Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids

 Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids, the new book by my friend Robert Jones, is a feast for the eyes. Even if you’re not an aficionado of the extended road trip, as I certainly am, you will find yourself experiencing a certain sense of déjà vu as you page through this book. The photographs tell a tale of an era that could be considered bygone, yet whose artifacts are still so present in so many forgotten little corners of North America that it seems its influence will never be erased completely.

Mexican taqueria detail
Farm-to-Market Road 2790, Somerset, Texas, February 2007

As Jones tells us in the intro, this collection of Polaroid prints, taken with his trusty Colorpack III, “represents a quarter-century’s quest to find beautiful, vivid, man-made color.” His color sense influenced by the “revelation” of David Lynch’s use of surrealistically brilliant hues in Blue Velvet, Jones has driven “untold thousands of miles” to find outstanding examples of these intense colors. He says,

“Ironically, these hues are most deeply intensified when driving across endless lonely stretches of highway in the American Southwest and Mexico, where the people use buckets of brightly colored paints to break the drab monotony of the brown stubble and caliche that characterize that region’s landscape. The crisp, clean air in Canada has given me skies with the deepest blues, and the most luminous greens and reds.”

The Polaroid film serves to exaggerate and shift the color in a nostalgic, yet slightly unsettling way.

Motel rooms
U.S. Route 130, Burlington County, New Jersey, May 2004

As to the artist’s intent, there is no attempt at a hidden message here; it is straightforward and without pretense. To understand what the photographs represent, a passage from “Coloring Outside the Lines,”  the essay by John DeFore included in the book, is enlightening:

“Where someone else might have culled through the hand-painted signs and statuary here in search of ironic juxtapositions, or framed them in ways that suggest a new layer of meaning is being created, Jones is happy simply to celebrate what he has found. This collection isn’t a straightforward, undiscriminating catalog of roadside oddities, but neither is it a monograph treating those objects as mere fodder for an artist hovering on a higher plane. Jones takes his pictures seriously, but he clearly respects what he’s photographing as much as he does the image he’s creating.”

Hoppers and landscape
U.S. Route 87, Union County, New Mexico, February 2002

Stop sign and street corner
Town plaza, Villa Union, Coahuila, April 2002

Are these photographs truly “garish”? I suppose that’s something best left up to the viewer to decide. Perhaps my judgment is compromised by my love of this subject matter, but I would say they are hauntingly beautiful, celebratory of the overlooked magnificence that can be found in forgotten little corners of the world, sometimes sparked into momentary transcendent splendor by a brief angle of sunlight, other times waiting patiently for decades for an appreciative glance, or for nothing at all. In this age of Instagram and Hipstamatic and instant-whatever-the-matic, in which anything and everything becomes fodder for an overload of superficially formulaic “artiness,” I find it comforting to think of Jones out there on the road, recording these images with this all-but-lost technology, a piece of paper with chemicals that in its own time revolutionized the art of photography.

Evan Jones and hillbilly figure, miniature golf course
Seawall Boulevard, Galveston, Texas, February 2007

For more information and to see more photographs by Robert Jones, please visit his website. The book Garish: Roadside Color Polaroids is available on Amazon.com. It’s also available as an ebook for Kindle on Amazon and as a NOOK book at Barnes & Noble.