Gabriele Rossi – The Lizard

Finding its place in the tradition of Robert Adams or Mark Ruwedel, Gabrielle Rossi’s book The Lizard is a road trip and a survey of the most mundane, and maybe the most alien, parts of America.  Rossi’s incredibly formal and precise images photographs, primarily of roads, freeways and the landscapes around them, are complimented by a lush production by Deadbeat Club.

First of all: I love the production and design. The size is large, which can be cumbersome, but in this case it is so easy to actually hold. The silver ink on black of the cover printing really makes use of the scale and the tonality present in the work.

Rossi’s incredibly formal and precise images photographs [are] primarily of roads, freeways and the landscapes around them.

When looking at the photographs Rossi has made, it is hard to ignore how quintessential the road, the vehicle and the car park are to North American spaces. So many of his  photographs show the viewer an expansive road cutting through an immense landscape. These photographs read, to me, as a very sublime presentation – the overwhelming scale and size of a space, undercut by the equally massive expanse of construction. That combination of awe and unease is a hallmark of how many photographers have explored the interior of America, and it is certainly present here.

Many of the photographs are composed in a way to highlight key visual disruptions or interruptions. In an image of a dam there is a line separating the rock that’s seen the sun before from rock that’s newly exposed as the dam level drops. In an image of a copse of trees a pole juts out – both hidden and obvious. There’s a visual pattern-making at play, especially in the first third of the book, which seems to me to be attempting to be metaphorical, but it’s all a bit too subtle.

In addition to this focus on the road and the land there are also many photos of buildings. I really found these to be quietly compelling. The back of a block of condos, a random concrete bunker built into a cliff face, a wooden cube of a house perched very abruptly on a hillside. These buildings are not blending in, they could never. Like the road, like the car, there’s something almost absurd about the built environment. It’s all so neat and manicured and yet, despite that, Rossi highlights just how noticeable and unnatural these homes, offices and public buildings are.

Like the road, like the car, there’s something almost absurd about the built environment. It’s all so neat and manicured and yet, despite that, Rossi highlights just how noticeable and unnatural these homes, offices and public buildings are.

At its best, The Lizard is full of  immense views  that feel like you could sink into them. The scale and formality of Rossi’s compositions feels alive. In  one image of a shoreline, the vantage point is looking down, the people swimming seem so small, there’s old brickwork in the water and new trees sprouting from it, and an imposing hillside, covered in forest. This image is, to me, the cream of the crop of a very formal and distant way of working – I feel like I’m there on the hillside with Rossi, seeing it all, feeling the sun, hearing the people in the water.

However, I find that this book – and many bodies of work like this – feels like it is not quite sharing what it’s trying to say. There is so much distance both in the photographs and in the artist’s perspective; I find the work is circling something and not really landing. I have noticed that many artists in, or working in, the USA prefer to make work that leaves space for the viewer to find their own opinion, reading or way through it. While this is a valid approach to making art, the risk is that by hiding one’s opinion or perspective the work ends up so diffuse that it says nothing. This is ultimately where I landed with Rossi’s book. There are so many hints: hints at damage, hints at sadness, hints at the problems we make when we bulldoze a hill to make a road. But after a while a viewer has to ask ‘What are you hinting at? What are you trying to share?’. At times I started to read the book as haughty – what could be more cliche that a European (Rossi is Italian) visiting America and just pointing their fingers at cars, carparks and roads? Yet I’m not even sure Rossi is trying to be critical of the prevalence of car reliance in the USA.

Given how well trodden, especially photographically, these exact spaces are, I feel that simply observing and cataloguing is a missed opportunity to say something more.

One may read what I’ve written above and wonder ‘does a body of work need a message or an idea?’ and the answer is ‘of course not’. But when I look at these photographs all together I do not necessarily feel they are more than the sum of their parts. There isn’t a pervading mood, a sense of personality or anything other than the content. At the end of the book the project seems to be a collection of road images – with not even a sense of journey or connection. What then can we learn from Rossi’s exploration of the road and its adjacent spaces? In my view, it’s hard to learn anything, I can’t even work out what Rossi might think, be curious about, or why he is drawn to what he photographed.

To give one example from the book: an image of a minivan in a huge and empty car park. It’s such an American scene – it speaks so much to the place and culture of the USA. Something like this could almost only be seen in the US of A. But after sitting with that for a second I had to wonder ‘so what?’. It’s a very American thing to see, but is there more? Is this bad, is it a problem, is it good, is it surprising, is it confusing? The photograph is so clinical it becomes purely descriptive, and I just don’t know if a purely descriptive book – for places so well photographed already – has enough going on for me.

As a reviewer I am wary of being too critical. If I don’t respond to a book that does not mean the book is bad or poorly executed. At the same time, it is important to share when a work feels like it isn’t quite there. For me, and this may just be me, Rossi’s book felt too distant. While I loved some of the scale that came from that distance I ultimately found the work seemed so deliberately separate from its subject matter, the history of the places explored and the broader questions of land use and environmental consequences as to come off as incomplete. Given how well trodden, especially photographically, these exact spaces are, I feel that simply observing and cataloguing is a missed opportunity to say something more, to add additional perspective or contribute to photography’s engagement with the built environment in the American West. Sadly, for me then, while I loved the production (the cover design is so gorgeous) The Lizard just did not quite feel meaty enough.




All Rights Reserved: Text © Matt Dunne
Images © Gabriele Rossi/Deadbeat Club