N. King
A piece of trash on the pavement, a dilapidated building on the side of the road, or the bright blue sky are all things we see every day, but choose not to really see. Hammond draws a box around these mundane images, putting them into extraordinary focus. "Idealizing the ordinary" as he calls it, is a quality that comes naturally for this photographer. This seemingly insignificant subject matter is somehow transformed into a more complex representation of place and time, where sometimes emotions get entangled within each other.
Hammond has traveled the States, East Coast to West in search of well, nothing. His images come from, as he refers to it, "the middle of everywhere." These photo-excursions, usually under the hot summer sun, he considers not only a road-trip but also a metaphor for life. "It’s not just about getting from point A to point B but what’s in between…it’s life" Hammond states. This life that Hammond chooses to document isn’t the one that you see in the flashy framed photos sold by vendors in a street fair, it’s stepping away from that and still finding beauty in what’s there, what’s untouched. No makeup, no glitz or glamour.
One cannot always instantly find the real beauty in Hammond’s images, but there are always golden moments of hilarity or loneliness hidden within the context of the seemingly boring subject matter. In We Accept Credit Cards, a roadside sign indicates where one can find Amish products like fudge and double yolk eggs and that now they take plastic.
Many of Hammond’s images are coated with a thin layer of irony. A blank white billboard stands massively in the middle of a long deserted stretch of road in the New Mexico desert in Billboard. There’s nothing around for miles and apparently not much to say either, but the lack of message is the message. Still, the reality of other images is just aesthetically pleasing, such as the beautiful colors of a Colorado sunset illuminating a piece of farm machinery just off in the distance.
Hammond’s work is often compared to the great photographers Walker Evans and William Eggleston, and one can readily see why. Evans and Eggleston as well as Stephen Shore just a few influences on Hammond. The images created by each of these brilliant photographers are so simplistically pedestrian that it seems as if the images were literally cut out of reality. They are bringing a modernist authenticity back into this type of photography. The Polaroid medium chosen by Hammond, and Evans in his later years, is also conducive to simplicity and the instantaneous capture or reality.
Another similarity between Hammond and Eggleston specifically, is that there is almost no set-up time for the photograph. The image is spied by the photographer and quickly shot, but only once. Rarely do these two make a second effort at capturing an image. This is what brings the raw reality to their images, as well in a style Eggleston calls, "photographing democratically" where everything in the frame is given equal emphasis. As Hammond tends to shoot most every scene straight on, there are no angles for abstraction.
At first Hammond did not see his sizeable assembly of tiny Polaroid photographs as art created for the masses, but as a sort of selfish compulsion or "my own personal bug collection," which he entitles — "Polaroids from the Road," amassed for his own pleasure. What Hammond isn’t aware of is that many of us here in the photo world, as well as those who just enjoy the simplicity of the Polaroid medium, are admiring his collection of "ordinary" images.
Hammond’s "bug collection" can be viewed at http://www.polaroidsfromtheroad.com.
