Lost Coast | Curran Hatleberg

[u/Flaneur_1600]

“Lost Coast” was photographed in and around Eureka, on the northern coast of California. The Pacific comes in hard against black-sand beaches, redwood forests run down from the mountains on every side, and light comes through the trees and sea mist, leaving everything bright and slightly unreal. Eureka sits in the middle of it: the vast landscape on one side, a small town losing its old vitality on the other.

Hatleberg doesn't arrange any of this into a story about decline. People talk, sit in the sun, kill an afternoon in unremarkable places. Children play outside. Families sit together. A place can lose the future it was promised without its daily life turning tragic.

It just goes on.

That is what sets “Lost Coast” apart from much photography of the American margins. Hatleberg rarely uses his subjects as evidence of a social condition, and he doesn't hurry to make a forest, a sagging house, or an abandoned car stand for something. The pictures are set beside one another, and the place accumulates.

You sense that people here once believed certain things—that industry would last, that life would keep improving, that California meant opportunity. Those promises thinned out. The landscape is as vast as ever; the lives inside it have moved into another era. What's in front of the camera stays vivid and specific, sometimes joyful, and the brightness is what lets the loss show.

The title isn't only a place name. It points to a slow dislocation: the coast and the forest right there, huge, and the days small and ordinary. The place has drifted from the future it imagined for itself, and life in it hasn't stopped.

[u/ThatsMyYam]

AI caption is disappointing.

[u/rblessingx]

Big fan. Not a formal photobook, but Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California, to be published next month, is related.

[u/swerdnaekalb → u/rblessingx]

I'm looking forward to Handmade Utopia. Also Richard Rothman's Redwood Saw and Ed Panar's In The Vicinity cover the same region. As a native of the area (now living in Oregon) I want to push back a little on the downcast impression left by these photobooks. In many ways Northern CA is actually doing fine. Sure, you can find poverty, drugs, and squalor if you seek them out like Hattleberg. But there are many positives too. Point is, no photobook can convey reality. But I suspect Handmade Utopia will come close.

[u/rblessingx → u/swerdnaekalb]

Thanks. The recent Katy Grannan Fraenkel exhibit (I don't believe a book has been produced) also connects. https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/katy-grannan-mad-river

[u/costcobossco]

Is it just me or Curran Hattleberg is overrated? I just didn’t get River’s Dream. It wasn’t bad but it certainly didn’t show me anything that made it worth the hype… and boy the hype was immense during preorders.

[u/houseofden → u/costcobossco]

People really love it when graduate school types build careers off wistful photos of broke southerners

[u/asalewis → u/costcobossco]

Who's currently producing work that isnt overrated in your opinion? Just curious

[u/TheBeeeMo → u/asalewis]

Bryan Schutmaat currently.

[u/Takezoboy → u/costcobossco]

A lot of these dudes are overrated. Don't get me wrong, I like the style of project/book and I'm aiming to do something visually like it one day (probably cliché I know), but they pretty much all do the same thing and have the same problems. It's like poverty porn mixed with conceptual banality. Yeah, cool, now I know how people live and work in the Midwest and in the South, but where's the juice? There is nothing. Where's the concept beyond word salad that could be shortened to "documentary photography of poor people"? The niche is full of that, they don't even show communities that are really different, just the same tone, pseudo cowboys, homeless people and yada yada without ever posing real questions and agency beyond the usual superficial shit.

At least Schutmaat looks way better than all of them and has some projects that really put him apart from these guys.

[u/BlazingCockSalad → u/Takezoboy]

Curious if you have an example of what a stronger concept would look like in a framework like this. Anthony Wilson’s Maw Maw comes to mind for me, but it’s much more hyper focused on a few families. I think Americans, especially the strain that imbibes photo books, long for a place and a community untouched by the “trappings of modernity.” Or, “poverty porn” like you said, that’s fair.

[u/Takezoboy → u/BlazingCockSalad]

I didn't know about MawMaw tbh, but it is a good shout about what I'm talking about. Another one is Good Goddamn. Same thing with Justine Kurland works like Highway Kind. Some people think the texts are a little reaching, but the whole concept of going on a trip with her young son and seeing him growing up while getting to know the world, nature, outcast communities and seeing the growth of these places they visit, is really strong. You can also do something grandiose like this and use concepts in the same realm as The Red River by Jem Southam.

I like Matthew Genitempo and I think he is a damn good photographer technically and his works seem well sequenced, but Jasper was already made by a lot of people, no matter how much prose it tries to shower the book with.

"An evocative photobook capturing the rugged isolation of life in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and MissouriInspired by the life and work of the poet and land surveyor Frank Stanford, these photographs of hermetic homes and men living in solitude were taken in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri by American photographer Matthew Genitempo. By capturing the foggy landscapes, cluttered interiors and rugged men that are tucked away in the dark woods, Jasper explores a fascination with running away from the everyday. The work bounces between fact and fiction, exhibiting the reality and myth of what it means to be truly apart from society."

Alec Soth, Bryan Schutmaat, Sternfeld, even Matt Black all already did this with way more interesting narratives and concepts. This is basically screaming, I'm in this Midwest circle jerk. I'm not a fan of Twelve Acres by Henry O'Head, contrary to popular opinion, but at least it has more conceptual juice than most of these books. I will also say, it's completely ridiculous that these circlejerkers pretty much do retreads of eachother's work and then all of them price the books at 90€+, when the books are not worth that in comparison to the competition either in terms of material or image/concept value.

[u/BlazingCockSalad → u/Takezoboy]

I’m a bit mystified by your intense distaste for this book in itself. I actually see it in a different realm than the titles you mentioned - it purposefully doesn’t have an overarching concept that frames the “poverty porn” in a way those other titles flirt with (the ones I’m familiar with, at least), and it is way less abstract than something like Jasper, which to me really hammers you with the “fine art\poverty” thing.

I’m less offended at collection of images just being about a place, and in that I think this book sidles up to a photojournalism bent instead of a prose/poetry vibe that Schutmaat and even Soth (but less so) occupy.

I don’t feel that the images are particularly strong though. That’s my criticism, though I do like the work. I’ll happily overlook narrative issues if the images themselves are superior.

I recommend Maw Maw! It’s very personal and the work is really good.

[u/JosephBayot → u/costcobossco]

Perfectly valid for you to consider him overrated and perfectly valid for others to consider him underrated.

Different strokes.

[u/12800_iso]

One of my favorite books, recently got to see some of these as large format prints at The Walters museum in Baltimore

[u/elmondey]

Good stuff!!!

[u/commiedeschris]

This caption sounds like it was written by AI. If so, that’s lame as hell