Amy Stein Interview

by Davin Risk

MakingRoom: How did Stranded evolve? Were you taking photos that lead you to this theme or was the concept born first?

Amy Stein: The seeds of the project were planted during hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I was sitting in my living room watching live images of people stuck on their roofs as the water was rising around them. I remember thinking that a lot of these people were living in poverty and had been for generations, but it required them taking to their roof and writing “help” in big bold letters on live television before we paid attention. In those moments I began to examine my own apathy and the broader decline in American civic engagement.

During this same time I was making frequent car trips to Pennsylvania for my Domesticated project. Along the way I would pass cars that had broken down on the side of the road and really pay only minimal attention. After a while I started noticing the people stranded and standing next to the car. I began to slow down and try to see their faces and their expressions. They had that same dazed and shaken expression as the people on their roofs in New Orleans. I immediately wanted to pull over and capture these moments of personal isolation.

MR: To your mind, what is the American relationship to isolation? Is it the flip-side to the "American Dream"?

AS: I believe isolation has become a kind of survival mechanism for many Americans. Our attention is a battlefield of competing commercial interests. We are under constant siege by messages and images. I believe we retreat to keep some semblance of self and the effect of that retreat has been an overall decline in our social capital. In many ways I think our decision to disengage has been enabled because of the fallacy of the American Dream. We work hard with the promise of financial and personal rewards. When those rewards don’t come I think we are less inclined to invest in the political and social systems that promulgate the ‘dream.’

MR: In your work, do you most hope for an emotional or a political response? Or is that line too blurred?

AS: I hope for both, but leave the interpretation to the viewer. That line is blurred and those elements, the political and the personal, are very intertwined in my work. I take pictures to satisfy my own desire to tell a story. Within that narrative I will mix elements of the personal and the political, but not with the intention of making a grand statement to the world. I am interested in exploring subjects and issues that interest me and then challenge myself to see connections that might not be so obvious at first.

MR: Some of the first words that popped into my head when first seeing your work were "middle America." The apparent cultural landscape of your work is uniquely American but also not fixed by a real sense of place. "Middle America" seems to fit regardless of where the images take place – they simply emphasize an "in-between."

AS: Your mention of Middle America regarding the work is interesting. When I think of the term what comes to mind is all that is typical of the part of America that is not geographically or culturally of the two coasts. You’ve taken it a step forward both literally and metaphorically to reference that which is in-between these two culturally, politically and socially dominant spaces. The stranded motorists in the images find themselves broken down somewhere along the route of their journey, in-between their origin and destination. Often this occurs in a place that has no distinct physical characteristics, it simply reads as the side of the highway. In this regard the term Middle America fits the work quite well, but not in the way most of us would initially understand.

MR: With "Stranded" do you see the work as documentary in any sense? You are dealing with this central theme of witnessing and the circumstances of strangers but are those people more vehicles for creating a sense of a broader social situation?

AS: Yes, I think this series has a very strong documentary streak. My primary motive is to document each breakdown as a unique situation. I want to capture the individual mood and tone of the moment. I want the audience to connect with the people and the places in the photos before they connect with the theme behind the series. Each of these images obviously exists within the context of the broader statement I am making, but the individual situations must be compelling enough and the individual images must be strong enough for the series to work.

MR: Driving is intrinsically linked to American culture. Do you feel like the "freedom of the open road" is a broken promise at this point?

AS: Driving for most people has become the routine means to our routine ends. It is how we get to work or the grocery store or the mall. I don't know how often people get in their car and let their curiosity and sense of adventure be their guide. For me, hitting the open road is one of the few paths to truth that still exists. There is the America we are fed through media and there is the America that is real. The only way to experience the real is to get out there and see it and touch it for yourself. In that sense, the only thing that may be broken is our will to explore.

MR: The roadtrip is part of the canon of contemporary American photography. Does that recent history have an effect on your work in terms of capturing America?

AS: Yes, many photographic series that use the roadtrip for inspiration and structure have influenced the making of my Stranded series. I draw steady inspiration for Robert Frank's The Americans (who doesn't, really?), the work of Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, Henry Wessel's work, Jeff Brouws' book Approaching Nowhere and his earlier highway series. I often travel with a few photography books, sometimes these included and look over them at night in the cheap motel rooms for inspiration and to clear my head from the days driving and shooting. While I obviously love a good roadtrip and the photography that can result from it, I think of my series as sort of an an inverse roadtrip, where I travel from breakdown to breakdown, revisiting similar emotions and states of tension and frustration.

View a Google map of Stein's Stranded travels.

MR: Can you say a bit about the Do You Know What it Means? project?

AS: I spent four months in New Orleans heading up a photo archiving project called Do You Know What It Means? (after the Louis Armstrong song of the same name). The goal of the initiative was to collect photographs from the residents of New Orleans and the surrounding areas that depicted life before the storm, from everyday family moments and gatherings to special events like Mardi Gras to images of the architecture and street life. I met with many individuals and groups to do so then scanned the images for inclusion into an online archive.

The archive now contains thousands of images of life before Katrina. Many people donated images from their family albums that depicted happier times before the storm. They shared stories with me of close and nurturing neighborhoods, generations of families living in the same house or block and how wonderful it was to live in New Orleans. The experience of working with these individuals and cataloging their donated images was very moving and allowed me to begin to think of photography in new ways. Through the project I have become very interested in the power and beauty of vernacular imagery and its value to the individuals and communities that create it.

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Amy Stein is based in New York. For more information, check amysteinphoto.com