Life on the road: Art Sinsabaugh's Midwest Landscapes

Afterimage, July-August, 2005 by Stephen Longmire

If Edward Hopper had been a photographer, he might have been Art Sinsabaugh. Both are poets of the ordinary, of the inhabited but often unpeopled landscape, sociologists of the visual with a magical realist touch. And both take as opportunities for their pictures the way the world opens itself up to the blind, perpetual gaze of the road.

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The shape of Sinsabaugh's photographs stands out most. They are at once very big and very small, long slender ribbons of asphalt-colored silver the shape and color of the insistently straight Illinois highways and horizons he traced in the 1960s. Whether the view is agricultural or urban, it often seems he is pointing while his arm scans a distant shore. The world is always at arm's length, so you must crane your neck to see it clearly. However small his world may seem, the photographer's view is as large as life and the details are all there.

Nearly 20 inches wide, Sinsabaugh's black and white contact prints are a boast whose machismo only a photographer would understand. Since contact prints require no enlargement these could only be made with a 12 X 20-inch "banquet" camera like the one Sinsabaugh commissioned from the famous Chicago camera manufacturer L. F. Deardorff & Sons, which is on display as part of the retrospective of Sinsabaugh's work currently touring the Midwest. "I enjoy looking at the whole landscape through a camera this size," the photographer told an interviewer late in life, not long before he died of a heart attack in 1983 at age 59. "It gives me the feeling the whole world is mine." (1)

Along with this boast came unparalleled self-effacement. Sinsabaugh's classic Illinois landscapes and cityscapes of the 1960s, long favorites of midwestern landscape photographers, are cropped top and bottom until the prints are just a few inches tall, some little more than an inch. His mammoth camera turns out miniature prints compared to today's standard issue murals, with their grander expectations of size and value. Today, most photographers would scan these long, skinny images into a computer and make digital prints as big as walls. Sinsabaugh's ambitions seem modest by comparison. (An early proponent of photographic editioning, he was hardly blind to the value of his work--which, ironically, is scarce as a result.)

The road, not the wall, is the defining space of his achievement; the linked photographic series, not the individual print, is his vehicle. Sinsabaugh's best pictures resemble the gridded southern Illinois highways they record in shape and color. These were the pathways into his "Midwest Landscapes" of 1961-63, which remains his signature series. It was his great discovery, on which he built but which he never outgrew.

Shortly after he was hired to establish a photography program at the University of Illinois at Champaign in 1959 (he was among the first generation of university photography professors, and a founder of the Society for Photographic Education) Sinsabaugh began exploring the local countryside with his big camera in his car. Amazed at the flatness of the landscape, he honed in on the horizon, trimming his narrow images to the incidents he found there. Many show farms, but they are not about farming. Their's is an automobile perspective, not a tractor's; an observer's, not a participant's. The view is cinematic.

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Endless rows of corn come to an end at the roadside, whipping by like an artist's perspective game. Farms and their outbuildings unfold like small towns. Grain silos and elevators line up alongside the railroad tracks, ready to ship the seed heads of the prairie's latest tall grass to still more distant horizons. Trains smoke by in the distance, as small as toys. Always there is the invisible highway, explaining how pioneers, including this one, made their way into this landlocked place. Now there is a carnival by the roadside, now a subdivision. The careful pruning of the frame mimics the farmer's care for his fence lines, edges of meaning both.

A short documentary film, American Horizons: The Photographs of Art Sinsabaugh (2004), included in the exhibition shows the photographer's copious notes on his subjects, including their precise locations, but Sinsabaugh's titles are as uninformative as possible. Midwest Landscape #24 (1961), to cite just one, shows an intersection of road and rail lines, a forest of leaning power line poles providing its only vertical lines. As in Hopper's paintings of run-down New England towns, the T-shaped poles are crosses, reminders that human markings on the land sketch a spiritual geography as unconsidered as a crucifixion--or a rural road numbering scheme.

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In the mid-1960s Chicago was being bulldozed and rebuilt to make room for a new system of expressways, displaying the efficiency of the first Mayor Daley's political machine. Sinsabaugh, a New Jersey native, returned to the city that first captured his imagination when he came to study photography at its renowned Institute of Design. Thanks to the G. I. Bill, in 1946 he was one of Harry Callahan's first and best students in the nation's first degree-granting photography program--where Sinsabaugh began to teach right after graduating. His previous efforts to photograph Chicago failed to rival Callahan's, but this open heart surgery the metropolis was undergoing opened it up to him. Sinsabaugh arranged a roving documentary commission from the city's planning department, which granted him unlimited access from 1964-66 in exchange for prints.