The American Scene in Neon

In the thirties I traveled the country with my view camera, obsessed with the honesty of the ordinary — the way a gas station or a billboard revealed the true character of a people. A rusted silo, a peeling advertisement, a lonely stretch of highway: these were my cathedrals. The sublime lived not in mountains but in the vernacular, the man-made landscape of the everyday. My negatives were stained with dust and devotion, every print carrying the weight of a nation struggling to remember who it was.

Your wide-angle images of Hong Kong are the ultimate vernacular study, pushed vertical. They capture the visual noise of the city — air conditioners clinging to facades like barnacles, satellite dishes sprouting from rooftops like metallic fungi, neon signs stacked twenty stories high in columns of commerce. This is a city written on its facade, a text of struggle spelling itself out in gas and glass. But I must question the glamour of the neon. In my black-and-white plates, the monochrome palette stripped away distraction and left only form. Your color images risk turning this vernacular into spectacle. The neon glows with a feverish intensity that seduces the eye and dulls the conscience. It is a beautiful, dizzying, romanticized view of a city built on hard, vertical labor. The colors sing, but they also soothe, wrapping harsh realities in a blanket of artificial warmth. Does the panoramic vista reveal the truth or decorate it? I do not know. The neon is both beacon and veil, illuminating the city even as it obscures the lives beneath its glow.

Still, there is kinship between the gas stations I photographed in Oklahoma and these neon towers. Both are shrines to movement, to the restless urge to go somewhere else, to be someone else. The gas station promised mobility; the neon promises transformation. Both are lies, of course, but necessary ones — the myths by which we navigate the dark. The broad view captures this myth-making rendered in light: the promise that if you climb high enough, shine loudly enough, you will be seen. You will matter. And perhaps that is the deepest vernacular truth of all — that visibility is a form of validity, that to be seen is to be real. The scene has changed, but the hunger remains. We still want the light to find us, even when it arrives in colors we do not recognize.