Place and capitalism are enabling conditions of human existence today. Who among us does not live in place and under capitalism? It hasn't always been so. While place in some form or another is as old as our species, capitalism did not come fully into its own until the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Place and capitalism are now mutually dependent; they form what Karl Marx calls a "contradictory unity."
Framing Capitalism in Place explores this contradictory unity and how it works by putting pictures in conversation with words. It departs from the standard script of most photo websites, in which the pictures are expected to speak for themselves while the photographer strikes a pose of mute humility on the sidelines. Mute humility is not my style and the sidelines are the last place in the world I would choose to be, as you will discover if and when you read the essays that accompany the photo galleries.
Most of the places I have photographed are within driving distance of Atlanta, the city where I have lived for the last thirty-plus years; the more distant ones require that I head for the airport, run the TSA gauntlet and board a flight. When I'm in transit, I can't help but feel like a UPS package. John Ruskin might have had me in mind when, over a century ago, he reflected on the deadening experience of getting from place to place on the great transportation marvel of his time, the railroad. "It transmutes a man from a traveller to a living parcel," grumbled the dyspeptic art critic.
But if Ruskin is correct, why is it that some of my most productive thinking comes when I'm a living parcel, suspended in a timeless place and placeless time, neither here nor there?
For example, I'll be motoring along the highway at 60 mph or flying at 550 mph with planet Earth 36,000 feet below me. I am vaguely aware of the world outside as it streams by the windshield, when suddenly from out of nowhere an idea floats up into what novelist John Banville calls "the Dead Sea of the mind." Right on cue, the world snaps into focus for me. Or should I say on me?
This must be a common experience for travelers, even if Ruskin seems not to have had it himself, the liminal moment of clarity. In my case, I think it has something to do with the sensation of speeding through unbounded space on the way to some bounded place. Being a living parcel seems to enact the contradictory mix of motion and fixity, fluidity and permanence, which lie at the heart of capitalist place formation.
Framing Capitalism in Place tries to sort through this mix.
Almost all of the photos in this website are tagged with captions indicating how they illuminate this or that aspect of the process of capitalist place formation, and subcaptions identifying the spot where they were taken. Some of the photo galleries are paired with interpretive essays which explore these thematic connections in greater depth. My plan is to add more essays and polish up those that are in pretty rough shape at the moment, so stay tuned for updates.
I wrote my share of scholarly essays when I was a university professor. Some of what I learned about the craft of academic writing I have had to unlearn since my retirement in 2018, not because such writing isn't worth doing, but because I want to share my thoughts about how capitalism shapes the world with an audience that goes beyond the academy.
This explains why the essays in Framing Capitalism in Place blur the lines between formal case studies, field notes, entries from a private journal, blog posts, self-narratives, late-night scribblings of an insomniac, maybe even cries for help. My hope is that the different kinds of writing I have experimented with here will appeal to the different kinds of readers out there, wherever there is.
I occasionally write about birth and death, marriage and parenthood, depression and joy, despite the risk of drifting over the line into the kind of confessionalism that always seems to make the top-ten list of the New York Times Editors' Choice and the Oprah Book Club. This is a risk I am willing to take. Keeping these stories under lock and key out of some misplaced desire to maintain an aura of objectivity and impartiality would deprive you, the reader and viewer, of information that sheds light on the photos and my reasons for taking them.
Lest I make it sound like photography is all work and no play, I should add that I often take pictures just for the hell of it or, to quote street photographer Garry Winogrand, "to find out what something will look like photographed." In some of the galleries, I take a break from the intensely focused and programmatic gaze of documentary photography and surrender myself to the more playful, spontaneous spirit of street photography which requires nothing more than a willingness to be in the moment.
A photographic analogy might illustrate what I'm getting at. My digital camera has a LCD screen like a smartphone as well as an electronic viewfinder like an old-school, film camera. Most of the time, I shoot with the viewfinder, partly out of hard-to-break habits formed during my rangefinder days, and partly because the viewfinder encourages me to think hard about the composition, especially about what to crop out of the picture.
But relying on the viewfinder can create a kind of tunnel vision in which all the stuff going on outside the frame ceases to exist. My first impulse looking at the world through the viewfinder is to identify the subject and bring it into sharp focus; my second is to crop out everything that doesn't relate the subject. These aren't bad impulses. On the contrary, they are pretty much what you learn in Photo 101. The problem is they can produce static images that lack the contingent, unpredictable and messy sides of life.
When I feel that I'm over-managing my images, I will shoot with the LCD. This way, I am able to see the image on the screen while sneaking quick peaks at what's happening off the screen. It's very hard to do this with the viewfinder.
For example, imagine that I am teeing up a picture of a derelict building through the viewfinder. Like most photographers, I'm drawn to such structures with their rotted woodwork and peeling paint, which are like the palimpsests of Medieval scribes, layer upon layer of messages left by the past. I carefully compose my shot, using the handy spirit level displayed in the viewfinder to make sure all the horizontal and vertical elements are squared up. Later on, I import the photo into Lightroom for editing. All in all, it's a decent shot, maybe a keeper.
