Final Analysis
Roger Hicks considers… ‘Untitled 6768’, 2015-2017, by Joachim Hildebrand
In 2015, 2016 and 2017, Joachim Hildebrand made a protracted and dissected ‘road trip’ through seven states of the American Southwest, concentrating on the way that the ‘wild west’ of popular imagination has been supplanted by urbanisation, representation, nostalgia and downright falsehood. The results can be seen in Kehrer Verlag’s superb Wild West.
Many of the pictures are of reconstructions and even murals. These are interesting enough, but where he really plays games with our heads is with shots like this, where you are never quite sure what you are seeing. The desert butte is almost certainly real, but the way that the legs of the three tourists are chopped off by the wall plays spectacular tricks with perspective and perception. Even when the sun is high in the sky (look at the shadows) the clear desert air defies normal perceptions of aerial perspective, and other forms of perspective (principally scale and receding planes) are further subverted. There is no real vanishingpoint perspective because we do not know the relative sizes of the various picture elements; or to be fair, we can make a good guess at them, but only a good guess. Suburban qualities Then there’s the stop sign and the disabled parking bay. They are jarringly incongruous in the context of almost all the Western movies we have ever seen, with the possible exception of the end of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. The vivid colours – the blue and yellow of the parking bay, the red of the stop sign – and the suburban quality of the lamp standard, the road, the sidewalks and the low wall add still further to the surrealism. As do the clothes of the three figures: as un-cowboy-like as we can readily imagine.
It’s easy to forget that travel photography (and travel writing) involves travel not only in space but also in time. Eugène Atget (1857-1927) set out to photograph a vanishing Paris, as did Brassaï (1899-1984), albeit less avowedly. Atget and Brassaï, however, are already in our past, whereas Hildebrand is very much in our present.
There is an old saying that you cannot cross the same river twice. At the very least, the water under the bridge will have changed, and we will be older. To quote Isaac Watts (1674-1748), ‘ Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away.’ Do we try to photograph the present, or try to photograph the past? Or the collision between the two? The choice is ours. And Hildebrand’s.