Recently it seems as though American cities everywhere are undergoing identity crises that mirror the midlife distress of their baby boomer movers and shakers. The pressure is on to reinvent, rebuild and reinvigorate — and where cities are concerned, revisions tend to dwarf the typical individual indulgences like Botox and Porsche Boxsters.
Chicago, to cite one example where a focused makeover is underway, has emerged as one of the leading green cities of the 21st century, innovating with rooftop gardens and bike paths. Tampa, slightly less sure of its footing, courts the arts, the waterfront, and conventions/sporting events for potential couplings. Whatever the result, this moment of out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new seems ripe to contemplate Tampa on the verge of … something.
Change throws the work of Rebecca Sexton Larson, Tampa's 2005 photographer laureate, into sharp relief. Walking through an exhibit of pieces she produced for the project last year and early this year, she pointed out subjects — parks, buildings, a restaurant — that had changed or been destroyed since then. "I felt like the photo laureate of doom and gloom," she said wryly.
Kiley Gardens, a world-class work of landscape architecture, languishes in disrepair; a March episode of tree removal by the city took park advocates by surprise and seemed not to bode well for its uncertain future. Goody Goody, a diner and downtown landmark near I-275, closed up shop last fall. A memorial at tiny Snow Park, once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for its diminutive size, met with a bulldozer after Larson photographed it. The Fort Homer Hesterly Armory in West Tampa, currently in limbo, could wind up being renovated — or destroyed — to accommodate anything from film studios to condos to an ice rink. Even MacDill Air Force Base, which Larson chose as a subject in tribute to her father, a long-time military officer, was temporarily on the chopping block during a slate of Air Force base closures.
The context of Tampa's protean landscape makes having a photographer laureate program seem all the more pertinent and poignant — worthy of celebration not just as a portfolio of works of art and documentary, but as history very much in the making. Not every city has one; in fact, very few places do. In an age when a picture is worth well over a 1,000 words, the photo laureate succeeds the poet laureate as the artistic commemorator of place and time.
Robin Nigh, Tampa's public art manager, instituted the program three years ago, drawing inspiration from the remarkable Burgert Brothers collection of images of Tampa from the early 20th century and Farm Security Administration photographers like Walker Evans. The goal of the program, which issues a yearly call for submissions, is to create a similar, contemporary photographic resource utilizing the Bay area's wealth of talent, she said.
Of the two previous laureates, Beth Reynolds ('03) took a strict documentary approach. Suzanne Camp Crosby ('04) combined documentary shots with staged compositions but still maintained a high level of realism.
In contrast, Larson creates ethereal hand-painted photographs that resemble paintings. The pinhole camera she uses — a wooden box with a tiny hole in lieu of a lens and a 4×5 Polaroid film back — yields a soft image, just slightly out of focus from top to bottom. As a result, subjects take on the blur of nostalgia, which makes them particularly well suited for eulogizing.
Piecing and sewing together several photographs — often a main picture bordered by smaller ones — Larson assembles an unstructured narrative about each subject. Mixed in with original photographs, images from found objects like antique postcards and photos, patches, pages from books, and drawings flesh out the story; often, she inscribes a historical text or stitches in the delicate outline of a poem fragment. Using oil paints, she colors the originally black-and-white photographs in a palette of muted hues, typically choosing sepia, suggestive of age, or muted greens and yellows.
Sulfur Springs, historically a popular swimming spot for locals and tourists alike until pollution mandated its closure, is recognizable by its majestic white tower, framed with images of river rocks, plants, and pictures of the area in its heyday. In the piece, Larson shows off one of her most effective skills: combining images of different scale, texture, and tenor that read as realistic, universal memories. You don't have to have been to the springs for the imagery, evocative of summertime and family vacations, to resonate deeply.
With images of Goody Goody and the Armory, Larson plays up the nostalgia factor, reveling in the diner's classic signage and signature butterscotch pie, and superimposing a suggestively leering Elvis on the West Tampa structure where he played. Snow Park glows in white and sepia tones, juxtaposed with an image of tiny sparrow that echoes the park's daintiness.
The minimalist beauty of Kiley Gardens is preserved in a checkerboard grouping of photos that suggest an optical illusion. Competing grids of the gardens' concrete-and-sod patterning and the window-studded exterior of the adjacent office tower — the beer can building, in local parlance — create a vertiginous density of diagonals and intersecting lines. Interspersed, delicate black-and-white line drawings transferred from the pages of an antique botanical manual soften the rigid geometry.
In all, 15 works will join the city's collection, in accordance with the project proposal Larson submitted and in exchange for the $25,000 commission. Works in the collection are displayed in government buildings like the convention center. The University of Tampa exhibit includes three other works that she produced as alternates that have been picked up by a private collector. And a long wall in the gallery will be installed with a grid of paper positives and negatives of some of her original shots.
Nigh, the public art manager, hopes to eventually bring the work of all the laureates together in an exhibit or book, she said. Until then, check out the portfolios of all three laureates online at the city's website, and see Larson's work at the University of Tampa to catch a vision of the city as it fades into the past.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.