Overview

Photographs offer a fresh, razor-sharp view of contemporary American culture. In many ways, Ohio has become for America the quintessential heartland state, for what happens in Ohio happens over all of the United States. It's where fastfood companies test-market new products and where chewing gum, Teflon, the first cash register, first vacuum cleaner, first airplane, first traffic signal, and first gaspowered automobile were invented. This landmark book of photography offers a fresh view of contemporary American culture in Ohio and the rest of America. AUTHOR: Andrew Borowiec was named Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of Akron's Myers School of Art. He has also worked as a photojournalist, as the staff photographer for the International Center of Photography, and as Director of the University of Akron Press. He has received fellowships in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Ohio Arts Council. In 2006, he was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize. His photographs of America's changing social, industrial, and post-industrial landscapes have been exhibited around the world and are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nelson Adkins Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others. His previous books include Along the Ohio (2000), Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast (2005), and Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills (2008). 67 colour photographs

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9781938086199

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"""The New Heartland recalls other landmark books in the history of photography. Robert Adams's The New West (1973) leaps to mind, because Borowiec's title echoes that of the earlier book and because both books wrestle with dichotomies: myth and reality, beauty and ugliness, gross social trends and real needs of ordinary people. Together, these two books demonstrate that the issues they address, however specific and local they may seem in the pictures, are as universal as they are persistent... The New Heartland gives us a fresh look at American culture that partakes in an important artistic tradition.""--Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography, Denver Art Museum, and author of Belonging to the West"

Andrew Borowiec's photographs take stock of contemporary life in America's heartland and explore how the way people shape their surroundings expresses our prevailing social and environmental attitudes, perceptions, and values. The book is not simply a critique or an analysis of current American culture; the specificity of Borowiec's work reveals a sweet, simple, and irrefutable humanity that connects what we see with what we have experienced ourselves and insists that these pictures and the trends they describe belong, somehow, to all of us. The New Heartland recalls other landmark books in the history of photography. Robert Adams's The New West (1973) leaps to mind, because Borowiec's title echoes that of the earlier book and because both books wrestle with dichotomies: myth and reality, beauty and ugliness, gross social trends and real needs of ordinary people. Together, these two books demonstrate that the issues they address, however specific and local they may seem in the pictures, are as universal as they are persistent.The other books that seem to lurk in the background of The New Heartland are Walker Evans's great American Photographs (1938) and the four-volume The Work of Atget (1981--1985) by John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg. The strong affinity I see among Borowiec, Evans, and Atget has mostly to do with their faith that simple facts about how things look, stated clearly and economically in photographs, possess a unique poetic power. Borowiec contributes to this tradition of careful looking, with photographs of supreme intelligence and wit. The New Heartland gives us a fresh look at American culture that partakes in an important artistic tradition.

The New Heartland recalls other landmark books in the history of photography. Robert Adams's The New West (1973) leaps to mind, because Borowiec's title echoes that of the earlier book and because both books wrestle with dichotomies: myth and reality, beauty and ugliness, gross social trends and real needs of ordinary people. Together, these two books demonstrate that the issues they address, however specific and local they may seem in the pictures, are as universal as they are persistent... The New Heartland gives us a fresh look at American culture that partakes in an important artistic tradition. --Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography, Denver Art Museum, and author of Belonging to the West

Author Information

Andrew Borowiec is Distinguished Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Akron who has received fellowships in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Ohio Arts Council. For more than three decades, he has photographed America’s changing social, industrial, and post-industrial landscapes. His photographs have been exhibited around the world and are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others. His other books of photography include Wheeling, West Virginia (Camera Infinita, 2018), Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008), Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast (Center for American Places, 2005), and Along the Ohio (John Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 2000). David Giffels was a longtime columnist for The Akron Beacon Journal before joining the faculty of the University of Akron, where he is Associate Professor of English. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Grantland, New York Times Magazine, and Wall Street Journal, among many other publications, and he was a writer for the popular MTV series, Beavis and Butt-Head. Giffels’s other books include the acclaimed Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life (Scribner, 2018), The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt (Scribner, 2014), All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2008), Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! (SAF Publishing, 2003), with Jade Dellinger, and Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron (University of Akron Press, 1998), with Steve Love.

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