American Horizon: The Photographs of Art Sinsabaugh

Are you. Thinking. I loaded the equipment in the car. And headed out to the country. I drove and I drove and I drove and I drove and as I passed the last hotdog stand. I realized I was in the country. But so much so much in the country that there just wasn't anything there. Nothing. I was so desperate to get out of the city that I thought there must be something good before the graph out there. Of course I was quite disappointed. I didn't make any photographs. I came back to the city. These were the words of landscape photographer art since when he first encountered the flat seemingly an eventful landscape of the American Midwest. Year was 1952. It would be another nine years before sensible would turn his disappointment to success and create a series of photographs that were as unique as they were important. Nothing came easy for him. He struggled but at the end of that struggle

is a body of work that has tremendous integrity and what looks to me to be as fresh as the day it was made. A photographic image is a record of what is here in this place at this time. It is also an expression of the self. It tells as much about the person who took it as it does about the subject of frames. Art since Abbas started out with a small eight millimeter movie camera and later added a 35 millimeter still camera he used them to explore his environment to savor and preserve the things he liked as he had done with a variety of objects since early childhood collecting stamps rocks

even sand. The roots of my career as a photographer go back to my boyhood in New Jersey. I was always searching and exploring the visual world around me. Through geology chemistry film. And finally photography. Art was an only child and he grew up in an upper middle class household. His father was a school teacher with a secure position and thus the family lacked for nothing. Even during the Depression years. Since Abbas spent the summers travelling around the country first to the New England states. But when they bought a trailer in 1933 they traveled to more distant places. I think his parents on their travels. In America. Right. That's really what it's all about. As he saw America through his family's eye.

And then he saw through his family's eyes as well. From a very early age art became fascinated by the American landscape. And this you know clearly became a very formative influence on him later in life. He I think he very clearly associated the idea of traveling of exploration with that warm nurturing environment of his upbringing. To Art since about photography it would become a means of making sense of the world around him. More importantly with it he would discover who he was and create who she wanted to be. I wanted to make photography a part of me in me part of photography. I see no reason I should stop or anything that will or can stop me. I need the act of photography for survival. As a youngster. He did not yet comprehend this dimension of his work. Nonetheless Art threw himself into photography.

Enrolled in a photography course and took part time jobs as a photo assistant. In 1943. Shortly after he graduated high school he was drafted into the army and attained a position as photographer. Since Abbas emerge from these experiences with solid fundamentals in photography and printing but his true education and a sense of direction came afterwards when he enrolled at the Chicago Institute of Design in the summer of 1986. The Institute of Design was founded in 1937 by hung Garion constructivists artist Muslim holy one since about joined it. It had just instituted a four year course in photography run by famed photographers Arthur Segal and Harry Callahan. In fact art since Apollo was the first full time student to enroll at the institute's

photography program the Institute of Design it was an incredibly energetic place. It was. Full of students and professors who were absolutely dedicated to their craft and to employing art as a means of understanding life an understanding of the connection to society and that was something that I seem to crave deeply loved. And there was a lot of interaction between the professor and the student. It was like the old idea that you go to the master and listen to everything. You know it's important to describe these photographers as people. Because they're a generation that's no longer here I mean photography was like you were born into it it was a real conviction because that was the only thing that you got out of it was conviction because there was no other awards or money. I was a fanatic in this new visual world. I don't mean to imply

that this supplanted my basic religion but it surely was a direct adjunct to. My spiritual leader was Harry Callahan. Who somehow managed with a minimum of words to direct me to explore me. The tire field really became foursomes upon for many of the great photographers that came out of the ID program a profoundly self expressive medium into which they poured themselves and the results are this marvelous combination of images that reflect some kind of truth about the world but that also reflects some kind of truth about the makers. Contemplating a landscape is a personal experience. We all can look at the same thing. But each of us sees something different. A photograph preserves a kind of sensory memory.

Many artists discover early on what they want to say and just how they want to see. This was not the case with art since about he was passionate about being a photographer and he was gaining recognition. But it was not until he was in his late 30s that he would find an approach he could call his own a truly personal mission. Something about was in a period of kind of artistic turmoil and struggle for for a good chunk of time. Art. I think was very restless and very driven in many ways he was so intense. You had to organize things he had to do something he couldn't be passive. He just couldn't sit and relax. He wanted to find his own ideas. So he was looking

for himself. He was looking for something new. He also had some health issues he had a minor heart attack at a relatively young age I think he was 35 years old. All of these things came together. And he realized if he was ever going to be an important photographer and he wanted to be an important photographer he had to get on with it he had to do it by coincidence or not it was the move to Champaign Illinois to begin teaching at the University of Illinois. That crystallized everything. The teaching the pointman play since about back in the prairie landscape he had first encountered nine years before. At the time he had not found anything spectacular in it. But the vastness of the land and in particular at the horizon line had stuck with him and he had returned to take a few tentative pictures of me. You should see the land it is unbelievable. It is absolutely flat there. Of course I didn't believe it the day we thinned down he said I've got to show you this I've got to show you

