Photographs by Frank Di Piazza
Photographer Michael Eastman has lived nearly his whole life in St. Louis, a city that has both nurtured his work and in some ways held it back. With the publication this month of Vanishing America, which collects three decades of his photographs, Eastman reflects on receiving greater international recognition, what it took to earn it and why it was worth the wait
Surely one of the satisfying advantages of touring an art exhibition with the actual exhibiting artist is that the concept DO NOT TOUCH no longer applies. On an afternoon last December, I entered “Elusive Light: Michael Eastman Retrospective,” and within the first few minutes the artist—youthful at 61, with near-blond hair grown long, round glasses, untucked shirt, a white goatee—had already turned down the sound on a video montage of his work and straightened a few framed photographs. The show was in its final days at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art, having opened the previous February; it stayed open an extra six months because the crowds, 6,000 visitors in all, kept coming.
SLU’s Beaux Arts–style building was an ideal place to see Eastman’s work, its high ceilings allowing Eastman’s frequently monumental photographs room to assume their commanding positions. And this particular occasion—spending a few hours walking with an artist through the first retrospective of his work—turned out to be an ideal way to learn about his life, his work, his plans.
“It’s a big, big space,” Eastman said as we walked into the first gallery. “I was a little worried about filling it. And then I was a little worried we filled it with the wrong things. And then I wished it was bigger because I could put more works in it.” The show’s curator, Petruta Lipan, spent several weeks at Eastman’s University City home looking at everything he’s shot over the past 35 years. The 96 photographs she selected range from Eastman’s early efforts to brand-new projects conceived of while the exhibition’s planning was already under way.
We began where he began: with black-and-white images—cool, sober, abstract—shot in the early 1970s in St. Louis, where he returned after graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Eastman had been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps as a wholesale liquor distributor, but he could see that his father himself was unfulfilled by the career, wishing, instead, that he could have been an English teacher. (The family has no relation to the Eastmans of Kodak fame.) He tried retail—opening, with some friends, a bell-bottom store in Brentwood called The Lower Half, plus a store upstairs for shirts called The Upper Half—but its groovy vibe wasn’t enough to stave off the boredom of standing in a store all day. So after shooting a few photographs with a friend’s camera and printing them in another friend’s darkroom, Eastman saw his future develop right along with the pictures. He went to the closest office-supply shop and made business cards stating that Michael Eastman was now
a photographer.
During his first years, Eastman shot the usual contract work (actors’ headshots, interiors for a free local magazine) and used the off-hours to teach himself the craft. He learned composition and formalism by shooting first and cropping later. Over the course of the next decade, he got better at knowing instinctively where the picture’s ideal rectangle should be, so that eventually what he shot through the viewfinder was what he printed.
At SLUMA, we walked into the 1980s and into what is perhaps Eastman’s most recognizable characteristic: color. He still remembers the day in 1982 when he considered two of his images in front of him and went in a new direction. “When I looked at the color and then the black-and-white, it was clear to me that I would never look at a black-and-white photograph again and not wonder what the color was,” he said. “It just warmed everything up.” The photos framed in front of us certainly showed that warmth. They were somewhat similar to the earlier black-and-whites—tightly cropped and focused, almost architectural abstracts—but they showed a rusty brown and that brown’s darker shadows. It was an interesting progression, since rust—as a condition even more than a color—would become central to his work.
A few steps, and a few years, later, we began looking at Eastman’s images of the United States: storefronts and stations that have character in place of customers. Sometimes under moody skies, these spots seem frozen in either quiet desperation or peculiar contentment; they always, somehow, look familiar. “There’s always been this interest in America,” Eastman said as we walked. “Not Americana—not kitsch in any way—but definitely an interest in saying, ‘This is where I live, this is what I know, this is the visual language that I speak in. And see in.’” We moved from 4- by 5 1/3-foot Guadalupe, with a blue-tarped El Camino in front of an old building advertising Gold Medal Flour (its partial slogan, “Why Not Now,” painted who knows when); to the stunning Cairo, Illinois, in which old storefronts look like part of an abandoned movie set, but authentic; to Marcellus, a resort-town photo that is Eastman-ish in at least two ways: Its point of view is dead-on, and it’s populated by empty chairs. Eastman says that viewers often take confident guesses at the site of Marcellus. “They’ll say, ‘Is that shot in …’ and they name whatever town they went to once in the summer,” he said. “‘Is that in Michigan?’ ‘Is that in Texas?’ ‘That’s in California, isn’t it?’ Or ‘That’s in Maine.’ And you realize it somehow touched the American consciousness, the uniquely American collective consciousness.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Eastman’s name rose in the local and national arts community, which opened his opportunities even more widely. Two of the people particularly supportive of his work were Jan Broderick, then the curator for A.G. Edwards, and David Mesker, then a vice-president and the executive who worked with Broderick to build the company’s corporate collection. A.G. Edwards had bigger and bigger spaces in its offices, so Eastman’s work—which Broderick and Mesker admired, and which was large—was a good match. Mesker and his company arranged to help Eastman take six shooting trips to Europe in the 1990s, in effect prepurchasing photographs he would bring back. Some were there in the SLUMA show, and as we walked by them, we’d gone from the outside world to interiors: an ancient-looking stairway in Budapest; a sensually shaped stairwell in Barcelona; a red-roped library in Vienna, patronless.
