Our Town by Michael von Graffenried published by Steidl © Michael von Graffenried

In 1710, Christoph von Graffenried of Bern, Switzerland began forging a little city in North Carolina named New Bern. 296 years later, Christoph’s lineage, Michael von Graffenried, traveled to the humble town to experience the product of his ancestor’s work. Over the course of 15 years, Graffenreid photographed the North Carolina town and its inhabitants, capturing their nuances and many contradictions. Our Town is the culminating document of these visits to New Bern, which ultimately reveals the fabric of American small town life and realities of race and diversity in America through still images.

While photographing the civil war in Algeria, Graffenreid encountered obstacles preventing him from taking the pictures he desired. In order to catch elusive moments of a war-torn Algeria, he ditched his conventional camera for a Widelux panoramic camera that allowed him to discreetly photograph the happenings on the street. This format and technique has the power to capture ultra wide shots and multiple stories per image. When photographing the people and places of New Bern, Graffenreid continued using these techniques, putting the viewer in the same rooms as his subjects, creating fully realized scenes with an undeniable je ne sais quoi.

Our Town distills the essence of time and community in a small American town by showing moments unremarkable yet undeniably idiosyncratic. In each page, Graffenreid’s time in the town is palpably felt as we turn from a day with a rifle collector giving a shooting lesson, a black family funeral, years worth of late night parties, and countless haircuts. Townspeople crop up multiple times over the span of the publication, showing their fixture within the fabric of the town and Graffenreid’s flourishing relationships with them.

There is a separation between the races of New Bern that intersects on occasion, but the town’s segregation is noticeable. Graffenreid represents all facets of the town, offering glimpses into the experience of living in New Bern regardless of race. A gathering of elderly white people sits in a town square with foldable chairs, basking in a slowly fading summer dusk. In another set of images, a black family enjoys a dinner in a brightly lit dining hall. The town’s football team and cheerleaders are multiracial, fighting for the same cause, while white policemen arrest black men in the streets and confederate flags run high next to a trailer park. In one outlandish albeit poignant moment, army men walk in an indoor pool, participating in a training exercise while swimmers embark on their own less militarized swimming practice.

The law leaks into the bedrock of the residents of New Bern, cropping up towards the end of the book with Trump signs and rifle collections owned by white residents. Graffenreid weaves a story of increasing consciousness of police brutality in these dynamic moments. The book’s parting pages offer looks into some of the first Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, illustrating a culminating moment of Graffenreid’s time. Paradoxically, a book about his ancestry’s mark on the world becomes far more, metastasizing into a new phase as life tends to.

Graffenreid’s sweeping panoramic scenes of New Bern capture moments of rest with underlying tension— a boy sitting in his car in the setting sun, a man peering out his bedroom window— a rifle placed on the foot of a queen sized bed. The images contain a gravitas— a crispness comparable to the snapshot memory of walking down the sidewalk and seeing the fireworks of life crackle until they one day blaze in a fire. Graffenreid does not show us the fire in the form of an explosion. He shows it boiling underground— the powers that rumble just beneath our feet.

Jul 8 Book Review: Our Town

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Jul 8 Exhibition Review: ”Yet, Only Voice Echoed“ at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art

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