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Alise Hofacre “I don’t like them—they’re dull and flat. There’s no people, no involvement, nothing” (Interviewer 9). In an interview about the New Topographics exhibition, this interviewee expresses a sentiment no doubt shared by most who have made their way through the exhibit since it’s opening in 1975. Any one of the exhibit’s many photographs is not likely to keep you looking for long. Questions will linger longer in your mind than you did in the exhibit. Why did these photographers choose this as their subject? Where is the emotion? What is the idea they are trying to convey? Black and white photographs of things we see every day, including gas stations, building faces, and suburban street corners aren’t exactly the typical subjects of great art. There are no people, no sweeping landscapes, no scream of beauty or purpose, in fact, there is no scream at all. Instead, there is a strong feeling of detachment, objectivity, and lack of emotion that leaves you questioning. The answers will take more than a passing glance to grasp. In a world where art typically shouts its meaning, these photographs ask you to be still, be quiet, and take a second look. It may be a long look, but if you stare long enough, you begin to hear their whisper. New Topographics marked a turning point in the history of photography with its hitherto unheard of answer to the question, “What is landscape?” Until the 1970s, the traditional answer to this question is seen most unmistakably in the work of Ansel Adams. His landscapes are like that of a fairytale; one can hardly believe they were taken of the real world. They inspire immediate awe and emotion, leaving the viewer captivated by their beauty. According to this view, one has to travel outside the bounds of everyday life to capture life’s true beauty. The photographers of New Topographics, however, became disillusioned with this idea. Joe Deal stated, “…it was like seeing everything in quotation marks” (Salvesan 17). Nicholas Nixon even used the word “sappy” (Salvesan 17). These photographers don’t believe that landscape is confined to national parks; they see landscape within the boundaries of everyday life. To avoid this romanticized view of landscape, they took a “detached stance” from their photography, replacing the scream with the whisper, and making their work appear detached, objective, and emotionless (Salvesan 17). Although this is the case, the photographs are by no means devoid of beauty or purpose; they merely hold a different definition of what these are and where they can be found. According to these photographers, beauty lies in the mundane, in the banality of life, in the ordinary. There is no need to search for it in national parks because it is all around us. As Cass Fey, curator for the Center for Creative Photography put it, “The world is far more interesting than any interpretation I can make of it.” Discovering this merely takes a second look. Anton Chekhov, a famous Russian playwright, has been called a photographer. This may sound absurd, but when paralleled to the history and ideas of New Topographics, one cannot find a better word to describe him. Like the photographers of New Topographics, Chekhov’s work sharply contrasts that of his more dramatic, shall we say, Ansel Adams-esque, counterparts. One of these counterparts, Leo Tolstoy, is actually reported to have asked of Chekhov’s plays, “Where is the drama?” Unlike the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and others like them, with their loveable heroes who lay bare their thoughts and hearts to us, with their explosive drama and emotion, Chekhov gives us a photograph. He hands us life unaltered (Baring 1). Like the photographers of New Topographics, who took “great pains to prevent the slightest trace of judgment or opinion from entering their work” (Salvesen 17), Chekhov does the same. As the photographers of New Topographics defined beauty within the monotony of life, Chekhov does the same. We do not have the privilege of immediately seeing into the souls of his characters, he never “nudges the reader’s elbow” with his ultimate purpose. Instead, we are presented with life and characters as we would observe them in reality. The unveiling of the truth is left up to us (Baring 1). The reader will wander through the story much like he wandered through the exhibition, quickly, searching for the loud emotion, for the ultimate purpose, for the loveable protagonist, and coming upon the final page finds himself at a loss. Why did he write about this? Like the photographs, discovering the answer will take a second look. If Chekhov is indeed a photographer and his writings photographs, one would find them in an exhibition similar to New Topographics under the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Bechers’ technique is much like that of his own. In order to convey the most information about their subject, the photographers use multiple photographs of a single subject from different vantage points to form a grid. No picture is more important than another; rather, all contribute to the