Eastman continued his focus on interiors—and explored new areas of texture and color—with his next international project: Cuba. In the late 1990s, he used a cultural exchange through the Center for Cuban Studies in New York to get invited to Havana’s international film festival, as a pretext for gaining access to the Communist country. He took three trips between 1999 and 2002, and the results are some of his most moving work, the usual absence of people somehow even more acutely felt by the viewer. The Cuba photos exhibited at SLUMA showed cracked walls grimed with time and creaky, run-down furniture under once-grand archways, the homes’ owners either long gone or drained of their pre-Castro wealth. For all the neglect on view, the images are still incredibly crisp. “Cuba was remarkable,” Eastman said. “It was beautiful—the colors were fading, with just a little bit of life and a little bit of glory still there. And the narratives that come to mind when you look at those interiors are extraordinary.”
He continued talking about that last word as we walked a route that returned us to America. “A lot of what contemporary photographers are doing now is going to exotic locations and shooting,” he told me. “And you could refer to Cuba as exotic, but the places I photographed are not. None of these are special places. It’s more about what is presented to me at that moment, and it usually has a lot to do with light. You are probably walking by 25 places that aren’t lit and presenting themselves at that moment—the timing, the change, the color, the patina of a wall, the time of year. To me, it’s not so much about a special place that’s extraordinary and exotic, but an everyday place that becomes extraordinary. And it becomes so, I hope, because of my recognition of it. That’s where the artist comes in. That’s what photography’s about: the moment of time, the moment of light, the angle, the color, the patina, the state of the place. And they’re always vanishing.”
Just as Eastman finished talking, we walked in front of Shotgun House, taken in New Orleans in 2005, three months before Hurricane Katrina. The print has been enormously successful—selling out more quickly than any of his works, and for serious money—but, as always with his work, there’s more than just a twinge of sadness to its reality. Eastman first started shooting in New Orleans in 2004 on the suggestion of The Great Deluge author Douglas Brinkley, who had seen Eastman’s Cuba work at an art fair and thought it looked like the Crescent City. Eastman ended up taking three shooting trips to New Orleans, all before the flood, to document what he described as “the slow decay” of the city. He has returned since Katrina, not to shoot but rather just to check in on the city he’d grown close to; as of early 2007, “Shotgun House” was still standing, with a watermark line two-thirds of the way up.
SLUMA was closing soon, and Eastman and I still hadn’t made it to his landscapes and horses, both important parts of his body of work. To get there, we walked past whole other projects: palladium prints of cacti, created with his stepdaughter and cactus enthusiast Lilla Bartko; delicate photos of weeds; sensual photographs of Parisian Rodin sculptures, taken as part of a book project with St. Louis writer William H. Gass, whom Eastman describes as a neighbor, friend and mentor.
In fact, one of the first landscapes we saw when we reached the new gallery was the striking Big Hole Valley, which appears on the cover of Gass’ novella collection Cartesian Sonata. What we see looks like the world’s last log cabin, surrounded by nothing but yellow prairie grass and dirt and sky. Where did it come from? How dead are the people who lived there? “It asks more questions than you could possibly answer,” he told me. Eastman’s fascination with clouds could be seen in other landscapes in the room, including those with light beaming gloriously down, curiously UFO-like, in front of
overlapping mountains.
