An exhibition on the Tempe campus documents the boom and bust of Phoenix in a culmination of three years worth of photography fieldwork.
“Phoenix Transect,” a photography exhibition at Northlight Gallery, displays until Nov. 19 the works of Regents Professor Mark Klett and the graduate students from his photography field study course.
Klett’s field study course documents an area along two transect lines in the Phoenix metropolitan area and the lives of residents within the lines.
To start the project, two rough lines were drawn on a map. One followed the Salt River from the east and the Granite Reef Dam to west, ending at the remains of the Arlington Dam south of Buckeye. The other line was drawn from central Phoenix north to Anthem.
Along the lines, students examined the Salt River, where they found unpolluted and polluted areas created by waste water, dried riverbeds, wildlife, new development and older parts of the city in various states of decay.
Klett said the lines were later expanded to included lines of transportation like the light rail and air traffic.
“At times, the lines were based on geographical features like the canals and the recreational areas that dot the city,” he said. “Growth and communities became a focus, having nothing to do with literal transect lines but the more metaphoric lines of connecting human lives.”
Recently, another focus of the project has been the negative side of growth and the foreclosure crisis.
“These are all threads of the narrative that make the city what it is,” Klett said.
Different walls of the gallery contain photographs expressing the multiple subjects of the exhibition; Buckeye’s Verrado, recreation and mobility, foreclosure and the Salt River.
Liz Allen, director of the Northlight Gallery, said she noticed many of the images in the exhibition were photographs of the ground, and these images were kept unframed to depict the experience of wandering along the Salt River.
Students photographed found objects along the river, including a tire, a shoe, an old Polaroid, a headless Barbie doll, an old map and even a copy of the Chicago Tribune from July 1969 with a headline that read “Fly U.S. Flag on the Moon.”
Chad White, a Master of Fine Arts photography student, photographed the Granite Reef recreation area along the Salt River and said he was surprised by the amount of one object he found.
“There was a time I was here, [and] I was taken aback by the number of alcohol containers,” White said.
He decided to take one weekend to photograph all the alcohol beverage containers he could find along the river.
The piece “147 Alcohol Beverage Containers” shows White’s findings in a large grid of photographs displaying the 147 alcohol containers he encountered that weekend along the river.
White said his photographs usually involve cultural and social implications and in this work “the evidence people leave behind defines how they recreate.”
Klett said the ultimate goal of the project was to create a portrait of Phoenix in time.
“It was designed to be a long-term project so that the portrait is continuously changing,” he said. “We ask the question: What will the photographs tell us about this place when seen 50 or
100 years from now?”
Reach the reporter at lpalmisa@asu.edu.