this. So we took a big turn off to go and see the land and it was I couldn't believe it myself that you guys. And then the feeling that you see forever and that you could see other thing it was sort of like all in front of you. Since a band needed a way to capture what he saw he stumbled across it at a photo supply shop in Chicago. There he discovered an unusual camera one that used film several times larger than an ordinary camera. I automatically and immediately decided that this was the camera for me. I remember going on a field trip with it carrying this thing on my back all set up on a tripod. I made no photographs. I had no holders. I just looked through it in amazement by 961 everything's in place. He's found this gigantic 12 by 20 inch view camera. He's found the lens he's found holders. He's now living in Champaign Illinois. In the midst of

this wonderfully flat farmland and everything comes together. So he takes this germ of an idea he had in 152 in 61. He plants it and this amazing sort of crop comes out. Between 61 and 63 he makes his Midwest landscape pictures and these are great photographs. They're fresh they're original They're bold they're Savile they're the kind of things that really haven't been seen before. They were great or. He took nothing in these vast spaces flat spaces and he made beautiful paintings out of them. And nobody had ever seen the landscape that way and he interpreted the landscape for what it was. A million people drive down that road and nobody ever takes a picture of three trees and a

farmhouse. And I was able to you know make those three trees in a farmhouse. Special. The 12 by 20 inch banquet camera was originally designed to take pictures of large gatherings of people. It was heavy and cumbersome but since a bock quickly became adept at using it he could have a tripod. And large tripod Norma's camera. Instead. He take the tripod out and set it up. He grabbed this big banquet cover he put it on the top of the tripod. He then opened it up and pulled out the lens like that and then you have this big black cloth you put it over I'm moving this

giant thing around like this you know and it was like clockwork BOEM BOEM BOEM BOEM BOEM. It was amazing to watch since above found that the panoramic format perfectly expressed the way he saw the landscape. I was seeking a peripheral kind of quality in the photographs. I knew that my impressions of the prairie were to stand and turn my head left and right. It would be all taken in by the tremendous sweep before me. With some of these he crops the negative down to only one inch tall by 20 inches wide. So you have this whole new sense of what the picture is. We're used to looking at a photograph as a rectangle of varying kind of dimensions while sensible as radical Midwest landscapes are still rectangles but rectangles like we've never seen before one inch by 20 so we almost read them as a kind of a Chinese scroll. You really do feel the space. And you feel like it's the edge of the world which is I think what he was trying to get at. You know like

there's a drop off somewhere and you may never come back home again. Since it worked intensely for the next two years. He knew he was doing something unprecedented. His achievement was not just a matter of the unusual for net he was expressing something fundamentally new about seeing a landscape. He was looking at a landscape that is the product of the forces of both nature and culture together. And that combination is very original and very important because when you look at landscape photography in America from the later 60s or 70s the most important work is all about this intersection of nature and culture in a certain kind of way his work has an ecological sensibility ahead of its time. And it also is very philosophical in that it suggests that all landscapes are a product of

human action human intervention. The idea of landscape is a human construction. What is arresting about a photograph is not simply that it looks like reality. A good artist with a paintbrush can create a photographic likeness. Its real impact stems from the fact. That whatever or. Whomever it chose had to be present when the picture was taken. Even the most artistically conceived shot concerns as a document. The notion that the human presence shapes the landscape is even more evident in art since Abbas Chicago photographs these pictures have a remarkably documentary feel. As I reflected upon the images I had already made. It became apparent to me

that I was into something much more than pretty pictures of Chicago. I could see that there was slowly developing a pattern of social awareness. I found myself literally running from one end of the city to the other to try and photograph how an area appeared before something was to go up or how an area looked as something was coming down. One of the great things about says about Chicago pictures is that. We can look at them on multiple levels. There are you know big enough and bold enough that we can look at the skyline the big buildings in the background. But almost all of them have these funny or odd little things happening in the foreground areas that are equally part of what they are in through that. Art got Chicago like no photographer has photographed as he got the lights he got the space he got the importance of the contemporary architecture and all the architecture. He saw the way the city worked as a fabric use

of the language of the city. And it doesn't look dated. I mean you begin to appreciate things you appreciate before. I think that's what makes them important is that you know you don't see it all at once. You know oh I get it. And you know what else. There are pictures you go back and look at and see like I never saw a baseball with a person's gutter from Wrigley Field. It's so hot. Since Abbas interest in factual detail led him to open up the framing of his pictures when he did crop his prints something he did less and less. He preserved the entire negative in part so that it could be studied later he even began tape recording the sounds of everyday Chicago. All in an effort to document the city as fully as possible since by himself talked about his photography as a kind of collection and his