Skies and landscapes are what brought Eastman to Taos, N.M., in June 1998. After two weeks of unsuccessful shooting, he learned that the skies New Mexico is famous for don’t form their dramatic clouds until mid-July. “The last day I was there,” he said, “there was a horse at dusk, posing almost. And I went up and started taking pictures of it. When I got back, the only thing I really liked was this horse.” Eastman’s wife, Gayle, suggested he pursue the horses as a project. He listened, eventually spending four years shooting horses at a stable between Valley Park and Eureka. Unexpectedly, a project that began by accident would provide his most significant introduction to the wider public; in 2003 Knopf published a handsome monograph, Horses, with more than 100 photographs and essays by Gass and the novelist Jane Smiley.
“When I look at these, the ones that just knock me out still are the portraits,” Eastman said, as we sat on a gallery bench surrounded by the large-scale works, the horses looking almost bronzed. Some are at play, others galloping fast, others still as stone, eyes wide and watery. He called them “beautiful,” which they are, but quickly clarified that it’s the horses that are beautiful, not his photographs. Although he sounded sincere, his comment underplayed the amount of work he put in to make the photographs after he shot them, using Photoshop—a “darkroom” he gratefully credits with providing an unlimited window of time to make traditional adjustments—to bring out a slice of light, to accentuate a particular muscle of a particular horse.
What has photographing horses meant for Eastman’s career? It’s meant having a substantial book in its fifth printing (not lucrative, but not out of print, the fate of his earlier book, The Forgotten Forest, about Forest Park). It’s meant having Ralph Lauren buy 35 works from the project, initially for his most upscale international stores, then for his private collection. It’s meant getting an email from Sheryl Crow saying, Hey, I’d like to buy one of those horse pictures. But however magisterial—which they are—they remain photographs of animals, traditionally not a subject that provides an artist with the respect and recognition of elite galleries, museums and collectors.
His next book might.
It is six weeks after our SLUMA tour, and I’m with Eastman inside the home he and his wife share in University City’s Parkview neighborhood. The exhibition had closed, and the timing of my visit turned out to be opportune. Earlier that morning, a FedEx courier showed up with the author’s copy of Eastman’s new book, Vanishing America: The End of Main Street, Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments. The mostly mellow man was elated.
“Sorry, I just can’t stop,” he says, as we paged through the book: a donut shop under a giant JESUS sign in St. Louis; a melancholic juke-joint doorway in Memphis; the forlorn Main Street of Dubuque. “This is me,” he says. “The horses was me, too, but it was an anomaly. It was just a period of my life where I was photographing landscapes and a horse appeared. This one, though, is my work. This is what I’ve been doing all along.”
It is, to be clear, the fine-art work he’s been doing all along. Concurrently, though—up until about eight years ago—Eastman was making most of his living on commercial projects. In the early part of the 1970s, he earned $5 a photo for a local free weekly, which at the time was a fine support for his life on the Loop. Soon he was shooting a few covers for a previous iteration of this magazine, which helped get his name out in the community. He then moved into agency work—Stolz, Kenrick and, later, a big break with Core (the only one of the three still around). As his name grew, so did the projects: a Kangaroo shoes ad which ended up in GQ, brewery shoots for A-B and Miller, two campaigns for Jack Daniel’s, a highly profitable shoot for Marlboro (Leo Burnett paid him more than 10 grand a day, and he managed to bum a smoke from the Marlboro Man).
Eastman has known fine-arts photographers who couldn’t believe he would sink so low to do commercial work and commercial photographers who wondered why he went off to spend weekends shooting close-ups of cacti. But he’s comfortable with both and indeed still speaks well of some of his favorite commercial work, like dairy farmers in Wisconsin and California for Monsanto and cowboys on a Utah ranch for Carhartt (“Most of them wore Carhartt, anyway”). With his best commercial work being recognized in industry bibles like Communication Arts, Eastman was entering a niche: no models, no art director, no stylists, no fuss. The Republic of Tea called him up for a corporate book project—traveling the world photographing the history of tea—but the plans fizzled, representative of larger industry changes. Agencies, particularly in the year after the 2001 attacks, began trimming their budgets and shelving these ambitious, trust-the-artist campaigns. For Eastman, this downturn led to a “gradual, natural transition” into making a living in the fine arts. By that point, his reputation continued to rise on a national level, for both commercial and fine-art work: several covers for Time (including a portrait of an African-American student in U. City’s Flynn Park for a story on segregation), an assignment for Life, the Horses book, entry into the collections of museums like the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Saint Louis Art Museum. Also important: His work was beginning to sell for more money, with photographs from Cuba starting to fetch up to $3,000 and select horse photographs reaching $15,000.
