The streets of America fascinate me. It is here I have discovered signs that speak about all manner of cultural and social issues, eloquently conveying the hopes, desires and fears of their makers. It is in the street that Americans reveal a unique, often cocky confidence that sets them apart from most of their Canadian neighbors. Treasuring their freedom of speech, they pride themselves on their right to say what’s on their minds. So many of them have no trouble expressing their most private feelings and thoughts publicly. I have been drawn in by this American bravado and the resulting signs left behind. Crisscrossing the United States in an ancient camper van, I’ve meandered through a labyrinth of roads, misdirections paying off in significant finds. I’ve escaped into the freedom that comes from not worrying about where I was or where I was going. My approach being to let the character of the found material give me my direction both geographically and intellectually. While slowly working my way through the hundreds of American towns and cities I visited, I have carefully sifted through the chaotic onslaught of the street’s complex visual and textual material, searching out and photographing those few fragments that carry some special meaning. My interest in signs and sign makers and the interplay between high art, kitsch, and the vernacular was first stimulated in childhood, watching my father paint. For over thirty years he worked as a sign maker for Coca Cola. I enjoyed watching him for hours, his brush gliding across the pristine eight foot surfaces, body swaying like a dancer’s as he completed his last flowing line, magically forming some new patron’s name. On Sundays, I would watch him subtly change directions as he copied a postcard of another member of the Group of Seven. I was always fascinated by the differences and similarities in the two processes and the two objects made. Early on in this project, Walker Evans and Joseph Cornell’s fascination with objects, signs and collections rekindled this interest. Their work helped me to better understand the process of making pictures. Robert Frank’s early use of pairings and later use of sequencing taught me about the power of using relationships and structure to build meaning. I found such meaning in both literal and figurative signs. Sometimes it was in the ambiguous or multi-layered potential reading of the literal signs - signs made by various people for a variety of personal, political or commercial reasons. More often though, it is in the deeper potential of the figurative signs - the objects, displays or places that seep into our minds as strange yet familiar metaphors or symbols. T he reading is not always obvious. Sometimes it is merely a feeling evoked; sometimes a cue to some intangible experience drifting through a viewer’s subconscious. Gradually, I began to read these signs as messages. These poignant messages left behind consciously and unconsciously by Americans as they struggle through their daily lives, reveal much about the makers and their culture and in turn, something about the American experience. These messages draw me in. Ironic and ambiguous, humorous or offensive, they reveal some of those elements that disturb or touch their authors. My vantage point while making Shards of America has always been that of the empathetic neighbour. The outsider’s eye is often able to see more than the long term habitant. Recognizing the difficulty and pitfalls of tackling such an enormous subject as ‘ America’, I’ve been careful to stay on the side of observation and poetry rather than attempting to produce some kind of comprehensive statement. America has a complex and layered cultural landscape distinct from that of Canada. It has many conflicting forces at work, acting on each other simultaneously, each with a powerful agenda. New battlegrounds can spring up on a daily basis to deal with multiple sides of any issue, whether it be terrorism, abortion or dieting. In response to this complexity, I chose to let opposing forces co-mingle and thus more expressively represent the paradoxical and challenging nature of contemporary American society and culture. I used the word ‘Shards’ in the title to reference the archeological dig. While photographing, I often feel the kind of rush that I imagine the archeologist must feel when first uncovering a new shard, a fragment of some ancient civilization’s artifact. As it is for the archeologist so it is for me that the discovery of the shard is the first step in a longer process of discovery through which its meaning is understood, in relation to the culture from which it came. Sifting through the remains of America’s cultural legacy, I’ve stopped to photograph its many shards, trying to make sense of them, slowly piecing them together - first within the structure of the single image, then in pairings, and finally within the complex structure of the completed sequence. The process of selection, editing and sequencing was long, challenging and exciting. Drawing from the tradition of sequence construction developed by photographers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Nathan Lyons, I constructed the poetic fragments into a powerful ensemble that could collectively express something genuine and meaningful about the mysteries of this complex nation. With Shards of America, I have tried to make a unique photographic object - a poetic statement about America developing through several interacting, recurring themes. What I hope for in response to the book was summed up by Robert Frank, “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” Phil Bergerson |