Artist Statement - In the Shadow of the City
These photographs demonstrate a love of the great American landscape; the backroads, the small towns and the
people who inhabit these spaces. This body of work has been made over the last three years during road
trips with my family. Staying in our vintage 1961 Shasta Airflyte camper, we travelled over 10,000 miles
and crisscrossed 25 states. The resulting images show the quirky and idiosyncratic personality of a
human-altered landscape, and are a humorous and somewhat melancholy view of a rapidly
disappearing way of life, which exists on the fringes of the cities and small towns we traversed.
The tropes that manifest in these images lie at the heart of working class towns, and are the fuel of Tom
Waits songs and Charles Bukowski poems. This is the place of auto body shops, strip clubs, bodegas,
tire shops, motorcycle repair, hourly motels, bail bondsmen, pawn shops, cheap apartments,
warehouses, liquor stores, dive bars, and fried chicken joints. It is a site of transactions and
interactions, where necessity and function override aesthetics.
This is a crystal-clear, photographic documentary, which combines a nostalgia for my blue collar,
Rust-Belt roots with a love of life at the edge of the urban environment. The journey across the country
was both a personal exploration for me, as well as a discovery of a new means of working. This
collection of photographs is a look back in time at a way of life that is slowly but steadily disappearing
across the great American landscape.
The content of the work elicits memories of home and family, as well as the stories that were told to me
by my father. It is also about loss, nostalgia, and a love for the city’s periphery and all its complexities.
Reflecting familiar aspects of life back to us, this work is not about polish and shine, but about the
propped up, the patched and stitched back together, and the ways that, with persistence, we continue to
make do.
- Matt Haffner