Eastman walks me through his house, first passing through a kitchen whose table bears not one, but two books on Willie Nelson; down into the basement, which houses his darkroom and a 44-inch wide-format printer (on which he prints his horse and landscape photographs); and finally upstairs to his third-floor office, which has a high-end scanner (which he feeds with his 4- by 5-inch negatives) and a giant Mac on which he spends hours transforming the raw scanned-in image data into—some might say back into—what he remembers seeing out in the world when he shot it. Old cameras he’s collected look down on the work space from a shelf near the ceiling.
Up on this third floor of a large house, on a quiet street in the middle of the country, Eastman can cut a somewhat lonely figure. He’s self-taught, and although he has appeared at some receptions and fundraisers related to his work, he’s not associated with any MFA program or universities. When asked if it was frustrating not having an official mentor, he thinks for a bit and answers from another direction: “When you start off, you’re so impressionable. It’s very easy to be overpowered by your influences.” Later, he adds that he was shaped by his absorption in the images and writings of Edward Weston, whom he calls “the best kind of mentor—one who isn’t alive.”
I mention that a young art student and framer at the local ArtMart told me proudly that the store has framed some Eastmans in the past. “That’s nice,” he says, admitting that such recognition, whether from strangers or the arts community, comes rarely. “You want to have an effect on where you live, but there’s so much politics. There are all the academics who don’t want to share their influence—as if it’s unlimited. So you wind up getting isolated. I’m not with anything. I don’t really belong to anything here. So when you find out you really are having a significant influence on somebody, it makes you feel good.”
On the subject of St. Louis, Eastman’s perspective comes from someone who’s lived his whole life here, but whose life as an artist takes him around the world. “I think we have a poor self-image as a city,” he says. “I’m all over the place, and wherever I am, they ask me where I’m from. And I say I’m from St. Louis, and they don’t know St. Louis, so they want a cue from you. You could put your head down and say, ‘Yeah, I know, I lived in New York for two months once ...’ Or you could just stare at them and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis’ and not say anything because there’s nothing to say—it’s just where you live; it has good things and bad things. What I say is, ‘I’m from St. Louis. I love it. It’s one of the great American cities, and people don’t know about it, and I’m happy about that. The cost of living’s low. We live next to the most beautiful park. My daily commute is from the first floor to the third floor. I love it.’”
So what’s the problem? “I think for the most part,” he continues, “people don’t feel that way, and it reflects badly on them and the city. The fact that nobody goes, ‘Ahh, St. Louis. What a great city.’ St. Louisans don’t say that. They usually put their head down and feel bad. So that gets translated into ‘You’re from St. Louis, how good can you be?’ Or ‘He’s just a St. Louisan.’ The other thing is, we are provincial. I remember someone said to me once, ‘You’re one of the better artists in St. Louis.’ And I turned to him and said, ‘Dude, I’m shooting for a lot higher than that.’ It’s nothing personal, but that’s not my goal. I live in St. Louis, but I also live in this world. I want my work to measure up to the best.” He pauses. “I don’t want to be ... But there is that attitude, that provincialism, and it’s rare that somebody breaks through that. It’s rare that you get anything but resentment or competitiveness, jealousy, envy.”
When I speak with people who know Eastman professionally, the St. Louis issue comes up every time, sometimes with no prompting. David Mesker, the collector who helped send Eastman to Europe, says that at one point he tried to get the local arts institutions more interested in Eastman, but the fact that he was local seemed to be held against him. “OK, that’s fine,” Mesker says. “You don’t try to persuade somebody against their will. You just think some day the truth will out. And I think it’s pretty well getting there.” When I ask Petruta Lipan, the SLUMA curator, where Eastman stands in the larger international art scene, she starts in on an answer, then stops: “Just because he is from St. Louis doesn’t necessarily mean that he is not a great artist of international caliber.” (Eventually, she puts Eastman in the ranks of the much more widely acclaimed Germans Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky.) I ask Duane Reed, whose Clayton gallery has represented Eastman since the “Horses” exhibition in 2003, how Eastman fares with the city’s most important collectors. “He’s treated differently,” he says. “It’s very hard. An unfortunate reality—and it’s not just St. Louis, but it’s probably in every smaller city—is that an artist who lives there and is represented by a gallery that would be perceived as a local gallery gets pegged.” Post-Dispatch art critic David Bonetti has written of Eastman’s work before (both admiringly and critically), yet he didn’t review the SLUMA retrospective, the most significant show of arguably St. Louis’ most significant photographer. In an email, Bonetti attributes this to logistics: “SLUMA never sends me any press materials—either in email form or by letter—about what they are doing. So I am in the dark unless I drive by and try to read the banners while in motion.”
