Niagara

A-1 Motel, Niagara Falls, copyright 2005 Alec Soth

Last month, Joerg Colberg did an interview with photographer Alec Soth about his work and his recent book, Niagara. I was intrigued by the interview and what Soth said he was trying to capture in photographing that iconic American place: the falls, the surroundings, and especially the people who were there, looking for...what? romance? love? being transported somewhere by that relentless and enormous cascade? Afterwards I wrote to Soth and asked for permission to reproduce his work here, in a post about what these photos evoked in me, and he graciously consented.

I grew up in upstate New York and have visited Niagara Falls a couple of times, once with my former boss from the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation when we went out to western New York to design a nature trail at a state wildlife preserve, and once when visiting a guy I was briefly dating who lived out there. The first time, my boss and I went as a detour from our work; we often took such side trips, which were technically like playing hookey but no one ever cared or found out either. I probably told him I'd never been to Niagara during our long drive across the state on the Thruway, in the black bomb of a station wagon that the State issued to its foresters and biologists and conservation officers, without a working radio but filled with his cigarette smoke and the sound of (to me) more or less endless and fascinating conversation. We'd stop at diners for coffee and pie and then climb back in the bomb and drive another hundred miles, and I'd learn about the roadside geology or the native American artifacts of a region, or its rare ferns or migrating waterfowl - or hear some outrageous story about the woman who used to work at the diner we'd just visited. I was 22, maybe, wide-eyed and spongelike in my quest to understand the other gender as well as the world we inhabited uneasily together.

I digress. But only partially. I think he and I ended up on the bank overlooking the falls not only because it was a natural phenomenon he wanted me to see and experience, but because there was an unspoken and un-acted-upon erotic tension between us. We had, by then, known each other six years as mentor and disciple, teacher and student, as close friends. I remember standing there, mesmerized by the water, the hugeness of the falls, the spray, the sound of it. He stood off at a little distance, leaning on the railing, smoking, giving me whatever time I needed to absorb what I was seeing. And then we spoke about the scene - the way the tourism had totally ruined the place, the tacky, sordid, commercialism of it. We were, after all, used to being together in the woods and the wilderness. But we were both glad we'd come there and able, somehow, to block out all that other stuff and just see the falls almost as if we had come upon it unknown, drawn by the rush of the water and the increasing roar of sound. We didn't talk about it a reat deal; we didn't need to.

It was a few years later when I went back with a young man my age. That time we crossed over into Canada and viewed the falls from the other, much less commercial, side, but that day the sordidness felt like it was inside me; I was with someone I didn't really like that much and I felt cheap and used and tired, anxious to get back on the train and head home, leaving Niagara and the echoes of his empty promises behind.

Soth's photographs disturb and stick with me for two reasons. One is that he captured a quality of decay and transience that I know well from living in that part of the world; I find it most clearly in his photos of the motels - the kind of motels you find all across central new York in the small towns along Rt. 20, formerly visited by tourists and now forgotten. The photos of people are less compelling and more obvious; they make a statement but they represent only one subset of the types of people who come to places like Niagara.

The other photos that stay with me are Soth's photos of the falls itself, because they are like my first memory: existing alone in time, filling my eyes and my ears and my mind with a vividness and a power that neither the noise and detritus of human beings nor the intervention of thirty years have been able to alter.

Alec Soth, Niagara, copyright 2005

Comments

[marja-leena]

Thanks for this, Beth. It's really interesting how one's very human encounters set against the Falls (or any famous place) can colour it a certain way into our memories. I saw the Canadian Niagara in the mid 60's with my family. It was extremely humid and hot that summer day driving down from Toronto, the day after we flew back from a holiday in Finland. So we were jet-lagged as well as hot, and it was crowded and very touristy with all the junk food and tacky tourist gift shops. (And you say it isn't as commercial as the US side?!) The falls were magnificent, but I think if it had been surrounded by wilderness it would have been a far better experience. I guess that's what Soth is portraying.

[zhoen]

I may have stayed at that Motel when I was a kid.

[dale]

Well. I invented these pebbles for just this reason :-)

(o)

[Natalie]

beth, this is wonderful. Maybe part of an autobio? I love the way you can subtly evoke place and time as well as inner feelings.

"...an unspoken and un-acted-upon erotic tension.." between teacher and pupil, mentor and disciple - I recognise that so well, and how thrilling it was. You describe it beautifully and cinematically.

[lucy]

beth..The falls have a powerful effect on me too, I never tire of approaching the edge and just letting the feelings flow through me. I'm not sure what they are or what they were the last ime I was there and maybe that's what keeps me coming back. The crowd almost disappears for me as I try to get a grip on the concept of geologic time.

[Bill]

I love the movie. Joseph Cotton possessed by a ruinous infatuation with Marilyn Monroe which eventually picks him up as if by the scruff of the neck and tosses him over the brink. There was some term of art for the flow above the falls, a zone of no return. The falls were lit with changing colours at night, a hideous writhing abyss, ever ready to claim the desperate. All the clutter presses around the falls and gorge like a crowd crushed around a snake-charming act with one very outsized snake.

[leslee]

Stunning photos. Beautiful, and yet what they capture... I probably stayed in one of those motels as a kid, too. My parents for some reason left me with my grandfather at the falls while they went somewhere - maybe took my brother to see them closer? Anyway, he made the mistake of making some joke about my parents having left which set me sobbing until they came back. I remember the feel on my face of the wool coat he was wearing.