whole. In much the same way, Chekhov uses his characters to convey the themes of his work. Like the Becher’s photographs, no character is more important than another, but all are “instances” meant to be viewed as a whole. Together, they point to a larger and further reaching idea and form a more complete picture of it than the individual characters ever could on their own. The Bechers’ give no central image and Chekhov gives no hero. To do so would take away from the bigger “picture” conveyed (Gould 1). If one wanders the halls of this hypothetical Chekhovian exhibition in search of Uncle Vanya, it would be found in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Pit Head, Bear Valley, Pennsylvania, USA 1974. This grid is a set of four black and white photographs taken from four different angles, one from the back, one from the side, and two angles from the front, each depicting a different view, a different piece of information, all to reveal more about their subject: an abandoned, out of use, decaying mining structure. At a swift first glance, it is difficult to determine the angles, how they all go together, and even the nature of the structure itself. Upon further investigation though, the pieces come together and an unmistakable theme is revealed: the destruction and decay of something that once had purpose, once had meaning. At one point, this structure was a part of a thriving industry that provided jobs and fuel. But what of the edifice now? The formerly meaningful structure is nothing more than the hollow shell of what it once was, a haunting reminder of better days. Is there any hope for the degenerate structure? There is something left, something has remained. Is this enough? The themes of these photographs and the method by which they are revealed mirror those of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and when viewed through their lenses, the mystery of the play’s seemingly elusive purpose is revealed. Like the old mining structure, each of the characters in Uncle Vanya is decaying. And like the grid of photographs this decomposition is seen most palpably in four characters, Professor Serebryakov, Yelena, Astrov, and, most significantly, in Uncle Vanya. Each is merely the remains of what promise their lives used to hold. The first snapshot, the Professor, was once a flourishing member of high society with a family and a successful career, but now he is “a dried haddock, with a doctorate…Gout rheumatism and migraine and a liver swollen with envy” (Chekhov 6). All of his life’s work has amounted to nothing. “He’s reached retiring age and not a soul has ever heard of him” (Chekhov 7). The only thing he has going for him is his young and beautiful wife Yelena, and even she has experienced this same decay. She married the Professor for what she thought was love. She was “fascinated by him because he was a learned and famous man. It wasn’t real love, it was artificial, but [she] certainly thought it was real then” (Chekhov 28). Yelena now realizes that what she thought was love, is, in actuality, infatuation. Now she must live with the knowledge that she “gave him her youth and beauty, her freedom, her radiance. Why? For what in return?” (Chekhov 7). She is stuck in a marriage to a man she doesn’t love while her youth and beauty decompose. Astrov, the family friend and doctor, represents yet another angle of the grid and has met a similar fate. He wanted a career that would fulfill him and what he desired most in life: to leave his mark on the world. To reach this dream, he became a doctor, only to find himself worked to death and unfulfilled. Reflecting on his own decomposition, he says, “…I’ve had to work too hard… [I] go to bed and lie there just waiting to be dragged out again to a patient” (Chekhov 3). When he finally finds his true passion in forest conservation, he is met with disinterest and ridicule from those most important in his life. His past and present have failed to fulfill him and the hope for his future is irrelevant to the people around him. He ponders the decay in his life and comes to the conclusion that no one, none of those he wishes to leave his mark for, will ever pause to give him thought: “…the people who come after us…the people we’re beating a path for—will they ever spare a thought for us? They won’t…” (Chekhov 4). He and the other characters have become observers of their own facades, gazing on as they slowly crumble and fall to waste before their very eyes. To gain a better understanding of this “grid” and to fully comprehend, in all of its implications, the theme of decay and destruction, it is necessary to closely analyze its form personified: Uncle Vanya. The dreams of his past are crushed, his present is only filled with reminders of this fact, and his future is hopeless in light of it. He spent the years of his youth, full of purpose and vitality, working for a man he admired and respected only to find he is not the paramount of perfection he thought him to be. “Oh I’ve been so duped! I worshipped that man, that miserable gout-ridden professor, I worked like an ox for him!... I was proud of him and his learning—I lived and breathed him! But, oh God—now?