Urbanautica

THOMAS LOCKE HOBBS. MOUNTAIN FIELDS LIKE STAIRWAYS OF STONE

by Steve Bisson

«As an artist and documentary photographer, you have to respond to the present and work in the now. This is the context of our present.»

Tell us about where you grow up. What kind of place it was?

Thomas Locke Hobbs (TH): I grew up in Northern California in the suburbs of San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s. Even then it was known as Silicon Valley but it had yet to become to the global nexus of technology and wealth that it is today. Back then, there was strong mythology about the Bay Area and California in general; that it was the best place in the best state in the best country on earth. I think you were supposed to feel a little sorry for anyone whose ancestors didn’t have the luck for the foresight to migrate. I left when I was 18 and have lived a lot of places since then. I have come to see more clearly the absurdity of this mythology that I was raised with. My mom passed away about a dozen years ago and I no longer have any family connections to the place. In the infrequent times that I visit, I recognize the places but feel very much a foreigner there.

And then photography. How it all started? I found these words on a blog post you made back in 2009: «This is the first picture I made in color with my 8×10 camera. I remember getting it back from the lab, looking at it for the first time and thinking I should just stick a needle full of heroin in my arm right then. It would be cheaper and less addicting that shooting 8×10 in color.» Tell us a bit more of how you got into large format "addiction"...

TH: There is something narcotic about looking at a good photograph. There is a quality to the sharpness and detail that is better than real life. I think it also has to do with the fixed quality of the image. Unlike life, or cinema, photographs are not durational. As a viewer, I exist in time looking at this image that does not change. I don’t experience the image all at once. There is time for multiple layers of detail and meaning to emerge. It’s beguiling.

© Thomas Locke Hoobs, Graciela, June 2009

What about photography in the era of fast interconnections and instant sharing. How is the language evolving and impacting perception and daily life of people and communities in your opinion? How this is affecting the role of a documentary photographer?

TH: This is maybe not so new but I do feel like people now have a kind of double-self, of existing in a primary sense and also existing as an image apart that can be shared and seen. Nearly everyone that I have photographed in Iquitos, for instance, has a smartphone and is very active on social media sharing selfies and memes. There is a kind of implicit visual savvy, a knowledge of tropes that are imitated, usually deliberately. As an artist and documentary photographer, you have to respond to the present and work in the now. This is the context of our present.

Dinuba is a town of about 20,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley, near Fresno. Your family and relatives run a journal in town for a long time. What drove you back there and how people react to your project? What's left with you of this intimate journey?

TH: My mom’s family is from a small town in California’s Central Valley. They owned the local newspaper there, The Dinuba Sentinel. I went there in 2010, a couple of years after my mom had passed away. The paper was owned at the time by my aunt and uncle and I essentially did a self-assigned residency there for a couple of months. This was during the Great Recession and the area was severely affected by the housing crash and also the newspaper industry was cratering. I felt like my time was limited.

© Thomas Locke Hobbs from the series 'Dinuba Sentinel Portraits', 2010

I made a lot of photographs around the town but I was also fascinated by this massive copy camera in one of the backrooms of the paper. Even in 2009 they were still photographing the layout paste-ups for making negatives to expose the lithographic plates, something that most newspapers had stopped doing in the 1990s. I thought it would be interesting to use the camera to make portraits. I found some 12x20 inch ultra large format film and made portraits of the newspaper’s staff. The camera was focused to reproduce layouts at a 1 to 1 ratio, so the portraits are exactly life-sized. I exhibited the prints in Dinuba itself but never done anything more with the project. New work and grad school took my attention elsewhere in the years since. It would be nice someday to return to this work and find a resolution for it.

Some of your works are settled in Buenos Aires such as 'Lungs' and 'River Bank' to mention few. Tell us about your impressions of this city, its shapes, and living conditions. How nature fits in the city?

