American Roadsides

By Suzanne Révy

There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.
~Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

Frank Armstrong keeps rolling. During a two decade career teaching photography at Clark University, Armstrong would take long trips during the summers, often accompanied by students, touring the back roads through small towns and across vast prairies. He prefers to drive slowly, no more than about 35 miles per hour, which has allowed him to find quirky farm stands, kitschy advertisements, decaying structures, and the occasional orphaned toilet. A selection of work made on these day trips over the past ten years, alongside photographs by seven of his students, is on view in American Roadsides: Frank Armstrong’s Photographic Legacy at the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM) through June 5th, 2022. In addition, the museum presents selections from their photographic holdings in Quirky, Beautiful, Ordinary: American Roadsides from the FAM Collection, which will be on view through May 29th, 2022. 

The artist at a preview of American Roadsides: Frank Armstrong’s Photographic Legacy, photograph courtesy of Stephen DiRado.

The great American road trip has been a staple in photographic practice for a century. Walker Evans and Robert Frank drove across the country in search of cultural, economic and societal trends resulting in two seminal photography books: American Photographs (1938) by Evans and The Americans (1958) by Frank. It is instructive to compare Armstrong’s contemporary road trip pictures, which have a far more idiosyncratic tenor than either Evans or Frank. They reflect the zeitgeist of today’s iconography and the materiality of contemporary photographic technique, which differs in scope and scale from the mid-century work of his predecessors. And while strides in industry and technology over the past sixty years has in many ways enhanced American lives, there remains an undercurrent of loneliness which, like Evans and Frank, Armstrong intuits in his pictures. They reflect a forlorn sensibility that permeates vast rural areas through modest dwellings sitting alone in a field, in the neglected and peeling paint of abandoned structures, and even in a sizable trunk of a felled tree. Despite the occasional respite of humor, Armstrong seems to be asking, why do we feel so empty, so disconnected? 

(Feature Image) “Coshocton, Ohio” 2019 by Frank Armstrong, courtesy of the artist, the Fitchburg Art Museum and Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

“Skowhegan, Maine” 2018 by Frank Armstrong, courtesy of the artist, Fitchburg Art Museum and Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

“Mountain Home, Arkansas” 2012 by Frank Armstrong, courtesy of the artist, the Fitchburg Art Museum and Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

Armstrong’s journey in the medium parallels its history. He was influenced by the modernist love of form, tone and texture. He began his career making stunning black and white pictures of the landscape in his native Texas, and was directly influenced by Ansel Adams. His pictures evolved to include more frequent hints of human presence on the landscape, embracing an ethos that might be more in line with Robert Adams, who documented tract development in the west. But Armstrong’s work is too reverential to be in the critically minded camp of the New Topographics photographers such as Adams. Where those photographers impaled development in jarring and sometimes confrontational pictures, Armstrong endows human interference on the land with dignity. Discovering cultural ephemera such as plastic pink flamingoes, lost toys in a river, and mannequins tending a farm stand, Armstrong reveals an insatiable curiosity about the places he visits, and the communities who live and work there. And though there are no people present, his luscious, large prints offer viewers broad visual and emotional space to see a portrait of rural America. He finds grace in the mundane, and builds on the myriad legacies of 20th century landscape photography. 

“Carmi, Illinois” 2012 by Frank Armstrong, courtesy of the artist, the Fitchburg Art Museum and Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

“Morris, Indiana” 2019 by Frank Armstrong, courtesy of the artist, the Fitchburg Art Museum and Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

Frank Armstrong teaching at Clark University in 2019, photograph courtesy of Stephen DiRado.

Armstrong’s prolific career attests to his technical and visual mastery of digital and analog photography. As an educator, he has imparted a wealth of knowledge to his students not only in workmanship but in the pursuit of an aesthetic vision. The seven former students whose work appears within this show display an array of photographic practices, including social documentary, landscape, still life and portraiture. It is a tribute to Armstrong’s skill and inspiration that his students have found their own distinctive voices within the medium.

“The White House, Lunenburg, MA” 2019 by Catherine Wilcox-Titus from the series White House, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Untitled 8” 2020 by Greer Muldowney from the series Monetary Violence, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Solarium” 2018 by Russell Banks from the series Floating World, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Untitled” 2018 by Jasper Muse, from Untitled (New York City) courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

Catherine Wilcox-Titus’ White House and Greer Muldowney’s Monetary Violence each investigate the economics of place in studies of neglect, development and gentrification. Jasper Muse exploits the detritus of New York City in forming an anthropological narrative of the urban environment in Untitled (New York City). Russell Banks, one of Armstrong’s earliest students from his days teaching in Texas, photographed the culture of leisure on cruise ships with humor and satire in his series Floating World. Rachel Loischild’s atmospheric large format landscapes made in the Quarantine Islands of Boston Harbor are both beautiful and unsettling, raising questions around the histories of immigration, public health and industrial infrastructure. In All My Grandfather’s Tools, Eric Nichols lovingly catalogs long forgotten or broken items in carefully lit still life images that endow these items with a gemlike quality. Sarah Bilotta Belclaire disrupts notions around femininity and womanhood in two related series of portraits, Goddesses and Cultivators II. The work of all seven photographers reflects Armstrong’s unflinching support of his students’ artistic journeys.

“Deer Island, Boston, MA” 2020 by Rachel Loischild from the series Quarantine Islands, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Electrical Boxes and Switch” 2021 by Eric Nichols from the series All of my Grandfather’s Tools, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

“Untitled” 2015 by Sarah Bilotta Belclaire from the series Cultivation II, courtesy of the artist and the Fitchburg Art Museum.

While you are at the museum, be sure to check out Quirky, Beautiful, Ordinary: American Roadsides from the FAM Collection in the gallery downstairs. It brings Armstrong’s work into context and conversation with both the history of the medium and contemporary practice. The exhibit features works by a variety of 20th century luminaries such as Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand and Harold Feinstein and also more recent works by Jamel Shabazz, Rachel Barrett and Stefanie Klavens. In addition, it underscores the depth of this small gem of a museum’s impressive photography collection. 

“Quirky, Beautiful Ordinary: American Roadsides from the FAM Collection” featuring (left to right) Gables #20, Hop Bottom, PA, 1998 by Michael Thomas;  Poughkeepsie, NY 2005 by John Lehr (middle);  and The NYC Newsstands, 2008 by Rachel Barrett (right), installation photograph by Suzanne Révy.

My sincere thanks to Stephen DiRado, who is a longtime colleague of Frank Armstrong’s at Clark University, for his insights into the photographs and for sharing two pictures. ~SR

For more information: https://fitchburgartmuseum.org