…he’s nothing! (Chekhov 20-21). Vanya is crushed to find that the man he idealized, the man he placed on so high a pedestal, isn’t deserving of the position he gave him. The eyes through which he views his life are forever changed, tinted with dark pessimism. “Day and night the same thought chokes me like a demon sitting on my chest—that my life is lost beyond recall. There’s no past—that was squandered on things of no importance—and the present is horrible in its absurdity” (Chekhov 19). Vanya now stares at the decaying mining structure that has become his life and is terrified. All of the purpose he once possessed, all of the dreams that once held firm beneath his feet, have been knocked out from under him, leaving only the remains of what he had once hoped to be. Peering at the picture that is now his life, Vanya has choices to make. The conclusions he draws as a result of his gaze will have lasting impressions. They will decide whether the rest of his life is an image of hope, or one of desolation. Vanya’s behavior throughout the play is indicative of the conclusion he has drawn and the decision he has made: that his life, now purposeless and rotting, is hopeless. Vanya, looking for life giving water to abate the death the decay surely precedes, digs his own wells instead of going to the source. Rather than examine the festering state of his life and attempt to make it better, he further destroys it. He develops a fierce and sarcastic pessimism, a love of liquor, a dark envy for Yelena, and an inclination toward self-destruction, one that may destroy those around him as well. The first sign of this decision comes in his interaction with the other characters at the very beginning of the play. For every complimentary thing someone has to say, Vanya is quick to kill it with acidic sarcasm. Yelena comments on the nice weather, to which Vanya responds, “Nice weather for hanging yourself…” (Chkhov 10). Astrov reveals his life’s passion and Vanya deems it a “crackbrained notion” (Chekhov 12). The sarcasm he subjects the others to reveals the frustration and futility he feels about his own circumstance. By the end of the First Act we also learn of another of his paths toward self-destruction. The envy and resentment he feels toward the Professor and the feelings of hopeless misery he has toward his own life are further agitated by his love for the unattainable Yelena. He seems to seek her as a sense of meaning, as if somehow, he can vicariously regain the purpose he lost by winning her love. He tells her, “You’re my happiness, you’re life, you’re my youth!” (Chekhov 14). Attempting to gain purpose through an impossible endeavor will only lead to deeper discontentment. Alas, his attempts to woo her fail and his feelings are unrequited, they “[run] to waste as pointlessly as a ray of sunshine in a bottomless pit” (Chekhov 19). When his efforts to bring the lives of those around him down to his pitiable level and his pursuit of Yelena are unsuccessful, Vanya has one more well to dig. He comes to his breaking point and snaps. He attempts to take control of his surroundings with one final brash move. He shoots the Professor. He misses. This is perhaps the summation of all of Vanya’s plans to repair his life: He shoots. He misses. Vanya seems to understand the implications of this. “Didn’t I hit him? Another botch up? Oh, hell, hell…hell and damnation…Oh what am I doing? What am I doing?” (Chekhov 46-47). Vanya has come to the realization that he has no control over his circumstances and has tried to gain it through fruitless and destructive endeavors. Digging wells in all the wrong places, he is left with nothing. But the question that haunts us from the structure at Bear Valley remains: Is there hope? The consequences of Vanya’s decision prove devastating and irreversible. Not only is this apparent to him but also to those around him. His mother points out that “[he has] changed out of all recognition…[He] used to be someone with clear convictions, an example of enlightenment…” (Chekhov 9). This implies that Vanya once held the hope and promise of one sure of himself, grounded in firm conviction and purpose. But because he never “got down to business” to make those convictions into, not just “mere words”, but into true beliefs, they crumbled under the weight of the Professor’s failure to meet his ideal (Chekhov 9). The result has left him a man without purpose or conviction, the hollow exterior of one who used to possess both. The consequences may also reach beyond Vanya himself. As Yelena points out, they will affect those around him. “You do exactly the same with human beings—you recklessly destroy them, and soon, thanks to you, there will be neither faithfulness nor innocence left in the world, nor any capacity for self-sacrifice” (Chekhov 13). The comfort of knowing he is not the only one suffering is a dangerous temptation. Because Vanya has destroyed these qualities in himself, he attempts to destroy them in others. If he cannot be fulfilled and content, he will make sure everyone else meets the same pitiable fate. Still