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‘Tombstones Across the Landscape of Our Nation'
[Politico] The hollowed-out towns of Trump’s America, as seen through the eyes of a French photographer.Emmanuel Georges was 21 when he came to the United States for the first time in 1986, and he took hundreds of photos on the two cameras he took with him on his 15,000-mile trip around the country. But it wasn’t until he returned, 25 years later, that he was able to fully revisit what caught his eye the first time: The post-industrial shells of towns that remained after companies bled workers and business to automation and overseas labor. He started his later photo project in 2010, traveling everywhere from Nebraska to Ohio to Texas at the height of the recession--and as Americans were starting to take a close look at what, exactly, had happened in the past few decades as manufacturing jobs had disappeared and bonds, dotcoms and housing had all gone south in a series of busts. "I was really asking myself about what this country looks like now, 50 years after its political and economic climax," Georges, who is French, says about the photos. Donald Trump’s election has been widely interpreted as a reaction to that decline, and in his inauguration speech, the new president gave a nod to the "rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation." But Georges says he was less interested in politics than in the "poetic aspects of the landscape." In these places, "life is a little bit suspended," he says. Still, his photos show us that the factors that completely disrupted American politics in 2016 and prompted a national conversation about globalization’s winners and losers have been coming for a long time--long enough for an outsider to observe three decades ago. Above, a transfer and storage facility in Butte, Montana. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a mining boom attracted 100,000 people to the town. The population has been in the mid 30,000s for the past few decades. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-03-26 |
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