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Terence
Byrnes tells
us on his
site:
"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 a minor industrial capital, … but
it was really a workingman's town with Irish roots. …
"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.… Skilled professions such as machining and toolmaking went
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.… As
I photographed these people and their environments, I was
conscious of the work of [other photographers] 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. … For
this, and for their generosity in allowing me to enter their
lives, I’m deeply grateful."
To
read the full text and view some of Terence
Byrnes' photographs please visit his
site. |
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