Now Serving Monuments of the City: An Interview with Steve Polston
My personal definition of local geography is the natural, manmade, or a combination of these topographic features upon the land that the local inhabitants use as reference points of navigation but also carry a charged nostalgia. I believe these local geographies to be the lynchpin of any city or region. There is something particularly distinctive of the buildings in the rust belt where the urban landscape contains a functional beauty. Anyone who has lived in the Midwest knows these kinds of buildings and how urban renewal has changed these structures where they are either being torn down, adapted, or forgotten. This subject matter is popular amongst photographers but Steve Polston wishes to change the conversation about how we talk about such structures through his work Monuments of the City.
Steve and I met during a low-residency MFA program. By happenstance, we were in the same online sections of our thesis seminars and graduating class. Online classes tend to lack the solidarity of a traditional college brick and mortar learning environment, and although I don’t remember specifically how or why we hit it off in such a disconnected learning environment, I believe it is due to our dry senses of humor and a seriousness towards our work. Simply, you know an intellectual kindred spirit regardless of physical space.
During this time Steve was working towards a project documenting forgotten and endangered buildings in a stark and deadpan style possessing a very precise use of composition. It takes a keen eye to read between the lines that these are more than just an ode to buildings considered lost but capturing the essence of an era that once (and still does) defined a place.
Alexis Clements (AC):Do you feel that your region has a distinct vernacular or visual dialect that would otherwise be different in another region?
Steve Polston (SP): No. Yes. I don’t want to answer this question because it’s too easy to argue with. My mentor, David Bowman, said he doesn’t necessarily see my type of buildings in Minneapolis, with all this space around them, though I note that he seeks/creates a sense of filmic space around his buildings, as well.
I’ve been staring at the buildings in Indiana for 50 years, and often stood outside while my dad and brothers and mom were rehabbing and remodeling and decorating buildings. I was too young to work and my eyesight was horrible. I think I learned to really feel the exterior with my hands as a way to get up close and see what was happening. Later — as an adult who was transitioning careers and in need of money — I earned inspection certificates and gathered training to diagnose heating, air conditioning and ventilation situations to increase energy efficiency. I put my sense of how a building breathes to work. My family is still involved in rehabbing old buildings after more than 50 years and they have leveraged grants to preserve facades while creating business opportunities in our hometown.
But my cityscapes are a puzzle.
I’ve traveled in Europe and South America, working and serving in Germany and Brazil, as well as traveled across the United States and in Canada (just Toronto so far! I’m coming for you, Canada!), and I feel this vernacular that exists from the past two hundred years is well found all over, with brick exteriors, hip roofs, window frames designed to let in maximum light, and in the buildings older than a few hundred years where the framing tends to be more obvious. In the southern hemisphere, we see a lot of the colonial European vernacular that represents roots in Germany and Spain, but I have encountered a lot of ranch-style houses in rural neighborhoods around Brasilia that look like many places in the Midwest of the United States, just up the street, in fact.
I’ve confronted the southern store fronts of Walker Evans when I lived in the Mid-South, and the Midwest storefronts of Stephen Shore all over this area from Maryland and all the way to Denver. This shows me that the rapid expansion of the United States outpaced the desire to create new vernaculars, so my instinct is that what I see is available everywhere.
A couple of my contemporaries shoot similar ideas in northern Indiana and Saint Louis. Joshua Myers created a beautiful body of art on large format film called Constructs and Vacant, which I commend. He explores cityscapes at night. Clarence Sumlin created a beautiful fashion editorial project in Saint Louis that seems one part Walker Evans Mississippi River town and one part high fashion. It’s a beautiful shoot!
AC: How do you approach creating art within or about your region? Are you constructing imagery, finding it, or a combination? Why do you choose to work in this manner?
