The Great Unreal
About midway through Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs's mysterious
picture book The Great Unreal, resulting from a couple
of fantastic road trips (an inexhaustible inspiration for great
literature, cinema and photobooks alike) through the United States,
there is a black & white photograph taken in a nondescript back
corner of Las Vegas, possibly the greatest of unreal cities. In the
upper right corner, a billboard can be seen hovering above a
one-story building and a baby palm tree, announcing an exhibition
called Ansel Adams: America at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art,
and next to the text showing one of Adams's grandiose photographs
of the rugged American West.
I don't know whether Onorato & Krebs included this image on
purpose, either ironically winking at the long tradition of serious
and majestic American landscape photography or paying homage to the
master (perhaps it's just there by happenstance). As pretty much
everything that Adams stood for is inverted by Onorato & Krebs
idiosyncratic, humorous, personal, and adventurous approach to
translating the vast grandeur of the American desert into
photographs and photomontages.
One's never sure about what one is looking at. Why are those
power cables diverging from the poles as if to form a cobweb? Why
are these tyres rolling down a hill? Why is there a fake road
running in circles? Onorato & Krebs's version of America,
devoid of people, seems to be on the verge of entering an eerie
nightmare dreamed by daylight. It sometimes reminds me of Captain Beefheart's America of the late 1960s,
when he is singing, in his very distinquishable growly voice: "The
dust blows forward 'n dust blows back. / And the wind blows black
thru the sky. / And the smokestack blows up in sun's eye. / What am
I gonna die?"
The American landscape continues to be an inspiration to
filmmakers and photographers. A recent example is the landscape
photography of Matthew Brandt who soaks his prints in the
water of the very lakes that he photographed, thereby literally
converging the iconic with the indexical.
A similar concept was subtly and beautifully executed by Witho
Worms in his book Cette Montagne, C'est Moi, in which photographs
of coal mountains are printed on paper prepared with carbon ground
from coal of the mountains depicted. Though both Brandt's and
Worms's landscapes are of a somewhat gloomy character, they aren't
as troublesome and alarming as the awkwardly assembled American
landscapes of our fabulous Swiss duo (Swiss do duos well, we
shouldn't forget that another Swiss whose photographic views of
America turned out to be so influential, Robert Frank, formed an informal duo with Jack
Kerouac. Kerouac couldn't have written On the Road without Frank,
who drove him around the country.)
Of all possible Americas, Europeans tend to imagine them a
little less optimistic than Americans have done so often. The
Frenchman François Reichenbach driven by a boundless curiosity went
on a road trip through the U.S. He concentrated his experiences and
findings into a wonderful film of both admiration and gentle
critique (L'Amerique insolite, 1960). The Americans with
all their funny inventions created a different world on this
planet. "Do they themselves see America as we see it," asks
Reichenbach, "[…] These frozen landscapes. Do they still smell this
wilderness? Or do they share the impression that those vast
horizons are still waiting for something? The invasion of Martians
or the return of pioneers?"
Strange things can happen in America and even stranger things
happen when its houses and landscapes are confronted by the playful
camera-eyes-and-hands of Onorato & Krebs.
Taco Hidde Bakker