LONDON.- In this latest collection of photographs, taken over the last forty-plus years, Joan Myers turns her lens to the contemporary American West. In so doing, she turns our conception of western landscapes and the life contained within them upside down, revealing the changes the region has undergone over the last half-century.
Her perspective is at once elegiac and ironic, capturing the myth and reality of the West, its shaping and appropriation by Hollywood, popular culture, and the ever-present, but fracturing American dream. A larger-than-life statue of a cowboy stands on the same lot with a 1960s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. A man in Wrangler jeans and a cowboy hat sits for his portrait on a dais with a Hopi maiden, cows, and deer made out of barbed wire in front of a curtain featuring a photograph of iconic cliffs and sky. A billboard buffalo stands in a field flanked by red rock cliffs on one side and oil refineries on the other with a sign announcing, “Scenic Areas—Indian Country.” A cardboard John Wayne-lookalike cowboy poses by a fence topped by saddles and a sign that says, “We accept all credit cards.”
The myths surrounding the West are powerful and durable. They define much of how Americans—and others—perceive themselves. Yet if you travel today in the United States west of the 100th meridian, as Myers has been doing for decades, you will see that many of the iconic buildings and scenic views associated with the West have been paved over or disappeared. Those who now live and work in the small towns of rural America are struggling to make ends meet. Often, murals and billboards are all that are left of the mythic past. Working ranches remain, but many of them are now run by corporations.
In deconstructing the pictures, cultural critic Lucy Lippard notes that they “seem to emerge from cracks in American culture. They show us a past that still affects, and reflects, our present, revealing unexpected insights into how the myths of the West were formed and how they relate to reality.”
Joan Myers has been photographing for more than forty-five years, much of the time roaming the American West, but also in places as far-flung as India, The Canary Islands, Antarctica, Java, Sicily, Sardinia, and Hawaii, among others. Her work has been the subject of three Smithsonian exhibitions, more than fifty solo and eight group shows, and ten books, including Fire & Ice: Timescapes, with Kathleen Dean Howe (Damiani 2015), The Persephones, with poet Nathaniel Tarn (Damiani 2016), The Jungle at the Door, with William deBuys (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2012), and Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey (Smithsonian Books 2006).
