Shards of America Peter Higdon Phil Bergerson's fascination with the ironic detritus of North American culture as revealed in the publically displayed detail is longstanding. First finding expression in the "Interior Displays" grids of 1979-80, his work as an archaeologist of popular culture has reached a remarkable resolution in his new book, Shards of America to be published by the New York Publisher Quantuck Lane Press, in September 2004. By turns absurd, humourous, painful and poignant, the book is a rich and tumbling index of cultural expression as seen in the architecture, the streets and the signage - commercial, anarchic, eccentric and imploring - of small towns across North America. Its creators include the naive and the sophisticated, and their arena - the facades, display windows, abandoned corners and outskirts of many and varied towns, is the rich multi-layered site of Phil Bergerson's passionate ten year search. The photographic sequence opens with the tightly framed facade of a small post-war movie theatre's ticket booth, its blue neon Welcome sign hovering over veil-like curtains, mysteriously drawn. Above the heavy chrome curve which caps the booth, the word LIFE proclaims itself boldly and incongruously. The facade both conceals and invites our entry into the comic and tragic narrative which lays beyond the veil, and takes us, the audience, into the narrative sequence of the book. Moving in the aesthetic terrain which drew Walker Evans and later, Lee Friedlander, Bergerson engages our desire for meaning and renders it cogently through his framing of fortuitous juxtaposition seen within the visual complexity of the landscape. In the signs, scrawled messages, notes and manifestos adorning the vernacular architecture of Main Street, he reveals larger and unintended meaning, proffers understanding and acknowledges mystery. Shop vitrines are the site of theatrical tableaus, commercial on occasion, but more often than not the staging grounds for a variety of urgent personal or community campaigns. With their curious props, recycled mannequins and hand written announcements, they demand agreement, invite membership, celebrate reunion, ask angrily and anxiously for release from abuse, or are simply incomprehensible. The passage of time is poignantly invoked by these mute, fading and collapsing performances, and, as a hedge against final despair, the benign, transcendent face of Jesus appears insistently, placed hopefully and ubiquitously throughout. The narrative pulls the viewer through a real-world carnival ride of ambiguity and contradiction. We witness plaster corinthian columns against cinderblock walls, a crucified tree, and dance step diagrams which force collision with a magazine rack. The book's sequence is a seamless ribbon of affecting visual telling, a series of strongly paired and well paced photographs which expand and support the project's central metaphor of cultural archaeology with startling variety. In the remarkable distillation of purpose and exploration which Shards of America represents, Phil Bergerson has brought an important new work to the arena of contemporary photography. He has done so in a spirit of clear-eyed and compassionate engagement, and we are richer for it. Peter Higdon
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