The unseen America
Photographer Stephen Tamiesie finds signs of life where you’d least expect them
By Matthew Singer 05/22/2008
Stephen Tamiesie started his photography career taking pictures of the American landscape — that is, America’s urban landscape. Growing up in Portland, Ore., the 26-year-old Brooks Institute graduate first picked up a camera to document he and his friends in their various acts of skateboard daring. In the process, he captured the concrete terrain of his hometown: handrails, stairs, ramps, drained swimming pools.
For his new exhibit at the Ventura Beach Marriott, Tamiesie, who npw lives in Santa Barbara, is continuing his exploration of the country’s topography. Only this time, he is looking outside its cities, to the seemingly untouched wilds, primarily in the southwest — emphasis on “seemingly.” As hinted by its title, Signs of (American) Life, the show is about finding the fingerprints of man in the most barren of locales, the implication being that humankind has imposed itself on nature to such a degree that there is almost no place one can go where somebody, in one way or another, hasn’t already made their mark.
“I feel like whenever I go out to take pictures and stuff, I always think I’m getting away from everything, but really, I’m not,” Tamiesie says. “People have been there before you, if you look for signs of people.”
The signs Tamiesie stumbled upon are various and often haunting: a rotting camper half-buried in the Salton Sea, a lone hose and gas can in Bombay Beach. Others, however, are more whimsical. He finds cars preparing to race on an otherwise desolate salt flat in Bonneville, Utah, and a massive roadside Tyrannosaurus rex statue in the Palm Desert.
The latter images indicate that Tamiesie’s goal is not so much to criticize man’s encroachment on nature, but to observe just how odd the things we choose to do with it are.
“That appeals to me, going out and seeing this strange relationship, of being out in the wilderness and there are still power lines, there’s still life out there,” he says. “It’s this offbeat relationship between Americans and their landscapes.”
Tamiesie says he didn’t set out with that concept in mind. He simply wanted to travel and take pictures, something he had been doing since he was a kid, going on road trips with his family. But after viewing some of his work as a piece, he noticed a pattern, and what he found was something distinctly American.
“It taught me that America is unique in the way. That’s why I threw America into the title. I realize all this stuff had undertones of American characteristics,” he says. “One thing I learned or found interesting was that I don’t think there is any other place I’ve been to or imagined where people bring cars out to salt flats and race them for months, or build shrines in the desert or dinosaur statues. I found that Americans are unique.”
Stephen Tamiesie’s Signs of (American) Life opens at the Ventura Beach Marriott (2055 E. Harbor Blvd., Ventura, 643-6000) on May 22 and runs through July 5. For more of Tamiesie’s work, visit www.tamiesie.com
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