Eastman’s neighbor Gass says that the two have spoken often of the challenges of living here—often enjoyably—while trying to be an international artist not limited by choice of residence. “It is depressing for somebody like Michael to be in a place like this,” Gass says, “which really doesn’t appreciate what he does. If he wanted to make a big splash, he could go to New York, but then he would be involved with the whole commercial and political part of it. I think by staying here, he has kept his integrity, the integrity of his work.”
Could Eastman make a big splash? Some arts-watchers I speak with suggest that Eastman’s work is too painterly—too pretty, even with such run-down subjects—to be in fashion. When one scans the names of the more prominent international photographers, Robert Polidori seems closest in tone and subject (both have shot New Orleans and Cuba); but Polidori lives out east (not in the Midwest) and shoots for The New Yorker (not Life). Andreas Gursky does make large-scale panoramas, but they’re contemporary in subject (99-cent shops, not creaky cabins) and they carry a kind of sheen (not the patina of Eastman’s world).
In time, I realize that wondering about Eastman’s “place” is unproductive; it becomes too easy to put the photographers ahead of the photographs. Which is why, in the end, this month’s publication of Vanishing America may be one of the most important moments in Eastman’s career since he had those business cards printed more than 30 years ago. The book shows St. Louis—Red Ribbon Shoe Repair in Clayton, the sign’s shadow on the wall cutting diagonally across a gumball machine; a baptismal stage in University City; Ted Drewes at night—but it’s larger than one city.
So, of course, is Eastman. And his projects continue to take him far and wide: He’s well into a new series of abstracts; he’s exploring how light plays on drapes (inspired in part by the Tivoli’s red velvet); he’s trying to shoot all the country’s Martin Luther King Boulevards; he’s thinking ahead to his next book, most likely on Cuba. In the midst of all these projects, does he do anything just for fun? Fly-fishing. Where? Montana. Why? “I like watching the water,” he says. “You have to watch the water.”
The coming months will be significant for Eastman—both because of the release of Vanishing America and because his work seems to be ready for a rise in value. Christie’s London sold the Cuba photograph Green Interior last November for more than $20,000 (the seller bought it three years ago for about $3,000), and the auction house is estimating another work, Isabella’s Two Chairs With Laundry, at $30,000 to $45,000 for a sale this month. How will the photographer handle such success? “He’s been out of fame’s glare long enough,” says his frequent collaborator Gass, “so when it comes, it will simply stir him.”
But right now, on this third floor of his house where he makes the photographs he shoots, does Eastman feel satisfied?
“I am on the verge of getting the kind of recognition that I’ve spent my life working toward,” he says. “And I’m glad it’s taken a lifetime to do it, because the only thing I had control over was the work. And when it was accepted, or not—usually not, especially early—my response could have been to become bitter; I’ve seen many people do that. I could’ve been in denial. I could have stopped. My response has been ‘The only thing I can control is the work. And the only thing I can do is make it better.’ And so, fortunately for me—and I didn’t always feel this way—not being recognized nationally or internationally has been one of the advantages. I’ve seen so many people who have gotten recognition early in their career lose the one thing that makes an artist better, and that’s doubt. If you have no doubt—if you think everything you do is great—then you get no better. My response has been to get better, to work harder, to try different things, to push myself. And so now, I get to a place at 61 where I’m hopefully getting recognized, especially for this book. Because this book is really about 30 years of my life. It’s the stuff I hold dearest. It’s rewarding to get recognized for that. And it’s rewarding to have gone through this process, and struggle, that I’ve gone through. It’s called ‘life’s work’ for a reason.”
Vanishing America: The End of Main Street is being published by Rizzoli, with an introduction by Douglas Brinkley and text by William H. Gass. Select images from the book will be on view at the Duane Reed Gallery (7513 Forsyth, 314-862-2333, duanereedgallery.com) from May 9 to June 16. The gallery will host a reception and book signing on Friday, May 16, from 5 to 8 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public.
