12/27/22

John Rohrbach

Senior Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

 

 

Framing Oak Cliff

I would have guessed that the bedroom suburbs immediately surrounding Dallas, Texas, would be openly cosmopolitan, defined by their orbit around that city, but Oak Cliff gets local very quickly. For those who don’t make the daily commute into downtown Dallas or another surrounding community, life revolves around Jefferson Boulevard, Oak Cliff’s main commercial artery. Walking that street with Richard Doherty the other day, I found a quiet, small-town atmosphere dominated by modest, locally owned businesses catering to the area’s Mexican and Central American residents, including multiple shop windows filled with Quinceanera dresses or traditional religious alter pieces. The boulevard has never been a bastion of wealth, Doherty explained to me. Over his forty or so years of living in Oak Cliff, he related, he has watched white-owned businesses give way to a predominantly Latinx world. This current atmosphere reminds me of wide swathes of older suburban Texas.

 

The influential cultural geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson spent a lifetime describing what it is like to encounter places like Oak Cliff—what one sees when arriving in an unfamiliar town; how one orients oneself and finds one’s way around; how one comes to understand its atmosphere and culture. Physically, Jefferson Boulevard presents an east-west run of one-and-two-story retail outlets, some with apartments above. Its fifteen or so blocks give way at the east end to a few tall bank and office towers and on the west to single-family homes. Just beyond these edges, commercial zoning quickly dissolves into quiet bungalow-filled neighborhoods. 

 

Doherty shot most of the Jefferson Boulevard images filling this book in the late 1980s, though he has continued to photograph along and around the avenue across succeeding decades. Considering his remarks about the changes enveloping the avenue over the years I find it surprising that his photographs do not map the street and its shifting cultures, pointing out which block holds the Fiesta grocery, the location and look of the unusually designed Tex-Mex restaurant, or what shop has replaced another across time. Neither is he interested in conveying a Chamber of Commerce celebration of community striving. Instead, these images define the locale through his infatuation with photography’s peculiar way of reshaping space. Taking full advantage of the camera’s single point perspective and adding to it a wide-angle lens and panoramic film, he draws attention to deep recessions of sidewalk and street corner spaces. Contrary to photography’s documentary impulse they force me to attune myself to angle and line. They pull my attention out to the edges of each scene, splintering coherence into two or three key details.

 

From photography’s earliest days, its practitioners have understood and played with the medium’s peculiar way of recording the world—its cyclops flattening, artificial framing, and fracturing of time. 120 years in, the artist Garry Winogrand famously declared that he photographed the world to see what it looked like as a photograph. Like Winogrand, Doherty understands that he is playing a game more aligned with historical fiction than pure description. Doherty equally follows a line of photographers including Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, who, starting in the early 1970s, drew self-conscious attention to the feel of America’s twentieth century material culture by drawing attention to commonplace details, though where they focus on objects, he shifts the conversation to atmosphere, much like that astute visual chronicler of suburban Denver, Robert Adams. Across the 1970s and 1980s Adams photographically defined the suburban expansion occurring along Colorado’s Front Range in terms of the region’s white-hot midday light. Here, Doherty defines Oak Cliff, and specifically Jefferson Boulevard, in terms of long stretches of almost empty sidewalk, smooth plate-glass storefronts, and diverging street corners. The images leave me a bit queasy, as I reconcile their pull into two directions at the same time. I feel swept inexorably into the distance of each scene as if I am being yanked into a black hole.

 

This experience is a bit frustrating. I want instead to see inside the shops and engage with the routines of those who run and visit them, yet rarely does Doherty present such narrative views. When he does show me shop details, they often come in the form of window-filling posters or quirky juxtapositions like panties hung outside a streetcorner storefront as a young Hispanic couple approach from down the street. The scenes have a bit of a Winogrand quirkiness, though Winogrand’s work has a darker, more cynical edge. Doherty’s vision is gentler. He clearly enjoys the fun of sharing such finds as a woman walking up carrying a wig-covered head of a manikin, or caskets piled up willy-nilly outside a building.

 

On more extended looking I begin to see his real point, and internalize the slowness that he so loves—a few people heading off to do a bit of shopping or a young man placing a call at a streetside phone. (Remember when coin-operated phones were the way we communicated when we were out and about?) No wonder his store interiors rarely have a customer. On one level Doherty’s vision can be summarized by the shop window poster of the Maytag repair man waiting for that call that never comes. But this is no declaration of malaise. Rather it is simply a statement of why people along Jefferson Boulevard have time to stop, look around, hang, and sometimes pose. And his are no clandestine shoot and run grabs. Working from a tripod makes Doherty himself slow down and be noticed. His subjects know he is there, even if they choose to ignore him. When they wave to the camera, it becomes a performance.

 

Doherty then abruptly shifts me out of the hard-edged world of asphalt, concrete, and glass, to grass and bush filled yards, alleys, parks, and single-family homes, and to multiple portraits of people posing comfortably for the camera. I feel like I am being introduced to his neighbors. Even though the images are black and white, one can’t help but “feel” the green. Even the titles shift from place name to objects and people’s names. I see folks tending lawns, gardens, and cars, and children playing and hanging out. Couples, siblings, and friends pose together. Doherty still can’t help but share his self-consciousness. The panoramas dominating his Jefferson Boulevard views have given way to squarer centripetal compositions. Repeatedly, he includes the patterned edges of his Polaroid film negatives. At times he artificially extends his exposures so that his sitters blur and become ghostlike, as if we have entered a series of dreams, or maybe it’s just a compulsion to extend photography’s stopped moment.

 

What are we to make of all this? Photographs are curious. They describe so acutely yet say so little. Or perhaps it’s fairer to say that what they suggest in their detail may not be what they really are about. I find the key only at this book’s end when I encounter two shots of broken off branches precariously hanging on other branches or wires along Kessler Parkway. Doherty titles the last of these images Tenacity, the only metaphoric title in the book. Suddenly I realize that this book is less about place or even sharing the peculiarities of photographic craft than it is about staying power. The word tenacity suggests a kind of stubbornness and an individuality bordering on isolation that makes me think of the craft of photography, the doggedness of artist photographers who make work year after year in part hoping that someone will find the results interesting, but even more because of they simply can’t stop. I’m surprised, provoked, engaged by these images. Framed by tenacity, they have me wondering what Jefferson Boulevard and Oak Cliff will look and feel like in another hundred years.