The Beauty of The West

Every year for photography class an open ended assignment is assigned for the summer if a student is taking the class next year. This is my third year and up until now my summer film rolls have been hurried and thoughtless. My freshmen and sophomore years I had just wanted to finish my 36 shots and then get back to vacation. For my junior year I went much more in depth, I brought my camera up to my lake house in northern Michigan and shot for a good 2 hours. I didn't have any idea what I wanted my roll to be until I drove past a field with two horses. For some reason I thought of the stereotypical American West; I thought of rodeos, cowboys, and tumbleweed. I used the 36 shots to make Northern Michigan look like an old western. I took pictures with a big open sky as the backdrop and filled my middle ground with trucks, cornfields, and horses. At the time I had just thought it would make aesthetic pictures for my summer project when I got back to school but what I learned is that a professional photographer named Tim Richmond was doing something similar and calling his project "Last Best Hiding Place."

Richmond's project is full of beautiful landscapes and portraits taken in small remote towns in the far west of the country. He is a British photographer that became fascinated by the American West while watching movies as a kid. He made it his goal to capture the nostalgia and the sadness that these towns have, the sadness of the disappearing mystery of the West. The series is full of for sale signs and run down areas, the portraits are of people that almost look lost and scared. In an interview with Richmond he says that he leaves interpretation of his photos up to the viewer. I would argue that the washed out color and the desolate landscapes represent the destruction of the "myth of the west": the aura of mystery and freedom. My series of pictures, be it less extensive and less skillful is saying something similar. By comparing the nostalgic style, sepia toned prints of Michigan to Richmond's washed out, sad images of the modern small towns of America's west you see that there is barely any mystery left in our country. The term "Last Best Hiding Place" is used by people in Nevada to reference people trying to live "under the radar." Places to live uncensored and unseen are running out, maybe America's frontier has changed and maybe my photography project is showing that. I was laughing at making Michigan seem like Texas but America is running out of remote locations, and isn't that what made the West so special?

America has beauty that is ruined by cities and by masses of people, maybe it's time the country respects that fact and realizes that America is loosing its character, how can we be the land of the free without any where to "Hide."