ADAM BARTOS: "So THIS is America"

Paris

Venice Beach

I had a moment of complete clarity! Complete fucking clarity...as if suddenly someone ran a magnet in front of me and aligned all of the needles in my brain in the correct, front-facing position! I was looking over the galleries of Adam Bartos, and reading an interview with him in "The Morning News": The homes and streets of Adam Bartos’s Los Angeles have a still, reflective presence. These photographs challenge common assumptions about the nature of life in LA. Here we find spaces that are at once intimate and desolate. The work tells a story of Bartos’s moved to LA in the 1970s, when he arrived expecting Hollywood glitz and glamour and instead discovered the serene and all-American images in this series.

"intimate and desolate", "serene and all-American images"
You know what happens to me when I see these images? I feel almost as though I can smell them, and they reek of a certain undeniable mediocrity, of wear. I remember arriving in the States at night and being driven from Chicago to Detroit. I couldn't cope with how red and bright the night was. I had no understanding of light pollution. I woke up in the morning in America. Let me repeat: IN AMERICA. Everything smelled bad. The streets had pot holes. Then, in 2005 I went to Brazil. BRAZIL. Everything smelled bad. The streets had pot holes. God do the outskirts of Rio smell like shit. I hate postcards and vacation photos. They are so selective. But these places are jam packed with wonderful details- not pretty details, necessarily, but wonderful. In Paraty, a historical tourist destination south of Rio, Tony and I wandered away from the 'downtown' into a local outdoor bar and took shots of cheap cachaca and watched and laughed with some old guy who was petting a stray dog. In Hamtramck my 10 year-old buddies and I always hung out on what we called "THE HILL". In actuality "THE HILL" was a wheel chair ramp on the edge of the community center. I talked to my mother about that feeling of "Ah, so THIS is America". She said it dawned on her when she got her first paycheck from her 2 weeks at KDS Controls. It was about $290. Rent was $300. "AH! So THIS is America." Not that I'm complaining, but remembering that experience really clarified for me why I am so uninhibitedly fascinated by the banal and by residue. I simply believe that it is the truth.

Cheers.
-i.