SP: I think the combination approach is what works for this subject. I do really want to find shadow, color, and juxtaposition first and foremost and then decide if the building is suitable for my subject matter. I figured out long ago that I am a truth seeker, a fact seeker, and building facades are like faces. I have this unsettling ability to describe with a camera. People don’t like my portraits; they feel they’re too honest. But people read a lot into the buildings I portray when the real puzzle is uncovering my hand-at-work. I enjoy the way using a camera makes me consider and think about fact, but I always have to keep in mind that film is easy to spoil and destroy. It’s a delicate substance and material. You really just don’t know about the film until the development that the scene is true or made-up?
AC: How has the region of your childhood or your current environment contributed to the work you create; whether it is concept/narrative or visual style or both?
SP:When I exhibited my body of work in 2016, I set up the gallery to guide visitors through a series of traffic stanchions and walls that looked like dead-ends because that’s how people in Indianapolis see the buildings I document. We have an efficient traffic grid that moves a lot of cars, but invariably wherever you are at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m. you will be stopped in traffic. Then you look up… and you see the façade of a building that you’ve passed for years. It looks the same as it did a year ago, five years ago, 50 years ago. But there’s no business there and there hasn’t been for decades or, wait! Was it just two years ago?
My visual style is to really let the nature of film create depth in shadows, reflections, juxtapositions, color and space. I find that digital photography stares back at me with a blank expression, but film cameras and lenses provides an ability to create flatness and rearrangement of spatial relationships. For this work, I use medium format cameras.
AC: How would you describe the arts community where you live?
SP:I think the arts community is broad in Indianapolis, and there has been too much emphasis on creating artists who are useful to nonprofits, creating master’s degrees that are justified by contributing to the social good. In photography especially, the medium struggles to find the right amount of love within the collector community — by which I mean it’s difficult to sell photography to people who don’t understand how it’s made. The number of art galleries was large and vibrant 20 years ago, but now young BFA artists — especially painters — flood restaurant walls hanging art where it collects light damage and smells from the grill. Art continues to be exhibited in places where it is commonplace rather than where it can be appreciated. It’s unsettling to me because when I look at this young art, it’s exceptional. The expression and use of visual literacy is strong, but have you tried to look at art in a pizza parlor?
AC: Are you seeking exhibition opportunities for region specific work or do you feel that your work is more successful being shown in the region you’re living in or the region the work is about?
SP:I chose Indianapolis as the exhibition place because it seemed the work needed to be seen here, first. And the wonderful conversations people had in the gallery at Bona Thompson Memorial Center bore that out. The buildings were talked about as if they were living creatures, so it was hard to reconcile the idea that my photographs are objects with edges and that they create a sense of my gesture and the forcefulness of form. Meanwhile, the innate ability of people to misunderstand the literal subject as the actual subject of the work continues to be what lingers always in conversations.
You know, the first reaction when my art appreciation students write about the Mona Lisa is about what kind of person she must have been. So, we have to have that conversation on the first day and every day after… you don’t know and cannot tell from looking at the painting if she was happy or sad.
So, I repeat this line to everybody who sees my photographs — you don’t know and cannot tell from looking if these building are empty or being used or preserved. But you can be sure none of these buildings are abandoned, which is a favorite way people talk about the photographs. The law doesn’t allow a building to be abandoned. There’s a tax bill, and the nuisance abatement codes require maintenance… so, no — somebody is responsible.
I think the photographs will play well on other gallery walls elsewhere, or exhibited in a book. My inspiration for that belief is from the book by Camilo José Vergara’s New American Ghetto (Rutgers University Press, 1995), whose work is artistic as well as social science.
Steve Polston is a fine art photographer in Indianapolis. He teaches at IvyTech Community College at several central Indiana campuses. His first career was in journalism, including positions at newspapers, a magazine, in public relations and freelancing. He was part of an investigative team of college students who were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He is in the third year of a summer grant program that he uses to teach about simple cyanotype processes and digital pinhole photography in state parks.
His fine art photography investigates local cityscapes for buildings that defy easy categories (such as abandoned or remodeled) to create a sense of timelessness.
Steve Polston
steve(at)stevepolston.com
