Earlier this year, the occupants of The Mobile Studio, now the subject of a multimedia installation at The Light Factory Center for Photography & Film, traveled 10,000 miles across America. In their “Vehicle for Education,” vagabonds from the College of Architecture at UNC-Charlotte rode Route 66, and further, carrying with them an itinerant architecture and photography studio.The photographs and ephemera currently on view at TLF is from a collaborative project undertaken over several semesters by UNCC College of Architecture assistant professor Linda Samuels and five architecture students. In this setting, The Mobile Studio is naturally heavy with photography.
Many of the photographs (and passages of video by Jedidiah Gant), produced by professor Samuels and students alike, invite audience participation in the experience of “the road.” A lovely solarized image, “Sphinx” (Las Vegas, NV), is a collaboration between Samuels and student Becky Joye. Like “the strip” (Las Vegas, NV) by Bill Sinkovic and Gant, “Sphinx” was made with the giant pinhole camera built as an integral part of the automotive vehicle.
In its sad depiction of the roadside effects of America’s continuing dependency upon the car, this exhibit could also be called Car Culture. Architectural study emphasizes field trips and semesters abroad — or, in this case, travel across America in a nomadic photographic studio virtually as capacious as those of Civil War photographers like Mathew Brady, who hauled wagon-mounted “Darkrooms” to document the aftermath of battles of the Civil War. Nothing beats gleaning wisdom through experience.
Before taking the five students across the mid-South and the Southwest, Linda C. Samuels, assistant professor and project creator, assigned them readings in American novels — On the Road (Kerouac) and The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) — as well as movies — Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise. They visited Mobile, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Photographer Robert Frank (who received the prestigious MacDowell Medal a few weeks ago) collaborated with Kerouac on the book The Americans. As an intro states, “Armed with a camera and a fresh cache of film and bankrolled by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Robert Frank crisscrossed the United States during 1955 and 1956.” The book is said to “form a portrait of the country at the time and hint at its future.” See the show at TLF and think about that.
But it’s an earlier photographic aesthetic, that of Walker Evans and others, that’s evoked even more by work in the Mobile Studio. The particular aesthetic approach that Depression-era photos by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) artists employed through the New Deal influenced Kerouac and his followers way before the car culture was conceived.
The Mobile Studio is really all about the American landscape, and at times in the sextet’s experience, the camera was the literal vehicle itself. Within the confines of the studio on wheels, an authentic camera obscura (such as Aristotle dreamed of centuries ago) took pictures, literally “on the road.”
As visualized here, that (inexorable) American landscape is as vast and soulless as the American Night must have felt when Jack Kerouac wrote, “I stared into the darkness of the bunkrooms thinking what to do. Aw Shucks, go into the American night, the Thomas Wolfe darkness, the hell with these big-shot gangster football coaches, go after being an American writer, tell the truth, don’t be pushed around by them or anybody else or any of their goons… we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”
Some images at TLF “represent the variety of locations visited over the eight-week trip.” One class day in each major city was devoted to experimentation with the pinhole camera. See Samuels’ “pinhole positive” print, “route 66,” from Shamrock, TX.
The group created roughly 50 pinhole paper negatives — some single 8×10 sheets, others made of multiple tiles of 8×10. The positives, made from contact prints of the paper negatives, were created after the group’s return.
Experiences were unpredictable and varied. The initial mission — to focus on a contemporary vision of the road, the car and the mobility of the American context — comes through some of the snapshots and postcard-like images. On view are old, battered and weathered signs and roadside chapels. Some photos appear as poignant as the experiences rendered in the accompanying written words by Samuels — “eating fried catfish down the street from the Rural Studio Butterfly house,” “serendipitously crossing paths with the fabulous and friendly Cowboy Poets on our way to Marfa, Texas,” and “the very real memorial for the victims of September 11th, set up at the base of the very unreal New York New York Las Vegas hotel.”
Critics of Samuels’ collaborative design and travel project may ask if this is training ground for young professionals in the field of architecture. It’s a legitimate question. But even social philosopher Jean Baudrillard saw the value for everyone in the experience of driving “…10,000 miles across America… you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together.” (See Baudrillard’s book, America.)
What did these and what will other students find in their travels across America? Will these discoveries lead to more? Will they help our vast nation heal — or bring us closer to the vision of Jack Kerouac, who saw, “…enough to make America sick for a thousand years”? A war of another sort, on our own frontier.
Be sure to check out the website (www.themobilestudio.org), which includes “totals” — of miles, of gallons of gas, etc. And come to TLF to see the real thing: The Mobile Studio, with Linda C. Samuels, professor David Fish, Jedidiah Gant, Becky Joye, Couch Payne and Bill Sinkovic.
For further information, contact The Light Factory, 809 West Hill Street, at (704) 333-9755, by e-mail at info@lightfactory.org, or online at www.lightfactory.org.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2002.
