voodoo love charm, discovered a jar of lustrous Tiffany grapes in a tumult of second-hand furniture, and saw a man’s head repeatedly slammed against the concrete block wall of a bar on East Main Street, spraying little fans of blood each time it hit. I photographed a few of these things, but was wary of photographing any of them. Part of my wariness was shyness and physical fear, part a kind of moral squeamishness, and the rest a young man’s horror at the thought of aping anything from the past. I was aware of the glib ways the "underclass" had been represented in photography and popular literature—as victims of oppression, as sub-humans, as savages nobly sanctified by suffering, as people who are just like the rest of us, as free spirits—and was loath to repeat them.

Throughout the next few decades, I returned to Springfield sometimes as a photographer and sometimes just as a fascinated observer. Springfield was once an astonishingly productive industrial capital on the National Road, the nineteenth-century route to the west. It boasted the Crowe Collier publishing empire, huge farm machinery and motor factories, an automobile factory (the Westcott), and the lamented Springfield Metallic Casket Company. It also produced the silent screen's Gish sisters and the photographer Berenice Abbott, but it was really a workingman's town—a monument to the very idea of industry.

By the early 1990s, when I began photographing Main Street in a serious way, Springfield had long been engaged in a disastrous project of urban renewal by demolition  and disuse. The red brick train station with a vaulted ceiling, the department stores, the glorious Bushnell Building where the Wright Brothers patented their invention, the elegant, three-story brownstone apartments—in fact, a large part of downtown—all reduced to rubble or abandoned. A Frank Lloyd Wright mansion that had been hived into small apartments was in danger of demolition. Skilled professions such as machining and toolmaking were moving offshore, and the middle class, now a little frightened of downtown, spent their money in exurban shopping malls.  The residents of Main Street, however, remained bound to a tight orbit of place, class, and culture.

During my yearly summer visits, I walked from the depressed commercial reaches of West Main through the eerily quiet downtown to the fast-food alley of East Main, meeting and photographing people whose lives were urban, but in many ways outside the civic. A black woman truck driver with a daughter in university introduced me to a toothless lady she proudly said was "Springfield's oldest whore." A mixed-race couple—he, white and illiterate, but a good driver of an unlicensed pickup; she, black, and good reader and organizer—lived by picking up scrap metal and re-selling it. A little boy with running sores on his scalp, being raised by two men dying of AIDS,  spent his days caring for abandoned puppies. An old man who quit school at eight to support his family ran a business importing earthworms from Canada. As I photographed these people and their environments, I was conscious of the work of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander just over my shoulder. Yet, it was August Sander, the extraordinary German photographer whose aim was "to see things as they are and not as they should or might be" whose work resonates most tellingly with my own goals.

These images are the result of collaborations with the subjects, and all the subjects I was able to reach received prints. Some of the people I photographed thought I might be mad, spending 12 hours a day on the street in southern Ohio summer weather, introducing myself to strangers. Others worried that I was a police agent, while some figured, in their sociable and open-minded way, that I was just having a good time. At some point, all of them must have seen me as a curious and possibly threatening presence. Fortunately for me, their suspicion was almost always alloyed with hospitality that eventually became trust.  For this, and for their generosity in allowing me to enter their lives,  I’m deeply grateful.

Terence Byrnes

 
 

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