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THERE ARE A FEW artists
for whom wandering Antarctica might be considered the
next logical step on a career path. Joan Myers is one.
For more than 25 years, Myers, ’66, MA ’67,
has practiced landscape photography, deploying medium-format
cameras to make exquisite images that explore the relationship
between people and the land. What better place to capture
that exchange at its most elemental than the southern
tip of the planet?
An exhibit of her photographs of Antarctica will open
at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural
History in Washington, D.C., this December and then
tour the country. They represent the photographer’s
sixth major body of work since she took up the medium
in the 1970s. The photographs—richly detailed,
warmly toned and unsentimental—rank among the
best made of that ferocious continent and the people
who cling to it.
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Consequences |
They’re also a bit of a departure for Myers in
that they are not, at least yet, paired with text in
book form. The Tesuque, N.M.-based Myers usually publishes
her projects with extensive text by a writer of her
choosing. These aren’t conventional pairings where
words serve to explain or introduce the photographs,
or vice versa. Think, rather, of the form’s exemplar,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the lyrical exploration
of tenant farmers in the American South by photographer
Walker Evans and writer James Agee. Text and photographs
do not so much explain or even refer to each other as
create a complement.
Over the years, Myers has used the method to explore
the legendary Santa Fe Trail, which carried a generation
westward early in the 19th century; the medieval Christian
pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain;
the remains of all 10 of the Japanese-American internment
camps created in the 1940s; and the polluted and abused
Salton Sea in Southern California. She also has revisited
the work of Depression-era photographer Russell Lee:
his photo-essay of the life of a homesteader and her
family in Pie Town, N.M.
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Salton Sea Birds |
Although Myers is not a household name, her photographs
are well regarded by cognoscenti and have a place in
the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National
Gallery of Art, the George Eastman House and regional
museums throughout the country.
Martha A. Sandweiss, a professor of American studies
and history at Amherst College, writes extensively about
women artists of the American West. She considers Myers
an heir to Laura Gilpin, an early-20th-century photographer
of the Southwest. Landscape photography is, of course,
a venerable tradition, exemplified by such great practitioners
as Carlton Watkins in the 19th century and Ansel Adams
in the 20th. But men still dominate the field, typically
focusing more on the grandeur of the land than on humans’
relation to it. Gilpin sought the human element there.
In pursuing Gilpin’s legacy, Sandweiss writes,
Myers has “developed a new tradition for the genre.”
She was born in 1944 in Des Moines, Iowa, the daughter
of a geneticist father and lawyer mother, and, although
she is loath to admit it, the paternal granddaughter
of Henry Wallace, the legendary progressive and Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s second vice president. Myers’s
reticence is not for lack of pride in her famous forebear,
but from reluctance to draw unwarranted attention. Most
photographers prefer anonymity to do their work and
she is no exception.
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S Bay Yacht Club Pool (Salton
Sea) |
The world may have known Wallace for his politics,
but his granddaughter knew him primarily as a scientist.
Henry Wallace, too, was a geneticist, inventing one
of the first hybridized corns and starting the Pioneer
Seed Company to sell it.
Myers had a vague desire to follow in her family’s
scientific footsteps, a notion she pursued in her first
two years at Stanford. But, like her grandfather, Myers
was interested in many things. Her inclination to study
science gave way to an interest in performing and studying
Renaissance and baroque music. She had finished two
degrees in musicology and was in the middle of her doctorate
when, she says, “I looked up and said, ‘What
am I doing? I don’t want to be an academic!’
’’
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Manzanar, Calif. (Entry Station) |
In a faltering marriage and with two young sons in
tow, Myers moved to Los Angeles and wondered ‘what
next?’ She soon found it in photography courses
at the University of Southern California, where she
studied with curator and photographer Leland Rice and
with the avant-garde photographer Robert Heinecken.
The medium clicked for Myers. “Science deals
with the real world,” she explains over lunch
in a country store near her Tesuque home and studio,
where she lives with her second husband, the recently
retired head of the state’s arts council. “And
music offered self-expression. But photography brought
them both together. That’s what I love: you’re
dealing with the real world, but from your own place.”
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Paintbrush |
Myers wandered Los Angeles, often with her kids along,
making pictures without a larger plan. she photographed
blades of grass pushing through seemingly endless slabs
of cement. She posed models in apartments and in the
desert to make self-consciously arty nudes.
