Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids Released

I am pleased to announce the release of my first book, Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids, published by Middlebrow Books.

Garish is the culmination of many tens of thousands of miles and many thousands of Polacolor photographs I've taken over the decades since the late 1980s.  

This handsome edition includes a color monograph with 80 original prints in lustrous four-color, printed by master printers in Hong Kong. With an insightful essay by John DeFore, striking graphic design by Deidre Adams, and additional photography by Laura Klecker, Garish is a masterfully executed book that will enliven any coffee table (though it probably won't remain there long, whenever friends and family drop in).

Garish is on sale at amazon.com. 

eBook versions are available for sale for the amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Chapters Indigo in Canada for Kobo readers.

Garish: The Next Generation

State Highway 13, Morgan County, West Virginia, June 2011

When driving to your destination this summer on vacation, remember to look out for the little ones!  

Garish: The Next Generation

Mid-1970s Sebring Vanguard Citi Car SV-48

U.S. Route 136, near Brownsburg, Indiana, June 2011

Who killed the electric car?  Just stabbing in the dark here, but my guess is it was the guy who designed this "unsafe at any speed" micro econobox.  This loser was dead on arrival.  

I don't know what the industrial designer's previous resume items were, but I'm thinking set designer or propmaster for Woody Allen's 1973 futuristic comedy, Sleeper.

Back From the Dead

State Route 9, Paw Paw, West Virginia

July 2004

In the hazy, lazy days of summer, this sign beckons the motorist to its cooling charms.  But here in Minnesota, ice is the nectar of the damned.  Whoever said "When Hell freezes over" has never had to spend his winter in Minnesota.  If he did, he'd use the present - not the future - tense.

Yet, the Earth here is thawing, the days are longer, and spring is around the corner.  I shall take up my camera, wind in a spool of film, and shake of this pneumonia-induced funk I've been in for months on end.

Semper Fidelis

State Highway 80, Gonzales County, Texas, January 2005

As a proud wearer of the 56th Field Artillery patch and Pershing tab on my left shoulder during my term of service in the 1980s with the U.S. Army, I walk with a little swagger.  Anyone who's ever served in an elite unit knows the pride that comes with having earned their way aboard.  

Yet, there are two groups of people I will always stand before humbly:  Combat veterans of any service branch (I have almost twenty years of service divided among the Regular Army, the Texas and Delaware National Guards, and the New York State Guard -- but I've never been sent into a combat theatre of operations) and United States Marines.

You'll know one if you've ever met one, whether in uniform, or out:  Once a Marine, always a Marine.  The toughest, baddest ass sons of bitches ever to make the other poor bastard die for his country.  My godfather, rest his soul, is a Marine.

I say "is," not "was."  Even in heaven, there's no such thing as a "former Marine."

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

Ceramic wares and wall

Canyon Lake, Texas, April 2002

This arrangement of ceramic-coated tinware was made by photographer Sonja Heldt-Harris at the Rebecca Creek Gallery, near Canyon Lake, Texas.  I loved the way the red and the cerulean blue of the wall worked together.

This image was not included in my book, Garish, because, well, it is too subtle and not at all...garish.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

Somewhere in Coahuila, 2002

This closeup of a most friendly horse on a ranch somewhere in Coahuila was one of my Polaroids which made it only past the first cut, but not any subsequently.  At this point, my editor and I decided to go minimalist and focus solely on roadside distractions, as I sarcastically call them.  

Nevertheless, I am very fond of this close-range equestrian portrait, which I was able to get by bribing the subject with a couple apples.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

Post office, Rainy River, Ontario, June 2009

Is there anything more charming than an old post office?  To me, more than any other edifice, the postal office represents the highest convenience of civilized life.  Our correspondence, financial statements, magazine and newspaper subscriptions, and phonograph records come through here to our homes.  When we write letters, pay bills, and mail picture postcards, a short trip to the post office connects us with the world outside.

Including this post office:  This very photograph which you are viewing began life as a Polaroid snapshot, was addressed, and had postage affixed -- and arrived at my home in Minnesota just five days after me.  All for just 89 cents, Canadian.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

U.S. Route 52, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, March 2009

Having moved to the city of Stepford, Minnesota, in August of 2008, one of the first places I wanted to visit was Sauk Centre, the hometown of my favorite novelist, Sinclair Lewis, about four hours up the road.

Lewis's breakthrough novel, Main Street, tells the bittersweet story of Carol Kennicott, whose attempts to enlighten and beautify the fictitious town of Gopher Prairie -- a thinly-veiled Sauk Centre -- are met with the indifference and stubborn resistance of the town's provincial and priggish denizens.

This neon sign marks the spot of a local motel located on the town's Main Street, and named in honor of the fictitious hamlet.  The motel is located next to the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, where the tour guide informed me that the novels of America's first Nobel Prize in Literature winner are no longer required reading in the town's high school.    

This slap in the face of one of America's finest writers and keenest observers of human nature reflects the duality with which Lewis has come to be regarded:  Outside of town on Interstate 94, a billboard proudly claims Sauk Centre as Sinclair Lewis's boyhood home.  Yet, anyone who's ever read Main Street picks up on Lewis's heavy-handed loathing for his hometown's oblivious and hypocritical residents.

Now that the nation's high school and university literature instructors have forgotten him (with the possible exceptions of Babbitt and Elmer Gantry, seldom assigned anymore), their empty-headed counterparts in Sauk Centre have apparently followed suit.

