Number 63 Spring 2016

Contemporary Photography

13 Contemporary Photography12 RPS Contemporary Group Journal

Alien Resident: Searching for San DiegoJulia García Hernández and Stephen Clarke

In 2015 the independent photobook publisher The Velvet Cell released two volumes of Stephen Clarke’s photographs of Southern California’s marts, drive-ins and eateries under the title California Shopfronts. Dominated by signage and the automobile, the sun’s heat is palpable in this small selection of black and white images where people-less sidewalks point to a non-pedestrian culture.(1)

When Clarke arrived on the West Coast in the mid-1980s in the weeks immediately following his degree, he had expected to feel a familiarity with its landscape. Like other British children of his generation growing up in the 1960s and 70s he had absorbed a version of California by watching popular American detective shows. The backdrop to the weekly drama on Charlie’s Angels or Columbo was the bright, blue-skied Sunny State in close up. Onto his childhood picture of California, Clarke had mapped the work of the photo-artists who now informed his practice: Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Lewis Baltz. In Clarke’s portfolio were the markets, arcades and chip shops of the seaside promenade that he had been photographing continuously across Britain in the four years before visiting the USA. The imagery developing was of small-scale, flat-roofed, flat-fronted buildings with homemade signage and an appearance of impermanence: a temporary architecture more akin to the mobile or shed. This was a place photographed out of season in inclement weather and changeable light.(2)

From the summer of 1986 Clarke took up residence for one year in El Cajon, a suburb east of San Diego. This was alien territory: seasonless and sprawling, it was not the place of the ‘close up’. Streets were wide; buildings and landmarks were spread out. Everything that Clarke had imagined he would photograph seemed beyond

reach, in the distance, across roads, parking lots, and scrubland. He needed to learn to navigate San Diego County in order to picture it.

Clarke took casual employment in the photographic industries and became familiar with San Diego as a stage set to tourism and cinema. His first job was as portrait photographer of visitors to the tourist attraction of San Diego’s Old Town, a site of historic importance that had gained the character of a theme park. Later as a photo retoucher he was based in a studio in Miramar, the location for the film Top Gun (1986). As a minilab assistant Clarke collected film and delivered prints to the Naval Base Coronado where the Hotel del Coronado had been the setting for the film Some Like it Hot (1959).

Clarke’s approach to photographing the city and its environs was through simple exploration: he drove, parked up, and walked. On foot he was an oddity, a lone figure. In El Cajon, La Mesa, La Jolla, and over the border in Mexico’s Tijuana, he focused initially on features that were recognisable in their function but extraordinary in their appearance, such as the American mailbox.

As the year progressed Clarke met with San Diego based photographers Philipp Scholz Rittermann and Phel Steinmetz (3). Both offered support and guidance to enable his continued work and practice in the region. Clarke’s photographic trips became interspersed with visits to Steinmetz’s studio, then Professor of Photography at University of California, San Diego. Steinmetz, introduced Clarke to his photographic work and shared his experience of San Diego, encouraging him to apply for the MFA under his tutelage.

By the summer of 1987 Clarke had amassed close to one hundred rolls of film that remained unprocessed until

his return to the UK in the autumn. Revisiting this body of work thirty years on reveals his search for imagery that would resonate with his picturing of the British seaside. Accompanying the motifs that signal the Californian heat such as the cloth-covered car and the palm tree is an abundance of signs designed to attract the attention of drivers-by. Lifelike animals – bears, apes, and cattle – pulled out of their natural habitat are dropped into an environment in a manner that in Britain was reserved for the funfair or the sea facing façades. Titled San Diego Signs some of these images have been shown as part of Carlisle Photo Festival’s touring exhibition Visualising the Animal (2015/16) (4). On the pedestrian-only city streets of Carlisle, in the shopping precinct at Workington, and in the Glasshouses at Durham’s Botanic Gardens, these are creatures displaced by time and place.

1. California Shopfronts has been produced as part of The Velvet Cell’s zine series Chronicles. See: www.thevelvetcell.com2. See article From San Diego to St Helens by Cian Quayle on The Double Negative website: http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2015/10/from-san-diego-to-st-helens-stephen-clarkes-end-of-season/3. Philipp Scholz Rittermann had directed Clarke to Steinmetz. See www.rittermann.com

Phel Steinmetz was known for his collaborations with other artists including Eleanor Antin for her project 100 Boots. Steinmetz died in 2013. Seewww.phelsteinmetzphoto.com

Steinmetz’s work is represented by the Berlin based gallery Silberkuppe and has been shown at the 2016 art fair Independent New York. See: www.silberkuppe.org4. Visualising the Animal was on show in Washington Square, Workington until 9 April 2016, see www.carlislephotofestival.co.uk

From the publication California Shopfronts

From the publication California Shopfronts

15 Contemporary Photography14 RPS Contemporary Group Journal

From the publication California Shopfronts

Unpublished

Unpublished

From the series San Diego Signs