The Brooklyn Rail

At first pass, The New American West: Photography in Conversation, curated by Carrie Scott and Howard Greenberg at Pierre Yovanovitch Mobilier New York strikes one as a squarely photo-biographical venture. Although there are numerous artists exhibited—Liliane De Cock, Wim Wenders, Jungjin Lee, Frank Gohlke, Joel Meyerowitz, Edward Burtynsky, Mary Ellen Mark, Diane Arbus, Dennis Stock, Esther Bubley, Ansel Adams, Danny Lyon, Mark Citret, Bruce Davidson, and Edward Weston—the exhibition is buttressed by Maryam Eisler and Alexei Riboud’s works, all of which were captured during a 2024 journey that found the two high-school friends reunited after nearly forty years. Driving through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah in March, the two would stop to pace sparsely populated locales and landscapes, advancing in opposite directions and capturing motley abandoned and rust-bitten cars, fanning plains, vacated inns, movie marquees, and neon signs flanking tattered building facades. Eisler’s foreshortened neon signs, reminiscent of Robert Cottingham’s paintings of closely observed low-rise rooftops and alienated office buildings, are particularly impressive. These include Eisler’s The Palace (ex movie theater-turned private residence), Marfa, TX; ‘Keep The Lonely Places Lonely’ Signage, Lobo, TX; Hotel Paisano Signage at Dusk, Marfa, TX; “Starr” Signage, El Paso, TX; and Vintage Stardust Motel Signage, US-90, TX, (all works 2024). In all of these photographs, Eisler’s low angle shots are exaggerated, soot-spotted towering vertical billboard letters and the empyreal wisp-clouded heavens vertically domineering over the camera-eye. The works, complemented by long shot and medium view sun-soaked boarded buildings and empty parking spaces, indicate a common phenomenon: the ubiquitous American “ghost town,” the moniker for industrious population centers that have become fossilized husks, entirely or almost entirely abandoned and thus set in a state of petrified decay. This was the byproduct of decades of corporate monopolization conjoined by interstate highway policy like the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which found these towns, whose resources were soon fully extracted, bypassed by tourists and truckers alike.

In turn, much of Eisler’s work is de-peopled, though she does indicate the presence of a cap-donned woman in Silhouette with Vintage Chair, Marfa, TX, where a shadow of the anonymous woman’s torso dovetails with the titular lawn chair’s stiles. The work is more of a formalist study of shadows on objects than it is of any person’s presence, as the inferred figure’s fractional arm and thread of hair render her ubiquitous. Abandoned Swimming Pool, Marfa, TX, too, foregrounds the dance of shadows rather than the implied objects to which they belong, their horizontal cast doubling the framing device of an incised rectangle through which we can see the dried pool. Curiously, Eisler’s Concrete Lightwell, UT utilizes another of Cottingham’s visual devices, evinced in the latter’s “Component” series, which homes in on typefaces and railroad boxcars from so intimate a vantage that they are reduced into planar interactions. In Eisler’s excellent photograph, the azure sky is set into continuity with a partially illuminated alabaster tower. The triangulated aperture flows into the oblong-shaped celestial vault and juxtaposed by a swarming, segmented darkness that swallows the pictorial subject, turning the latter into an oblique chevron. These formalist experiments are significantly more interesting than the more documentary-attuned images, such as White Sands at Dusk I, NM, which, though visually pleasing, resounds of Ansel Adams’s bygone romantic West.

Riboud’s photographs are similarly galvanized by a formalist proclivity. In Central El Paso. El Paso, Texas, USA; Los Cerrillos, New Mexico, USA; and Car wreck, Shafter Ghost Town, Texas, USA, Riboud captures an isolated tract of a building or placard along a slightly tilted vortex plane. Unlike Eisler, Riboud does not take up the foreshortened vantage but captures his subjects from a more intimate distance, flooding the edges of his pictorial space with brick walls, shop signposts, or highway signs. His camera lingers on those fragments where painted walls chip or have unevenly distributed texture, their gradients endowed with a sense of time-worn haziness.

Eisler and Riboud’s rote titles give the impression of anthropologists devoted to straightforward documentation, contra the mythos-involved Romantic culling the Americana imagery exemplified by colorful Route 66 capsule diners, angular Ozark Trail Highway borrow pits, or the high-riding, desert-cast adventure typified by road films like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). But the inclusion of two of Wenders’s works from his 1983 “Written in the West” series, shot as preparatory on-site studies for Paris, Texas (1984), clarify that Eisler and Riboud are conscious of this antecedent mythos as a mythos—one baptized in liberating miasma and adventurous exploits, including the East Coast adolescent shorn from their insipid suburbia past, inventing themselves anew by way of a California dream. Presumably, the inclusion of Ansel Adams and Dennis Stock’s work is to typify the West of grand expanses, all-American family vacations, intrepid exploration, and high Hollywood. These fantasies, which reached their aesthetic zeniths in Americana literature and cinema of the seventies, were preceded by a different mythos—that of the nineteenth century Gold Rush and its concomitant stories of prospectors landing riches. Wenders’s projects are fully aware of these constructed narratives. Like Eisler and Riboud’s photographs, Paris, Texas sports a taxonomical title and both Wenders’s film and his anterior “Written in the West” photography series feature estranged landscapes, with signs and advertisements functioning as ironic remarks. Wenders’s photograph, Ave Dollars, Texas (1983), pictures a detached camper and two highway signs, one reading “$AVE$$” and the other advertising cigarettes and soda. The latter advertisement is partially occluded by the corroded camper. Wenders’s work clearly primes Riboud’s, which also utilizes parceled advertising phrases in service of this distancing effect, treating these catchwords as hollow relics of fictional narratives past.

In one of Riboud’s most interesting works, Los Cerrillos, New Mexico, USA, a cracked and oxidized car window is punctuated by a decal sticker of a pin-up woman adorned with a halo and wings. Eisler and Riboud’s treatment of the American West as a post-mythic ethereal expanse is underscored by a suite of recurrent leitmotifs, including foregrounded shuttered metal store front gates and tattered cars. Very occasionally, the two do introduce subjects, as is the case as Eisler’s portrait of James Magee, which risks broadening the project, veering in the direction of anthropological photodocumentary at the expense of the more honed and unified study of desiccation in the American Southwest. The strongest images are those where the latter is clearly the focus and in which the framing device is rendered part and parcel of the pictorial field, such as Eisler’s Abandoned Swimming Pool, Marfa, TX and Riboud’s Weary billboard with missing parts north of El Paso in the vast plains of TX, where the rectangular “missing part” of the billboard is analogous to the camera’s viewfinder. Such works underscore the means by which American myths are created, a thesis shared by Kevin Starr, in his 1998 locus classicus, “The Gold Rush and the California Dream,” which describes the Gold Rush as a “mythic formulation,” meaning that “the Gold Rush is not something back there in time” but “is everywhere around us, even in its tragic consequences.” Similarly, as historian Louis S. Warren describes in his 2023 article, “The California Dream: History of a Myth,” it was art that was responsible for the creation of the “California Dream.” Eisler and Riboud’s photographic images of barred Southwestern “ghost towns” serve as the aesthetic counterpart for the dream’s epochal contraction.