Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road by Sandy Sorlien, Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Like many photographers, I'm a collector. We fix our sights on the things we admire and find a way to take them home with us. And like most photography, mine is also an act of preservation. Collecting these houses, the ones that reflect and define the place in which they stand, is my way of saving them. For they are going down... and soon they may be gone.
Anyone who travels in this country has seen it. Suburban tract homes and strip malls and big-box stores spread across America like melanoma. Downtowns are gutted for parking garages. The architecture is functional, cheap, and banal. The architectural landscape, especially in the sprawl zones, has become so homogenized that you can drive along an access road outside of Anchorage, Alaska, and it looks exactly like Oklahoma City or Tucson or Jacksonville. I tell people that my next book will be Fifty Pizza Huts. I'll shoot the one down the street from me and print it fifty times.
...What was it really, that caused me to stop, cruising along two-lane road somewhere? Light on geometry; dignity in the midst of indifference, defiance of impending death—or, perhaps more poignantly, acceptance of it. Somehow I could read these attitudes in the stance of an ordinary house. It acquired its character, like the humans who made it, over time. Nearly all of the houses I photographed were past middle age.
...If I can just keep it [threats to authenticity] at bay in my photographs, then I have done something I feel powerless to do in any other way.
Middleburgh, New York
I made this photograph in 1990 and found myself in the area again ten years later. Curious, I drove through the Catskills to Middleburgh, sure I would find the rural fields around town infested with subdivision. I figured that any place within commuting distance of Albany, the state capital, would have succumbed by then.
Amazingly, it hadn't happened. The only changes I saw to this view were shutters on all the windows (and one window walled over); also a nice paint job. And planted just to the left of the path was a young oak tree, blocking the house from my original camera position.
Well, there was a small indication that, at the millennial rollover, automobiles drive us, not the other way around. Just out of the frame to the right, where there had been meadow, was a paved parking area and a spanking new three-car garage.
Mountville, South Carolina
I spoke with the woman who lived here but neglected to get her name and address. Later, I wanted to send her a print and ask about the trees in the yard. Back home in Philadelphia, the only thing I could think of was to call the Mountville post office, which I remembered as being just down the street from the house.
I got the postal clerk on the phone and said, "If I send you a photograph of a house in Mountville, will you recognize it and put it in the right mailbox?"
"No problem," she said, and it was done.
Answers came back shortly. Left: cedar of Lebanon. Right: magnolia. House: built in 1895 by the great-uncle of the present owners.
Penfield, Ohio (Cover shot)
I first cruised Ohio during the presidential campaign/World Series season of 1988. In my motels, with the curtains drawn, I could have been anywhere in America. When I turned on the TV and watched the debates or baseball games, I could only have been in America. When I yelled at Dan Quayle or the Dodgers, I felt connected with the rest of America.
Yet there are towns in Ohio with as strong a sense of place as any in the nation; some of them still have reasonable thriving Main Streets and well-preserved nineteenth-century brick buildings. You feel the West beginning here, in the wider streets, more monumental facades, and more open, spreading farmland. People paint their names on their barns or give up the space for "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco" ads; they run roadside vegetable stands with honor boxes; they invite you into their homes to see their craft projects.
This Ohio house reminds me of a poem by Edward Hirsch, called "Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad" (1925.) It closes:
"This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,
The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky,
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it."
Dubois, Wyoming
I saw some amazing things in Wyoming. The 867-foot monolith Devil's Tower was so compelling, it was as if it were lodestone and we visitors were made of steel. I also saw, in Buffalo, the state's largest outdoor swimming pool. It was mind-boggling; two and a half Olympic pools could fit in it. I also saw a baby moose clomping through the cottonwoods at dusk with the snowcapped Tetons towering in the background.
I also saw a sign outside a store that read:
"Western Clothing—Indian Relics—Jewelry—Fossils—Antique's [sic]—Fax—Dolls—Mineral—Rocks—Boots—Crafts—Cappuccino—Gifts—Books—Bibles—Art—Hats—Tack—Shipping—Deli—Boutique"
The architecture of the Western plains can be as eclectic as that list of attractions—there's no shortage of homes made out of Quonset huts, for example. But this picture represents to me the possibility that even new construction (the house wasn't quite finished) can respect a regional building tradition and adapt to the lay of the land.
Iao Valley, Maui, Hawaii
Iao Valley is one of the wettest places on earth, yet the town of Wailuku, just a few miles down the road, gets only about fifty inches of rain a year. The valley, which Mark Twain once called "The Yosemite of the Pacific," is actually the eroded crater of a volcano on West Maui. Its most prominent landform is the Iao Needle, a twelve-hundred-foot spire of foliage-covered basaltic rock. The Hawaiian word i'ao means "cloud supreme."
This house is part of a group of hale kahiko (ancient houses) set up in Kepaniwai Park to celebrate the cultures of the various immigrants to the Hawaiian Islands over the centuries. The descendants of the first Polynesian settlers, who arrived by outrigger canoe around A.D. 500, are the native Hawaiians of today, but they are outnumbered collectively by descendants of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Russian, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese immigrants, many of whom came to work on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century and pineapple plantations in the twentieth. This picture shows the Filipino house.
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