Patricia Erbelding

Patricia Erbelding is a french painter who travelled to the United States between 2001 and 2005, documenting the landscapes and atmospheres of the american southwest. Her photographs are plain and they seem to be taken in a hurry, almost spontaneously with no real premeditation - they seem to be a product of her drifting across the desert highways and smalltown roads of Arizona, Texas, California, Nevada and New Mexico. In one photograph, she even caught (accidentally) the antenna of her car as she photographed a passing motel. Much like Robbert Flick's work, which I talked about in an earlier post, her set called "Interstate" adheres to a simple aesthetic - bare subjects often captured with a minimalist or objective point of view. A lot can be said about the concepts at play, but the set remains interesting to me simply because it offers a glimpse of the United States I adore so much - the abandonment-prone desert towns and finite traces of human existence that time has managed to dissolve back into the natural landscape. It is the America where things are preserved and human vitality seems so indistinguishable. In her own words, during an interview with Tita Reut: The voyage is linked to dream, as my dream of America and its mythical roads, themselves frontiers, lines, crossing desert landscapes and ghost towns. The photography is a dreamcatcher. On her website, there is a directory of about fifty images which you can freely preview. Not all have been published, but they are available to view. Most are interesting snapshots of Americana and barren landscapes, and the rest are "of the moment" snapshots captured through a car window or by the side of a busy highway. For me, it was a good way to waste a rainy day with the nostalgia of traveling down sunny desert roads.

The vast expanse

Robbert Flick is perhaps my favorite photgrapher right now. He has documented the modern American landscape through simple and honest compositions. He has done to urban sprawl and vast spaces what Ansel Adams did to Yellowstone. His early works have a minimal structure, void of any specificity, and are in themselves abstractions of certain elements, like a telephone pole in the middle of the desert or the corner of a cinder block wall. 

His more recent work focuses on Los Angeles. With no implicit intent, Flick took to the streets in order to capture the sprawling boulevards of a city whose arteries consist of 16-lane interstates and large avenues. He created long strands of continuous photographs by digitizing video which he shot from a moving car. The result is a grid-like assembly of specific frames depicting the vast expanse of Los Angeles. 

Here's an excerpt from the Flintridge Foundation website:

His early black and white photos depicted the stark expanses of Midwestern landscapes and the striking architectural geometries of an Inglewood parking garage near his studio. In 1979, for a documentary project on the city, Flick abandoned the single frame image for a framework that would re-conceptualize L.A.'s vast and diverse topography. He shot sequential views of streets and neighborhoods, arranging many single photographs into a grid. Flick continues to investigate Southern California, constructing panoramic composites of cityscapes, desert, sea and canyons. In 1990 he shifted to a video camera, mounting it in his van. This allowed him to take "long continuous sweeps ... following predetermined trajectories or by systematically rendering parallel streets." Flick digitizes selected frames, creating bands of interlocking images which, when printed are "a collection of visual textures and phenomena" that capture the "visual complexities and simultaneities of the Southern California metropolitan area."

All in all, his work has been very influential to me. The simple, honest beauty of his work is an aesthetic which I admire and try to emulate. Flick is a professor of fine arts at USC, and I'm looking forward to his new projects.