body of work as an archive. He was more clear about that than perhaps any other photographer of the entire period. I thought it would be helpful for someone to understand what one guy went through to make some photographs. The good things the bad things all the everyday living things. He knew this day was going to happen. You know it's strange I mean he kept everything and he would keep always his receipt from the photo store. And everything was organized. And he said you know someday somebody is going to care about this. He saved everything from match books through lottery tickets whatever and when he corresponded he wrote on the outside of envelopes. I think he halfway expected she would have saved him. It all seemed to relate to that he wanted to leave a mark. I mean it was his form of carving his initial in a tree trunk. It was the midwest that had given art since of all his creative inspiration.

Now he set his sights on the rest of the country. I want to devote my time to photographing the American landscape to try and ferret out the peculiar qualities inherent in various areas as they affect me. The project is a continuous effort to photograph other states in my quest for summing up my feelings about the American land. Once again we see tremendous ambitions was about first wanted to make a body of photographs that encompassed in some way. The entire American landscape. Now nobody can do that and he certainly didn't do that. What he ended up doing was concentrating more on the American northeast. What we see in this body of work is in essence him returning to those places that had really meant a lot to him as a young person that was roots.

Back to his childhood wandering around having dinner. That was his really. Since about his trips did not cover it. Each state systematically. Instead he followed a more personal path stopping along the road whenever a view caught his eye. He was really a traveler and he had this long truck and he'd keep his camera tripod in the back and in the front seat of the truck he would have this index card catalog where he'd have all the cities he'd gone through little notes on each city what were the best restaurants were the place places to stay and you know these photographers there were outdoor working people you know their jobs to go out and look for photographs. They don't stay in a studio they don't work it out on a table. It's all out there so with art it was his truck. During his travels since I contributed to another long term project

he took occasional pictures of people something he had avoided doing since he was a student. In. Most all of Art's photographs are not inside. They're all out in the country. And they don't really have anything to do with people. It's always the land. I have always had the feeling that while I was photographing I was imposing on people. That was one of the reasons that I stopped photographing people or didn't really even get seriously involved in this aspect. But this shot taken on a whim sparked the idea for a new series. He did do a portrait group in the late 60s that actually extended all the way through the end of his life and it's not a large aspect of his work but it it is a pretty significant one where he made a very deliberate effort to do the thing that he had found difficult earlier on and that was to photograph people generally seen as kind of smallish figures in the middle of this larger

landscape so they're very much environmental portraits. I think he said to me one day you can take a portrait. Of yourself. And we were just driving into the Monument Valley and I said OK and I was wearing his long T-shirt. I mean I looked like a geek. You know I was in my early philosophical moment of like just be who you are it doesn't matter I went out there in this long teacher memorialized in this photograph. Since a bar was not a portrait photographer in the traditional sense. He photographed friends assistance professional contacts and family members. More than anything else he captured the people who were meaningful to him. But he went further combining both the person and the place into a single memento. A photograph in recording the actual is not bound by the photographer's intent. It feels different readings to different viewers at different times.

The meaning of a photograph can not be exhausted. In a way sensible is obsession with archiving his life takes us right back to his childhood and his interest in collecting things in holding onto a piece of the world. In many respects the photographs can't be done again because the landscape has changed. It's nonexistent any place but here. Is mine. Since about his very last series of pictures has taken on the Maine coast. These photographs are at once extremely simple and complex. They are transparent in terms of expressive means and yet perhaps count among the most personal of his pictures. What he did was to just stay in one place for an extended period time and watch the world change

around him. Watch the sun come up. The light changed through the day and the sun go down and watch the weather change. So it's really kind of sort of Zen like experience in a sense he's looking at nothing that is looking at everything he's looking through the physical world to something else. Since I produced the main pictures the year before his death after his minor heart attack in the 60s he had two more episodes in the 70s. He was on his second life. And he always said you know I should be dead. And one day I'm going to die and that's it and I'm ready for it. But every day now is a gift. This is one more day I get to live I'm really happy. It could be that this is why these photographs seem so personal. Or possibly it is just that they attain the most elegant in between the natural and the human. Between observing and creating between the photograph this record and the photograph as a means of expression. I do not consider my work part.

I'm a photographer using the medium I understand best to deal with the problem of man's interaction with his environment. If my work is done well. It may like an intrinsically valuable contribution. Becoming art objects. But that is a different sphere of human activity. One that is decided by others. And not my concern. American horizon. The photographs of Arts is available on DVD to order called PBS home video at 1 800 play PBS or visit us online or chop PBS or. We part. Yes.