Customer Reviews

Andrea Robbins & Max Becher: The Transportation of Place

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Transportation of Place, photographs by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, is an exceptional collection of documentary photographs whereby Robbins and Becher record cultural conditions of simulation, mimesis, and re-enactments that occur due to political events, tourism, entertainment, and cultural longing. Their collaborative photos function as "surreal nonfiction" and demonstrate a lucid vision (as much as this is possible) of the growing global phenomenon of displacement, artifice, fabricated identity, and cultural confusion. Their work beautifully pinpoints conditions where simulated environments and personas become preferable to actual cultural or historical contexts. Robbins and Becher's photos of "places out of place" make it possible to imagine more clearly the consequences and complications of denying or subverting one's surroundings or identity. In addition their images give us insight into the global, postcolonial conditions enabling alienation, loss of identity, and loss of history of place.

German villages in Africa, "Old West" frontier towns in Spain, Wall Street in Cuba, New York in Vegas, people in Washington state altering local architecture and dress to become a Bavarian community, and people in Germany attempting to dress and live as Native Americans are just some of the interesting series presented by Robbins and Becher in this superb book. In addition, Transportation of Place includes excellent essays by Lucy Lippard and Maurice Berger. This book is a must-see/must-read for contemporary artists, photographers, art audiences, and anyone interested in travel, politics, or the humanities.

One photographic series presented in the book documents "Old Tucson" (an outdoor film stage set - turned tourist attraction) in Arizona. "Old Tucson", constructed in 1938, miles away from, and built after the actual Tucson, Arizona, is neither "old" nor "Tucson." One image from the series keenly documents a wooden sign on the exterior of a "Candle Shop" that states in capital letters, "THESE BUILDINGS ARE ORIGINAL STRUCTURES FROM 1939's `ARIZONA' THEY WERE BUILT WITH ADOBE, THEN CONVERTED TO A WESTERN STREET THEN TO A MEXICAN COLONIAL STYLE FOR THE `THREE AMIGOS', RED TILE REPLACED THE ORIGINAL WOODEN BOARDWALKS, THE CURRENT FAÇADE IS APPROXIMATELY ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE ORIGINAL WESTERN BUILDINGS." Dislocated images and odd visual information of this nature illustrate why Robbins and Becher's work is truly "Surreal Nonfiction"... This is a wonderful book and highly recommended.
-Sean Miller, John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA)