THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701270199
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY CHILES T.A. LARSON
LENGTH: 79 lines
A NEW LIFE
Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South
EDITED BY ALEX HARRIS WITH ALICE ROSE GEORGE
W.W. Norton. 249 pp. $29.95.
A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South is a collection of photographic images and short stories sliced out of the asphalt, carports and shopping malls now covering much of what was once Southern pastures.
Editors Alice Rose George and Alex Harris, who is a Duke University professor and editor of DoubleTake Magazine, have selected the work of the 11 photographers to represents the diversity of the subject. But there is a certain discordance linking the styles of several, and it comes across as a studied effort to convey a snapshot quality to their images.
The 10 stories, written by well-known Southern writers such as Virginia's Richard Baush, tend to transport the reader more quickly into the subject and stay in the memory longer. Several are standouts.
Although the photographic technique is distracting - which may be the idea - many of the shots do contain components needed to make a point: contrasting or conflicting features, such as . . . a missing-person sign with the photo of a young girl tacked to a telephone pole in the foreground and a large ``Family Inns of America'' sign in the background . . . a discarded cabinet-sized television set floating screen up in a creek . . . a small, tidy brick house surrounded by a high chain-link fence, watched over by a large statue of the Virgin Mary in the tiny front yard.
Nevertheless, many of the photographs lack compelling elements needed to hold one's attention.
Some of the more interesting series of images are found in the work of Nic Nicosia, Margaret Sartor, Connette Pearl McMahon and Thomas Tulis. Nicosia's black-and-white portraits convey an excellent use of light and control of his subjects, while creating a stylized yet informal setting. Sartor's and McMahon's pictures, though covering differing subjects in black and white, bear a fresh, informal intimacy. And Tulis' tripod studies of construction sites at night express an eerie sense of the landscape being carved up for development.
As for the stories, Bausch's ``Tandolfo the Great'' tells of a man who works part time as a clown, giving magic shows in the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington. He has a small drinking problem, though. While entertaining a group of 5-year-olds, he realizes that the young woman for whom he has concealed his feelings has left a message that she plans to marry another.
Lee Smith's ``The Interpretation of Dreams'' takes the reader to a Linens 'n Things shop in a large outlet mall in Burlington, N.C., where Melanie works and also dreams. Smith, a novelist who grew up in southwest Virginia, was inspired to write this piece after overhearing an outlet-mail salesgirl interpreting dreams for a group of fellow workers huddled in the back of the store.
In ``Tobrah,'' Bobbie Ann Mason spins an absorbing tale of a single woman named Jackie who has motherhood thrust upon her by her own father - whom she has not heard from in 35 years. He had divorced her mother, moved across country, remarried and fathered a little girl. His wife dies and a year later so does he. How Jackie and little Tobrah adjust to each other makes for lively reading.
Mary Ward Brown's ``A New Life'' is also about a single woman in her late 40s, one who has recently been widowed. Elizabeth is having trouble getting over her grief. Well-meaning friends who have embraced a local religious group, Keepers of the Vineyard, try to help Elizabeth by exposing her to the magnetism of their preacher. Their smothering attention works on her, but not in a flash of religious fervor as they had hoped.
Summing up Southern suburbia and how it got that way is the task that Allen Gurganus takes on with relish and . . . a mess of turnip greens. He traces this explosive growth to, and from, the end of World War II, the GI Bill and the WWII generation's desire for plots of crabgrass with dwellings thereon. The photographs and short stories in A New Life seek to mirror the next generation's time and place.
Although the stories are tightly knit, there is a certain looseness to the photographic series. By assigning one or two photo-essays on specific subjects rather than selecting from a photographer's body of work, a more forceful visual impression might have added to an otherwise excellent collection. MEMO: Chiles T.A. Larson is a photojournalist who lives in Ivy, Va.