How soon in our future will the same fate be shared Minnesota's other genius author, F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hopefully never.  The keepers of Fitzgerald's legacy should thank their lucky stars their literary hero hailed from Saint Paul, and not Sauk Centre.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

Highway 68, Burlington County, New Jersey, May 2003

This photo makes me long again for school days, waiting for the bus.

But not in New Jersey.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

State Highway 43, Winona County, Minnesota, March 2009

This image is what they call "busy" in the graphic arts and art school biz.  Yet another reason I'm a proud art school dropout.  I like busy, and I'm sorry if some brains can't "process" too much "information."

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

Provincial Highway 8, between Moosomin and 

Rocanville, Saskatchewan, June 2009

"The first cut is the deepest.  Baby, I know."  

-- Rod Stewart.

This image is one of my dearest favorites, but it didn't even make it beyond the first round of edits.  That's how it goes sometimes.  The beautiful halo of powder blue, turning to a deep-blue sky framing this red farmhouse I found in Saskatchewan off the Trans-Canada Highway was too reminiscent of an image that did get included, of an even more brilliant crimson farm storage tank -- coincidentally, just up the road, near Esterhazy.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

U.S. Route 14, St. Charles, Minnesota, April 2009

I found this lovely place whilst driving on my daily commute to Winona State University. I did not partake of its bodily mutilation services, however ;).

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

U.S. Route 11, Abingdon, Virginia, July 2007

This proud-as-a-peacock rooster stands tall, representing the great Dutt & Wagner Company of Virginia.  Their fine products include eggs, meat, poultry, and kickass roadside signage.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

U.S. Route 52, Cannon Falls, Minnesota, June 2009

Companion image to the preceding, taken on the way home.

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

Provincial Highway 22, near Gerald, Saskatchewan 
June 2009

Form meets function meets form. Nature and agricultural architecture meet on this slope in rural Saskatchewan.  I enjoy photographing in Canada.  When walking onto property owned by total strangers up North, I have yet to meet paranoid landowners, asking the ubiquitous annoying question, "What are you doing?"

Which is very nice, because while I usually have some sarcastic comeback while in the United States ("You see this thing here I'm holding?  It's called a camera.  See, what you do is you point it at the subject you want to photograph.  A hole in the camera opens, and an image of the subject is captured on film."  Part of my shtick is pronouncing the key words very slowly, as though I were speaking to (in the words of Rahm Emanuel) "f***ing retards."  How I've lucked out by not being brutalized by local and state cops (particularly in Texas) is a testament to either the Due Process clause of the U.S. Constitution, or just plain dumb luck (I suspect the latter).

However, in foreign countries, I am always on my best behavior.  I've only had one incident remotely approaching a run-in with police in Canada (Mexico is another story), and good manners have always pulled me out of a potentially awkward situation.  

On the breezy June day I took this photograph, a gracious Russian immigrant farmer greeted me graciously, and she and her husband gave me a tour of the family farm -- from the back seat of their four wheeler!

Garish: The Cutting Room Floor

State Highway  30, Dodge County, Minnesota, May 2009

Selecting the final images for my upcoming book, Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids, has been an arduous -- and humbling -- undertaking.  

From over 2,500 original photographs, the process of narrowing the selection to the final 91 images to be published was difficult, to say the least.  Although I have been working in print media since 1988, all my previous labors were concentrated in magazines or newspapers that published weekly or monthly.  Pressing deadlines had a way of excising the inessential with hardly a care.

But when you make a book, especially your first, all your creative impulses come to the fore and result in... an unwieldy mess.

Every photograph is like your own child, and cutting those apron strings to beloved pictures is not unlike the proverbial death of 1,000 cuts.  

The first cut was the easiest: 2,500-plus photos became 437 in one day.  

It was the subsequent cuts that became tedious, grueling even:  Never having put together a book before, I went into the project thinking, "Oh, 437 pictures -- we can fit that into 120 pages at roughly four per page."  So, I commenced retouching and restoring 437 photographs, one at a time, in Photoshop.  With the assistance of photographer Laura Klecker (who also assisted with the first two rounds of editing), it took almost six months of patient and steady labor to fix them all (and if you've ever scanned and retouched a 108 Polacolor print, it can take anywhere from fifteen minutes to more than an hour, because of the dozens of tiny imperfections the development process leaves on each print).

Then, 437 became 263 -- another two weeks.  

263 become 150, and then 91.

From time to time, I will be publishing the ones that got away: Sentimental favorites that stood well on their own, but didn't quite work well with the others, as a whole.

But, if you've ever read my report cards from grade school, you'll read that I didn't work well with others myself.

Book cover design for "Garish"

The multitalented Deidre Adams designed this highly-saturated dust jacket cover for my first photography book, Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids, to be released later this year.

The book will feature a main portfolio section of 80 original photographs, taken between 1988 and 2009.  I started this series, captured on Polaroid's 669 and 690 films, quite by accident -- when traveling I always carry my Colorpack III instant camera, so I can make postcards to send to friends and family.  Over time, I realized I had grown a sentimental attachment to the camera and the process, and a unique way of expressing my affinity with the oddities and overlooked artistic masterpieces found along the highways of North America.

With an essay by writer John DeFore, this is one book that belongs on your coffee table!

More to come....