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The Sword of Heaven | County Fair | Portfolio | Links | Your Comments |
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Foreword by James D. Houston |
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From a quarter of a mile away you see the highest rides, their
gaudy red and yellow bucket seats turning and dipping in the afternoon
sun. Before you reach the turnstile you can already hear the taped
voice of a carnie pitchman from loudspeakers somewhere, inviting
you to come in and be amazed by Black Jack, The Super Steer-"Ten
Thousand Hamburgers on The Hoof "-and by Little Thimble, The World's
Smallest Horse. "A horse so small, " the voice says, "you can carry her in the
trunk of your car! So small you can hold her in your arms!" You laugh and decide to go for Little Thimble. "What the hell,"
your companion says, "why not? It's the county fair." But before you have travelled twenty feet you are distracted.
Inside the gate you begin to smell the mustard and the mayonnaise,
the butter and the salt that goes with the popcorn and the corn
on the cob the Lions Club is selling. You also smell chorizo sausage
frying and menudo simmering and the jalapeno sauce that goes with
the burritos. This fair is somewhere in California. Dee's Casa
de Mexico has rented a booth, and Dee herself is serving up homemade
enchiladas, next to Chef Kong's New Szechuan, which is serving
up mu-shu pork and pot stickers, next to the NAACP booth, where
they are selling cole slaw and barbecued ribs, next to a natural
foods stand called Another Roadside Attraction, where you can
pick up a vegetarian sandwich-grated cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes
and alfalfa sprouts stuffed into a pocket of pita bread. The smells gather in the air between the portable Ferris wheel
and the exhibition hall, enticing you farther into the mix and
flow. They swirl together, like everything else at the county
fair, where it is all going on at once-dog show, calf -roping
contest, livestock auction, prize cabbages and pumpkins, the comedian
from Guadalajara, the new mini-lift-truck from Japan, the Senior
Citizens Marching Band, the Solar Energy Information booth, the
True Scripture Rescue Mis sion, games of chance, jugglers and
acrobats, and, in the very midst of the swirl, somewhere along
one of these avenues of canvas covered concessions, there is the
photo booth where, for nine sum mers, Mikkel Aaland could be found
squeezed into a shadowy darkroom or aiming his venerable Burke
and James 4 x 5 wood box camera at whoever had just wandered in
from the throng. The pictures in this book are selected from many thousands he
took during those years. They speak for themselves, as photographs
always do. With any photo, whether good or bad, clear or fuzzy,
the story is right there, and the better the photos, the more
superfluous seem any words we might muster up. The strange thing
is, the better the photos, the more you want to talk about them,
the more tempting it is to try and pin down their special fascination
and mystery In these pictures, it starts with the impulse we all
have felt, at the fair, or at the boardwalk, or the amusement
arcade. The booth is there. Your spirits are high. You want a
souvenir. You grab your companion by the arm and say, "Hey! C'mon!
Let's do it!" That impulse, the spontaneity is part of the charm. Though these
fair-goers are posing-though some of them, in fact, were steady
customers, coming back every year or so, to have a new picture
taken at the fair-there is nothing false or artificial about the
shots. The photographer is not shooting four or five reels of
film in the hope that a few frames might satisfy the ego of the
subject. One minute to set up and get acquainted. One short conversation.
One click. It is sudden, and in that very suddenness something unexpect edly
intimate has occurred. The studio space is small. The people are
pushed in close-the lovers, the brothers, the families, the bikers,
the hookers, the clowners. Their bodies touch, and they all seem
to enjoy the touching. That is half the intimacy The other half
fills the air between these people and Aaland the cameraman. During
his one minute more or less, he is allowed to glimpse a life with
that kind of intimacy you will sometimes offer a total stranger
you never expect to see again, the person you meet by chance on
a train or a bus and who is soon hearing secrets you would never
tell your neighbor or your boss. I believe the extraordinary holding power can be found right there-in
the way these pictures honor that moment to moment glimpse. They
do not pass judgment. Aaland is neither above the people he photographs
here, nor below them. He is totally with them, with whoever they
are or wish to be when they walk into the booth. The result is one of those collections that somehow illuminates
a chapter in our cultural history-a certain slice of living, at
a certain time, in a certain locale. It brings to mind Edward
Curtis's PORTRAITS OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN LIFE, and the Dustbowl
photos by Walker Evans in LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, and the
series by Ansel Adams called BORN FREE AND EQUAL, recording the
lives of Japanese Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, east
of the Sierras, in 1942, and OUR KIND OF PEOPLE, Bill Owens' study
of hometown groups and rituals. COUNTY FAIR has that same kind
of narrative appeal. These eyes and outfits, the body talk, the
tattoos and the jewelry-they tell us, with haunting precision,
one of the true American stories.
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