Photographing Sprawl

Abstract

Robert Altman's Nashville (1975) is a film whose sprawling narrative structure reflects the equally sprawling fabric of the automobile-dominated, postwar boom town in which it takes place. The odd segues with scenes passing like batons from one character to another often depend on the medium of traffic, whether as traffic jams or impromptu roadside meetings. Down to the film's floating camerawork that captures actors from awkward viewpoints, it is a film in which nothing settles and its narrative momentum, like so much rubbernecked traffic, has a stop-and-go quality. Like Altman's film, contemporary photographers of suburban existence in the United States chronicle dispersed, car-centered boom towns with their strip malls, tacky signage, and acres of parking lots. In taking traffic as a narrative medium, the transportation and growth patterns of a 1970s sun-belt city are shown to circumscribe the relations the characters. In other words, the dispersed urban fabric of Nashville patterns the human interactions in the film. A filmmaker, Altman pieced together a narrative out of a hodge-podge of characters and plots, but photographers Laura Bennett, Vesna Jovanovic, and Brian Sorg do not. Rather, they probe the types of spaces in suburbia that Altman's wandering camera eschews and our own roving automobile-based gaze is likely to miss. As Americans visit drive-thrus, snag discounted clothing at outlet malls, and purchase particle board furniture, we pass by null spaces: loading docks behind big-box retail, weedy lots in stores, derelict malls, and office parks of unremitting sameness. What binds the art of these three photographers is their identification of and focus on these null spaces. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If suburbs are thought of as bedroom communities tightly linked to nearby cities through economic dependence and transportation routes, then Bennett, Jovanovic, and Sorg focus on a type of built environment that is no longer suburban. Instead, growth is now dispersed in all directions of varying densities and uses. Rather than concentric rings of development radiating from a historic with neat divisions light industry, heavy industry, and residential zones, the real pattern of development is now a web with a multiplicity of nodes that form around expressway exits, malls, or corporate headquarters. (1) For instance, the Atlanta region covers a large portion of north Georgia, and there is the band of development in Florida from West Palm Beach through Miami to Homestead, a distance of over a hundred miles, squeezed the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. The uninterrupted development from Northern Virginia to Boston is yet another example. While ostensibly connected to a historic urban core, places like Schomberg, Illinois; Tysons Corner, Virginia; King of Prussia, Pennsylvania; or Anaheim, California, are not economically tied to their respective anchors of Chicago, Washington DC, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles (itself lacking a core to attach to anyway). The South Coast Plaza mega-mall in Orange County, California, a city unto itself, claims to do more business than all of downtown San Francisco. (2) The new suburb is not ancillary to a city: it is far larger in population, economic power, and land area. The German urban theorist Thomas Sieverts calls the contemporary suburb the Zwischenstadt (literally, between city); he defines it as neither urban nor rural, and he finds it uncatagorizable according to conventional definitions that focus on density and centrality. (3) The Zwischenstadt is varied but remarkably consistent in its variations. Joel Garreau dubbed these new suburbs edge cities. (4) In common parlance, it is sprawl. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The concept of the suburb is not uniquely American or Canadian. The banlieues (suburbs) of Paris have a larger population, more jobs, and greater population growth rate than central Paris, whose population peaked in 1921. …