Allusions to Paradise results from three years of ongoing collaborative investigation into what the photographers describe as the "pathology" of development in Southern California. Who builds these instant communities, and who wants to live there? What are the underlying political and economic factors that transform a perfectly good desert into an ugly, but expensive, tract town almost overnight? The first phase of this investigation deals with construction and destruction explored in three groups of images, deliberately left unsigned to let the viewer concentrate on what generated the images rather than on who made them.
Many of the photographs employ ambient signs and slogans to point up the differences between what the developer promises and what the development actually delivers. "Sonata, a symphony in classic living" announces the pretentious entrance to a series of raw cuts into a dirt hillside; "James Watt Drive" is a solitary street sign, marking the intersection of nonexistent roads in virtual desert. Heaps of sanitary landfill, acres of bulldozed gravel and rocks, paved cul-de-sacs awaiting encirclement, concrete pads which will soon sprout office buildings -- these are the elements in this barren, dusty paradise.
Once construction is completed by the developers, everything needed for sophisticated suburban living is available on the site or in the nearby shopping mall. Again, the signs say it all -- the signs and the products offered: "cultural" stone veneers, "antiqued" imitation Roman columns and pedestals, Mini City for the home hobbyists, Bombs Away Ortho insecticides for the weekend gardener, Body by Tab for the weekend athlete, and a book titled How to Achieve Total Prosperity, available at the local Peace of Mind Center. Residents can also buy electrified fences and call on the Neighborhood Watch to protect it all. There are, of course, certain environmental costs attending metastasizing speculative development. Every drop of water for rolled-sod lawns, store-bought gardens and backyard swimming pools must be imported through miles of plastic pipes sunk into deep gashes in the arid dirt. Having stripped the land of thrifty native vegetation and created hills where there were none, these new communities must do battle against erosion and landslides with miles of plastic sheeting and tons of sandbags.
The formal tactics used in Allusions to Paradise are economical and appropriate. Two sets of wall images -- one staccato series of twenty-five straight prints and a large group of topographics-inspired pieces of irregular shapes and sizes -- makes an impressive indictment of the "quality of life" likely to survive here. A third group, neatly bound into books, shares a table with a stack of slick prospectuses offered by the developers. The contrast is exquisitely ironic: there is neither cotton nor wood in Cottonwood; there are no foxes and little place to run at Fox Run; the Del Cerro Hills are merely bulldozed hummocks. A photograph of Rancho Jamul Estates epitomized what the collaborators have found in Southern California development: on a gravel hill is planted a sign reading "Lot 40. Sold."
The water to irrigate this proliferation of instant communities has to come from somewhere. In an extremely well-chosen second exhibition, The Tuolomne River/Water Politics, the viewer can -- like Jack Nicholson -- discover where they're stealing the water. This project, with text by Erik and photographs by Brian Fessenden, is also part of an ongoing collaboration intended to foster specific political and social action to save the river. In the first section of the essay, the photographs document the breathtaking beauty and awesome scale of the powerful and ferocious river. A second chapter chronicles the early and continuing exploitation of the Tuolumne, beginning with its theft from the Miwok Indians.
Through the authoritative and poetic texts, well-seen contemporary photographs, and exquisite historical images, the Fessendens argue against continued damming, choking and diverting of the magnificent Tuolomne. Most effective are the photographs that record virgin lands bulldozed and stripped for construction, once-scenic creeks channeled into huge corrugated pipes and the great river imprisoned between banks of concrete. That placid liquid meandering beneath the highway intersection leading to Los Angeles and Bakersfield bears no resemblance to the violent white waters of the primitive river. Beneath an image of the tamed Los Angeles river, a caption asks "Will we soon experience our environment as concrete rivers and paved meadows?"
In the tradition of John Muir, these Friends of the River are waging war against everyone who would rape this river to irrigate the fantasies of Southern California developers. Mark Twain once wrote "Whiskey is to drink. Water is to fight over." This may be as good a place to start as any.
