Michael Eastman captures a darker, stranger America on film as it disappears before his lens
By Stefene Russell
"The Christmas tree has a function,” Michael Eastman explains. We’re touring his basement studio, where he and his stepdaughter, Lilla, are working together to produce large-scale palladium prints, a chemically and technically complicated process. “The amount of light that comes through those branches is what’s allowed when you’re working with a piece of paper that’s been exposed,” he says. That is, bathed in light inside the industrial film-exposure unit behind the tree. “That machine is from one of those type-production houses, before everything went digital,” Eastman says. Though he digs retro photo-processing equipment, Eastman doesn’t snub technology. The negative that’s on the exposure unit was created upstairs, on a computer; he tweaks images in Photoshop.
“It’s neat, because I’m one of these guys that’s old enough to do the old traditional stuff, but I still do the digital,” he says. “Most of the old guys turn their back on that and say, ‘Oh, it’s not the way it was.’”
Eastman does, though, have a use for a certain kind of nostalgia. His prints, which range from swooshing stretches of Montana sky to the crumbling interiors of Havana apartments, have the power to make you feel as if you’re on the verge of recalling a very important memory, though you’re not sure what it is. This month, the Duane Reed Gallery shows prints from Eastman’s America series, which captures a landscape that’s shrinking as fast as a sugar cube in tonic: beauty parlors, chop suey joints, roadside attractions, Odd Fellows halls. As a slideshow of these images flash across his computer screen, Eastman notes where the building was shot and whether it’s still there: “That’s gone; that’s gone. That one’s still there—but that one’s not.”
Asked if he thinks that recent interest in older buildings will help slow the destruction of these kinds of spaces, he shakes his head, bemused. “I don’t have a lot of hope. We like our convenience.” That grim knowledge has him, as the slide show continues to run, plotting another road trip down south for the weekend to shoot more buildings that, chances are, won’t be there this time next year.
Michael Eastman: America opens at the Duane Reed Gallery (7513 Forsyth, 314-862-8557, www.duanereedgallery.com) on September 15, with a reception 5–8 p.m.; the exhibit, which incorporates both video and photography, hangs until October 14. To see more of Michael Eastman’s work, go to www.eastmanimages.com.