further reaching than this, the consequences may even plague his death. Speaking to Vanya, Astrov concludes, “There’s only one hope left for you and me—that when we’re lying in our graves we might have pleasant dreams” (Chekhov 51). This is a bleak conclusion that Vanya has already made, and with this knowledge, he steals a bottle of morphine from the doctor intending to end it all. Is there hope for our decaying mining structures? Vanya seems to have answered our question. No. There is no hope. However, there is one viewpoint, one element left unexamined. As stated earlier, the individual photos and characters are not meant to be viewed alone. The ultimate purpose can be gleaned only when the “instances” are viewed as a whole, one grid, one play. What does the viewer conclude when gazing at the harmony of the whole? Who will gaze at the grid and give voice to its conclusion? Sonya, young and untouched by the rot and regret that plagues the others, is the one character able to stand outside the snapshot lives of those around her, and from this viewpoint, she sees the larger and further reaching idea they form when viewed as a whole. Throughout the play, Sonya manages to tread water while those around her sink into the abyss below. Surrounded by hopelessness, she remains hopeful and sensible, discouraging their defeatist and self destructive behavior. She supports the doctor’s dreams of forest conservation, discourages her uncle’s drinking and pessimism, and befriends her stepmother. Standing outside the grid of decaying structures that is the lives of those around her, Sonya comes to this conclusion: “We must live our lives! … We shall live out the long, long succession of days and endless evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials we’re sent; we shall labour for others from now into our old age without respite; and when our time comes we shall die with resignation; and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that it went hard with us; and God will be moved to pity; and you and I, Uncle, dear Uncle, shall see a life of light and beauty and grace; and we shall rejoice; and we shall look back on the unhappiness of this present time with tenderness, with a smile—and we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle, I have a burning and passionate faith… We shall rest! You’ve never known joy in all your life, but you wait, Uncle Vanya, you wait… We shall rest.” (Chekhov 59-60) Sonya, the only one able to view the grid of characters as one complete image, is the final authority on the answer to our question. Is there hope? Yes. What has remained matters. Like a flower wilts before its beauty is fully unveiled, so the once purposeful lives of our characters have decomposed. But as deceased flowers breathe new life into the soil around them, so the decaying structures of Chekhov’s characters have given life to a new flower. Removed from the photographs, Sonya has observed the snapshots, she has witnessed the toll that rot and self-destruction take on the structures of their lives, and viewing the grid as one complete image, she has learned from them. Though Chekhov’s crumbling structures will “die with recognition”, finally accepting their dreary fate, their lives are not in vain. Because they “patiently bear the trials [they]’re sent” in the eternal hope that, one day, even though that day must come after death, they will see the light of beauty and grace at the end of their unhappy tunnel, the observer, Sonya, finds “faith…a burning and passionate faith.” With the grid of their lives as an example, she has learned in a deep and eternal way that death is indeed the precursor for life; she says, “…there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that it went hard with us; and God will be moved to pity; and you and I, Uncle, dear Uncle, shall see a life of light and beauty and grace; and we shall rejoice.” The decay their structures leave behind is the fertilizer by which she, and all who will gaze upon their photographs, shall live.
Works Cited Baring, Maurice. “The Plays of Anton Chekhov”. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Hall, Sharon. Vol 3. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. Literature Resource Center. Web. 20 Feb. 2010. Becher, Bernd and Hilla. Pit Head, Bear Valley, Pennsylvania, USA. 1974. SK Stiftung Kultur Die Photographische Sammlung. Web. 4 Nov. 2011. Chekhov, Anton. Uncle Vanya. United Kingdom: Methuan Pub. Ltd., 2005. Fey, Cass. New Topographics exhibit. University of Arizona. Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ. Feb. 25 2010. Gould, Alan. “10/3/04: Chekhov Coldly”. Quadrant. Sept 2004: p 56. Literature Resource Center. Web. 20 Feb. 2010. Interviewer. “Prologue.” New Topographics. Center for Creative Photography. University of Arizona and George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. New York: 2009. Salvesan, Britt. “New Topographics.” New Topographics. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, and George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. New York: 2009.
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