TH: I moved to Argentina in 2008 to live with my boyfriend at the time. It was also there that I started studying photography seriously in various workshops, particularly those run by Nacho Iasparra and Eduardo Gil, who were my first early mentors. I lived in Buenos Aires from 2008 until 2011 and my first projects were made there. I’ve long been interested in issues of urban design, planning and architecture and their affect on the people who live there. I walked around the city a lot. My ideas for the projects mostly came from those walks and also from my engagement with the history of photography, which I was learning at the time. I felt a certain frustration of being stuck in the city and wanting to be elsewhere. I think that frustration made for a useful tension in making work. For example, in my series Pulmones, which shows the interiors of city blocks from the vantage point of mid-level high rises, I was interested in 19th century landscapes of the Western United States by Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan and thinking about how I could apply that approach in the context of a densely built city, in terms of my vantage point and how I framed the photographs. Another project, Ochava Solstice, tracks triangular shadows on a certain type of apartment building. I was thinking about Incan and Mayan architecture and its engagement with the Cosmos but with that context occurring in mundane neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

© Thomas Locke Hobbs from the series 'River Bank'

© Thomas Locke Hobbs from the series 'River Bank'

Landscape. Browsing through your Tumblr I see a contemplative approach to space as if you were trying to grasp a transcendent meaning? What's your definition of landscapes?

TH: I want to make work that speaks to interesting ideas about place but also has an impact beyond language. A lot of the landscapes on my Tumblr were made while I was in grad school at Arizona State. I came to the program very interested in New Topographics but while there I also fell in love with more transcendental approaches typified by Minor White and Frederick Sommer.

Your recent work is staged in Perú. What about it? What can you tell our readers beyond cliches…

I have been traveling to and making work in Perú since 2011 and I am now based in the country. Perú is one of humanity’s cradles of civilization. It is an incredibly rich and varied country with a deep history. It is also a poor country that has suffered and continues to suffer the predations of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. I have found opportunities here to make work that comes from very specific and local contexts but speaks to broader themes of our present global reality.

One project that I have been working on recently looks at ancient terraced fields in the Andean landscape. Highland areas between 3000m and 4000m have extensive terracing that was built up during the Huari empire a thousand years ago. Many of these terraces are still used today, altho most have been abandoned. The scale of ancient human modification of the landscape is truly impressive. The project combines these landscapes with images of informal urban settlements which are the product of massive 20th-century migrations from the countryside to the city. I’m interested in the dichotomy of the relationship with the landscape between ancient practices and contemporary realities while also exploring their visual similarities. The project is called ‘Mountain fields like stairways of stone’ after an early description of the landscape by a Spanish colonizer.

© Thomas Locke Hobbs from the series 'Mountain fields like stairways of stone'

Another project I started last year consists of large format urban landscapes from a city called Juliaca in the altiplano near Lake Titicaca and situated at 3800m. The city is known for its cold, harsh climate. Visually the city is stark, almost totally devoid of trees and with a strong, hard light from such little atmosphere. The city has grown tremendously as a commercial crossroads fueled by nearby mining of copper and gold. I remember passing through the city a few years ago and looking down a street. Something about the shape of the buildings and the quality of the light reminded me of an Atget photograph. That was the start of my curiosity about Juliaca. Parts of the city are under near total construction and, oddly, resemble ruins. It’s not clear what’s going up vs. what’s falling down. This gives the city a kind of atemporal quality that I think lends itself to photography. I’m still working on this project and I’m not sure where it will lead but I’m interested in Juliaca as a local instance of indigenous capitalism driven by the global commodities trade.

© Thomas Locke Hobbs from the series 'Juliaca'

I’m obviously an outsider in Peru and my work is based off a contention between my research and my status as an outsider in terms of how I see things and how people react to me. I think there is a balance to seeing a place with the eyes of a foreigner while having enough knowledge to not fall into the obvious or cliché. I’ve been coming to Peru for nine years now and cumulatively I’ve spent almost two years here. In addition to reading and traveling, a huge help has been researching the history of other photographic practitioners here; the Hermanos Vargas in the late 19th century, Martin Chambí in the early 20th, and more recent photographers like Billy Hare, Edward Ranney, Javier Silva, Milagros de la Torre, Edi Hirose and Musuk Nolte. There is a very rich tradition of photography in Perú to which I hope to eventually make a meaningful contribution.

