Like the sun-baked buildings that dot the desert landscape, the inhabitants of Globe and Miami, Arizona, survive gracefully, showing their age. The two cities live next to each other huddled in the hills. The heat that punishes Phoenix spares the high desert. In the Hill Country of Central Arizona, residents find themselves at a crossroads between national trends and their desire to control and define their community. Taken during the summer of 1995, these photographs reveal an America still rural and conservative.
This area came into existence when the San Carlos Apache Nation ceded valuable portions of its reservation to powerful mining interests. Crushed, fired, and processed, the copper extracted from the red and green rock created wealth for multinational corporations for more than a hundred years. The white sticky powder heaped high along the highway is part of the regions legacy. Arizona's Cobre (Copper) Valley would be a mecca for tourists, if not for the scarred hills.
My photographs evoke nostalgia for Americana, remnants you still find scattered in remote and untouched parts of our country. When I first came to Globe, I was struck by the eerie silence at night. There were no sirens or gunfire from the barrio to awaken me. The stars sparkled brightly, the air smelled clean, and, like the 50s in California, you could purchase leaded gas because no smog regulations exist. With so few people in such a large area, pollution laws were lax. Los Angelinos can be envious of some things in the Cobre Valley.
During the process of taking these photographs, I recalled my youth in San José, California. I remembered fondly how San José once had a downtown with small friendly theaters, department stores, and a sense of community. I remembered when prune orchards lined Main Street and Intel, Apple, and Silicon Graphics were fantasy. Everything changed with the invention of the integrated circuit. That is when San José was radically and forever transformed into Silicon Valley, the center of high technology. My hometown has since grown ponderous and fruit orchards have given way to bland warehouses and suburban strip malls.
Even though my hometown has evolved into a big city, I find solace knowing that small communities like Globe and Miami remain the same. My images of these communities document not only the environment, but also reveal its beauty by abstracting the details. I focus on the texture of a building, emphasizing the elements of the photograph that translate into the subtle but essential tonal values.
I rejoice in photographing sun-baked buildings with peeling paint; they give evidence to history's passing. The faded coffee shop sign and Gibson's Clothing Store remind me of a bygone era, before the new Wal-Mart took away their customers. My work documents a precarious rural America whose sites have become curios to be immortalized on photographic paper, their value increasing with every new mall erected in Seattle, Austin, and Cleveland. This vanishing America gains value by remaining the same.
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The images in this series were shot on a Hasselblad 500CM/150 T*. The negatives were scanned on a Scitex Leaf Scanner.
Please feel free to contact me should you have any questions about my pictures or text. I look forward to hearing from you.
The photogrphic series is located on my web site: http://www.jmmgarza.com/html/Gibsons.html-30-