But much of what would characterize her later work was
there from the first. She favored a medium-format camera
for the detail its negatives offer, and handmade platinum
prints, whose warmth and subtle tonal range was then
unmatched. A student of photographic history, she dabbled
in alternative processes that involved painting on the
surface of an image to alter it. To this day, careful
scrutiny of one of her lushly made prints will reveal
subtle emendations with watercolors to define a horizon
or give dimensionality to a rock. She loves the work
of Paul Caponigro and Paul Strand, both of whom, while
not strictly speaking landscape photographers, relished
fine, subtly printed images at the nexus of humanity
and the natural world.
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Toy Car |
By the late 1970s Myers decided that a world of cement
was no place to raise young boys and moved to Tesuque.
New Mexico proved a serendipitous choice. Few places
offer as palpable a sense of the primeval interaction
between humans and the land.
Myers’s mature work began abruptly with an NEA
grant to work on a Museum of New Mexico project surveying
the state. Myers selected the Santa Fe Trail as her
subject. Unsatisfied with stopping at the border, she
spent the next few years following the meandering twin
ruts in the dirt to their source in Missouri, making
pictures all the while.
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Doll |
Her “Boone’s Lick, Missouri, 1983”
is typical of the best of them. A massive, dark oval
rock, rubbed smooth (by the passengers of wagon trains?),
lies mysteriously in the foreground of woodlands, a
cosmic egg of a rock. In the surface of that rock, with
its intimations of untold hands that touched it before
pushing west, is the essence of Myers’s relationship
to her photographic subjects. Capturing a visual record
of the lingering, ghostly presence of long-gone individuals
fascinates her. In the worn rocks and rutted trails—even
the folly of the Salton Sea, where human intervention
proved environmentally ruinous—the implied tenacity
and striving of the human animal gives her images their
special charge.
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San Miguel, NM |
“Photography is great at giving a tactile sense
of someone’s presence,’’ she says.
“You say ‘internment camp’ and show
a worn flyswatter, and people make up a story in their
heads. There’s nothing like it.’’
When the time came to decide what to do with all the
Santa Fe Trail pictures, Myers turned to New Mexico’s
leading expert on the trail, Marc Simmons, and asked
if he’d be interested in collaborating on a book.
Simmons offered a personal essay rich in historical
information that feels neither formal nor pop. And a
working method was born.
Along with the texts of another writer and of Myers
herself, Simmons also weighed in on the next project,
a recapitulation of the Christian pilgrimage route to
Santiago in Spain. Her other projects also employed
some variation of this visual-literary pas de deux.
Antarctica is a departure for Myers in many ways: her
first use of a digital camera, her first published color
work, her first ink-jet prints. It may also become the
first in which Myers primarily tells her own tale. She
kept extensive diaries of the journeys, available in
preliminary form at her website, www.joanmyers.com.
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Hornillos, Spain |
Some photographers love to shoot, but hate to print.
For others, the darkroom is heaven. Myers seems to be
that rare practitioner who loves almost all facets of
the process. “I really enjoy the research part
of it—learning about the place, the history,’’
she says. “And I enjoy editing photographs. Picking
what’s important.’’
But all the research and slogging of equipment is a
preamble to what really seems to transfix her—the
moment of creation. “All that Stanford education
is gone when I go out and shoot photographs,’’
she says. “It’s all gone. Time dissolves.
It’s still magic.’’
The subtle format of the books—neither fish nor
fowl and likely a book retailer’s despair—may
have cost Myers in recognition as, probably, has her
refusal to define herself as either a documentary photographer
or a fine-art photographer. Typical is her comment about
the work on the Salton Sea: “A lot of people liked
that work. Maybe I made it too pretty.’’
Nor has she published that Holy Grail for most photographers,
a monograph surveying her best work. She seems resolutely
on the cusp, surviving on grants and spending years
on a single project, more intent on satisfying her dispassionate
curiosity than pleasing an audience.
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Antarctica |
What’s next for Myers? The Antarctica work will
preoccupy her for a time. There’s the traveling
show to prepare for, and probably a book in the offing.
She also continues to mull what to do with an earlier,
very different body of work that she did between other
projects: a series of nudes of women over 50. The work
caused an immediate stir when she showed it in the Santa
Fe gallery that represents her—so much so that,
unnerved by all the attention and attendant cultural
politics, she put it aside. It remains unpublished,
but not forgotten.
Whatever she does, Myers’s photographs will offer
what the photographer herself does when you meet her,
a curious, unaffected intelligence. That quality has
given her work its distinctive place. The viewer cannot
entirely escape from the reality she depicts into the
art, nor from the art into the reality.
She would have it no other way. |