Now imagine a slightly different scenario. I have composed my picture of the building with the viewfinder and am about to take it, when a nearby sound causes me to look up. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a kid on a Ferrari red bicycle racing toward me like hell on wheels. No time for fine-tuned composition. The cyclist will be in and out of my frame in less than a second. I'm going have to manage the best I can with the LCD screen. My finger is on the shutter release button, and I snap the picture as the cyclist rockets by, hoping that I dialed in the correct settings. I take a look at the image on the camera's playback. What I see is a high-velocity, red blur against the backdrop of a sharply focused piece of architecture which is slowly crumbling into dust. A juxtaposition of motion and fixity, youthful exuberance and aging decrepitude.
Did I plan this? Not a chance, I just reacted. But the photo's not bad, maybe another keeper.
You get the point. Documentary photography is the viewfinder, street photography is the LCD screen. If I wasn't able to toggle back and forth between these distinct but complementary approaches to image making, I would have burned out on photography a long time ago.
The day-to-day routine of putting this website together has been a welcome change from the way I used to go about my day job as a gainfully-employed academic. I don't mean to suggest that I was one of those disgruntled professors who walked around with a sign warning, "This PhD Bites!" I always enjoyed research and writing, teaching and working with students, arguing and paling around with colleagues.
But the one thing I did not enjoy was the unrelenting corporatization of higher education which gathered force like a Category 5 hurricane during my years in the academy. The self-styled educational "reformers" who boast about transferring value-added, performance metrics from the world of business to that of learning have done us no favors, unless it is to remind us that capitalism should keep its nose out of the classroom.
My days now pass quietly, for the most part. I spend my time traveling from place to place, planning my next trip, obsessing over photo gear, adding new galleries, revising old ones, watching the backlog of unwritten essays grow ever larger and, last but not least, doting on our brand-new granddaughter.
Did I mention reminiscing? Well, I seem to do a lot of that, too, in my new life as a state pensioner. Framing Capitalism in Place has become for me a ritual of old age, a work in progress undertaken as the clock ticks down toward the final buzzer.
To be honest, the real work in progress is not the website but me. This is the last thing I expected to discover about Chuck Steffen at this late date, since I always assumed I would have life figured out, more or less, by the time the Social Security checks started arriving. Isn't that how life is supposed to work?
In my case, not so much. But as my wise son Brendan recently reminded me, "Dad, once you understand what the hell you're doing, you're done."
He's right, of course. There are far worse things than not having finished the test when we hear the dreaded words of the Almighty Proctor who keeps a sharp eye on the clock, "Time's up!" I find myself thinking about the very last sentence of the third volume of Karl Marx's Capital. It was penned not by Marx but by his lifelong friend and fellow revolutionary, Frederick Engels, who spent the final decade of his life editing and knocking into shape the notebooks Marx left behind, unfinished, unpublished and famously illegible.
"At this point the manuscript breaks off," writes Engels. How's that for a kiss off?
The sentimental Marxophile in me wishes that Engels had wrapped up the the volume on a more upbeat note. But then I remind myself that the project Marx undertook could never have had a nice, tidy ending. From beginning to end Capital unfolded at its own speed, in fits and starts, interrupted by Marx's political and family obligations, burdened by his bad health and constant financial worries, sustained by his self-discipline and capacity for intense concentration. Engels, his comrade and benefactor, knew this better than anyone.
To repurpose one of his most quotable lines, Marx made his own life and work, but he did not make them as he pleased; he did not make them under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
I find this view of life as an open-ended process, historically conditioned and materially grounded, very appealing. Even comforting. In Marxist quarters, it goes by the name historical materialism. Would Marx have appreciated the perfunctory manner in which Engels chose to bring Volume 3 to a close, expressing as it did their shared belief that all human beings are works in progress who make themselves in the process of making the world around them?
Yes, I believe he would have said, "Danke."
I hope you take as much time as you can spare for Framing Capitalism in Place, a work in progress if ever there was one. This is a big ask, I realize, considering how much stuff is packed into this website, the proverbial two-pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.
Under the "Place" and "Capitalism" tabs on the navigation bar are two longish essays that I have broken up into mini-essays. Bite-sized pieces, you might say. Grounded in the theory of capital formulated by Marx and Marxist geographer David Harvey, these reflections on place and capitalism present an overall conceptual framework for understanding the deeper processes at work in the locations I have photographed.
If you're the type of reader who likes a French seven-course meal, then devour this pair of essays in a single sitting with my blessing. But if the Spanish style of small plates and tapas is more your thing, feel free to graze on the essays at your leisure. Some of you might decide to forego the essays altogether and head straight for the photos; others may prefer to zig-zag between the two.
It's up to you.
One last point. I would be disappointed if Framing Capitalism in Place failed to convey something of the excitement of discovery when one hits the road not knowing what will be around the next bend. As Herman Melville wrote in his great big book about a great big fish: "It is not down on any map; true places never are."*
(*I know, I know: Moby Dick is a whale not a fish.)