South America, it seems you have been traveling and living across the region for sometime. We all know things are much different from North America. A different history, economic settings, traditions (more latin) yet there's quite a similar native heritage. What have you learned so far?

TH: I’ve learned a lot but when you live a long time in a country that is not your own, you realize there is an unbridgeable gulf of understanding that you can never quite cross. You will always be an outsider. My perspective in making work in Argentina and Peru is necessarily that of an outsider. My hope is that I’ve spent enough time, done enough research that my perspective can be useful and insightful.

Another aspect of living outside of the country of your birth is a certain alienation from your home culture. I feel like a foreigner no matter where I am. I think that distance and outsiderness are present also in my work in the United States.

I am a bit tired of hearing people saying that photography is ended. What's your opinion?

TH: There’s a certain triumphalist narrative about photography, it’s origins as outsider art and it’s eventual incorporation into the fine art canon that I think has been played out. Obviously people are still making photographs with artist intent. The challenge is to respond to the present in a way that resonates (and will continue to resonate).

What about books. You made some interesting experiences. Can you comment on those?

TH: Bookmaking is an important part of my practice as an artist. My skills are not especially good but I do know how to do a few simple things well. I enjoy geeking out on materials and different kinds of paper and thinking about how size, design, sequence and materials can lend themselves to the presentation of different projects.

'Mountain fields like stairways of stone', handmade artist book. 54 pp. with 24 images, laser printed on recycled paper with Japanese 4-hole binding, edition of 100. 8.5x11"

My project, 'Mountain fields like stairways of stone' I made into an artist book using a laser printer and recycled paper. The quality of laser prints is mediocre but the recycled paper that obscures the defects and I worked a lot with the files to make the tonal range acceptable. It was important to me to have something I could sell to friends and colleagues at a reasonable price while still making a profit (at least on the materials). I also made a small zine of my work in Juliaca. I’ve found that the act of making a book dummy, an artist book or a zine can be very useful in thinking about the work itself and often suggests new ideas for additional work. I’ll often start making dummies while I’m in the middle of a project.

Another project, 'Maravilla del Mundo', contains portraits of young, queer men in the city of Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon. This work was published this year by Photogramas in Argentina. I worked with Pablo Cabado on the edit and Ricardo Baez, a fantastic graphic designer from Venezuela, contributed the design for the cover and typefaces in the book, making something far more interesting that I could have come up with on my own.

Three books (not only of photography) that you recommend?

TH: 'Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes' by William Denevan covers in great detail the extensive terraces found in the highlands of the Andes in Peru. Many of the terraces are a thousand or more years old and speak to a long standing modification of the landscape to suit the needs of the inhabitants. Additionally, the book is illustrated with some amazing aerial photographs, particularly those made by the Shippee-Johnson expedition in the 1930s which made extensive aerial photographs of the Colca Valley terraces with a large format aerial camera.

'The Structure of Things Then' by David Goldblatt is work made in the 1980s that interrogates Apartheid in South Africa through photographing different structures like government buildings, monuments, shantytowns, Dutch Reform churches and suburban developments. The last third of the book takes the form of extended captions in which Goldblatt provides more context on the history and meaning of the structures in question.

'War' by Candlelight is a collection of stories by Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcón. Many of the stories take place in Perú of the 1980s and 90s during the insurgency of the Shining Path and later of the corrupt years of the Fujimori government. His stories often build up to these moments of great tension between the characters that linger with you the way an image might.

Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

TH: La Vuelta at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin (MAMM), which was a show of contemporary photography looking at Colombian society in these moments of fragile peace following the signing of the accords with the FARC. There was a lot of amazing work in that show, particularly memorable for me were works by Karen Paulina Biswell, Juan Feranndo Herrán, and Miguel Angel Rojas. Colombia, like Peru, has amazing artists whose work deserve to be better known.

What's next?

TH: I am working on a number of projects right now in Perú and I have ideas for more. I hope to spend the next decade or two working on these. Ojalá!

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LINKS
Thomas Locke Hobbs
Urbanautica United States

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THOMAS LOCKE HOBBS. JULIACA AND PERU