Book Review: Memories of a Distant America
©Arnaud Montagard
By Micaela Bahn
Arnaud Montagard’s new book, The Road Not Taken draws us in with an image that resembles an Edward Hopper painting––a silver-haired man sits alone by a window on a ferry, half-swallowed in shadow. His back is to us, head bent slightly beneath a sunhat and a sense of quietude pervades. The soft saturation of blues, tans, and greens gives the impression of an oil painting, rather than a photograph. Like Hopper, Montagard creates something communal in the shared witnessing of loneliness. The photographer allows us to be alone, together.
© Arnaud Montagard
The Road Not Taken compiles portraits of longing and nostalgia in classic American stills of old motels, roadside diners, and long-nosed cars from decades past. He captures a sense of stillness in the American landscape that one fears is all but lost from modern life. Leah Ollman’s introduction to the book calls attention to Montagard’s respect for time in his images, “The most evident presence of the present in them is in the vitality of their love for the past, the active yearn toward what already lies behind.” That yearning for a bygone moment is captured in the elegant shadows that stretch across Montagard’s photographs.
© Arnaud Montagard
© Arnaud Montagard
Still, the present subtly permeates certain photographs and creates an arresting cognitive dissonance that draws you in further. One photograph depicts a gas station in the American West at dusk. A large, fake rooster stands atop the gas station overhang with a sign that advertises in thick bubble letters the “River Island Deli: Pizza - Burgers - Sandwiches.” White-gold light bathes the deserted landscape and catches in the dust that rises near the road. Mundane, timeless, yet dazzling. The only clue to indicate the year is the gas prices posted nearby.
Another photograph captures an old-fashioned diner, replete with pastel blue and white leather booths, Heinz Ketchup wall art, and the unremarkable presence of a woman and two very blonde little girls. The picture could have been taken at any point in the last forty years, if not for the iPhone which lies face down on the tabletop. It is the only trace of the digital era in the entire collection and its disorientation causes the eye to linger on the scene at hand. Here, the photographer reveals his own subjectivity through a private moment he shares with the girl in the frilled purple dress. A paper diner hat sits tilted on her head and she lifts a giant cup of coke to her lips; she stares accusingly, perhaps a bit confused, at the man behind the camera. In the foreground, the edge of the table where Montagard sits places the viewer in his shoes. The viewer becomes the recipient of the girl’s accusatory look. We too are implicated as strangers who merely pass through and peer in at small-town America.
© Arnaud Montagard
Montagard is himself an outsider to the countryside he lovingly photographs. Born in France in 1991, the photographer later moved to Brooklyn, NY where he is currently based. Montagard’s road trip, which brought him from New York City to the West, is like a palimpsest of the journeys taken by the realist painters and beat poets that came before him. His focus on the beauty of ordinary detail is like that of an Allan Ginsberg poem. His sun-bleached pastels are informed by William Egglestone’s photographs. Then, of course, there are the echoes of Hopper’s solitary figures, at once strangers and yet so familiar. But what distinguishes Montagard’s classic visual themes is his undeniably unique style of image-making. He captures an awe of our past icons, a reverence of their myth––glass coke bottles, metallic cars halted in their motion, illuminated theater marquees, gaudy motel exteriors. Montagard’s The Road Not Taken is a work of devotion to a dreamy America in its twilight.
