The Post-Industrial Rust Belt: interview with Andrew Borowiec / #URBANinsights

#URBANinsights are a series of exclusive interviews and insights dedicated to the winners of URBAN Photo Awards. The #URBANinsights of today is an interview with Andrew Borowiec, winner of the 2023 edition of the contest for the category Projects & Portfolios, with his series The Post-Industrial Rust Belt.

Andrew’s project depicts the degradation and desolation of the Rust Belt, the area that was once the heart of American industry, stretching from New York state to the shores of lake Michigan, and to the Appalachian mountains south of the Ohio river, in continuous decline since the 1980s. 

The Post-industrial Rust Belt was selected by Jérôme Sessini, who stated: “I chose Andrew’s project because it felt like the most accomplished, both technically and from a journalistic reportage perspective. I can see the photographer’s commitment through his work, his proper distance, and his refusal to use the usual gimmicks to try to seduce the audience.”

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, and congratulations on your award-winning project, “The Post-industrial Rust Belt.”

Whenever I have the pleasure to come across an artist like yourself, who has dedicated most of their life to their craft,  I am always fascinated to find out what first sparked their interest in it. So, if you wouldn’t mind indulging us, I would like you to take us back to the beginning and tell us a little bit about how your journey started.

It started when I was in high school in Switzerland. I planned to study zoology, so I took a couple of night classes to learn how to photograph animals and how to process film and make prints. I spent hours in the woods trying to photograph birds and I set up a makeshift darkroom at home. We had to do everything from scratch: I would go to the pharmacy and ask them to weigh out 2 grams of hydroquinone, or 100 grams of sodium sulfite, and mix my own chemicals. On a school trip to Florence I made some pictures that I was very excited about—street scenes of people interacting—and pretty soon I was spending all my free time walking around with a camera.

When I went to college I promised my mother that I wouldn’t take photography classes, but my resolve fell apart by the second semester. In the end I got a degree in Russian, but even my Russian professors knew that it was photography that I really cared about. The summer after I graduated I ended up working for the Rencontres d’Arles and that fall I became the staff photographer at ICP in New York.

Working for the Rencontres and for ICP were wonderful opportunities, as I got to meet many of my heroes: Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, André Kertesz, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan. I also met younger photographers who remained close friends over the years: Larry Fink, Len Jenshel, Jim Stone, Mark Steinmetz. 

My job at ICP wasn’t full-time, so I took on many free-lance assignments. I must have done every kind of photo job there was: photojournalism, product and advertising, fashion, public relations, even floral photography. However, what I learned from that experience was that I did not want to do commercial work, which had nothing to do with the kinds of pictures that the photographers I admired were making. One day Garry Winogrand told me that going to graduate school would help me be a better photographer, but that there was only one school that was worth attending. He said I needed to study under Tod Papageorge at Yale. Naturally, I took Garry’s advice.

Your life and career spans the globe, through Algeria, Tunisia, France, Switzerland and the US. Can you tell us a little bit about the difference in your experience of living and working as a photographer in those countries?
And how do you feel that having a multicultural background has influenced and enriched your approach to your craft?

I lived in some of those countries as a child, before I became a photographer. Still, I think my globetrotting childhood is at the root of my preoccupation with the idea of place. There’s a wonderful story by Natacha Stewart in which the narrator describes growing up in France and Switzerland, then moving to New York. She writes: “Ever since I can remember, I have felt at home both everywhere and nowhere. It is a precarious position at best, but it has a nice sense of danger to it: a little like standing on thin ice.” That’s how I have always felt: there is no place where I completely belong, yet I seem to be able to fit in everywhere. There’s a fundamental paradox to being an artist; you need to be a participant in the world to understand it, yet you also need to keep a certain distance to see it clearly. I think my varied background was the perfect preparation for that delicate balancing act.

Your work as a whole focuses extensively on documenting urban landscapes and challenging social environments. What initially drew you to these specific topics, and how has your perspective on them evolved over your decades of work?

I spent most of my formative years in urban settings, so I suppose I’m comfortable in environments that others might find challenging. My interest in industrial places came about essentially by accident of circumstance. I took a job teaching in northeastern Ohio and discovered a landscape that had been shaped by human activity, by manufacturing. The longer I lived in that landscape and photographed it, the more I grew to understand it, and to understand the lives of the people who lived there. Eventually, that understanding led me to photograph other landscapes that embody human struggle, such as post-industrial areas in France and Belgium.

A lot of your reportages have taken place in desolated – and often isolated – areas, which I imagine can be a very solitary and challenging experience.
Is this an aspect of your work that you enjoy?

One thing that I love about photography is that it is essentially a solitary activity: you do it alone, without the need for help from others, and you bear sole responsibility for the result. I know that many photographers use assistants, or work collaboratively, or delegate printing or some other part of the process to others, but I have always insisted on doing everything myself. I don’t find solitary environments challenging; on the contrary they allow me to see carefully, without distractions.

Admittedly, many of the places I photograph really are quite deserted. That’s a fundamental characteristic of post-industrial landscapes: the factories are gone and people have moved away because there are no jobs. For example, Wheeling, West Virginia, the subject of a recent book of mine, had a population of almost 62,000 in the early part of the Twentieth Century, but that’s now down to around 27,000. The infrastructure of a more populous city is still there, but you have a lot of vacant stores and empty homes, so inevitably the streets can seem desolate.

At the same time, I generally try to avoid having people in my pictures. I learned a long time ago that, when there are people present, they dominate the photo and the viewer ignores all the other content. I want the viewer to look carefully at the place and not to be distracted by the specifics of a person’s appearance or expression. I want them to think “I myself could be living in that house,” not “that’s who’s living there.”

In previous interviews, like the 2015 conversation with Fotofilmic (which we strongly recommend our audience read to gain further insight into your process), you mentioned transitioning from black and white film to color photography. How has this shift influenced the way you capture and interpret landscapes?

I have always tried to make pictures that are believable, that appear to be accurate descriptions of the real world. I grew up at a time when much of the visual information we received was in black and white, such as family pictures, the photographs in newspapers, passport photos, legal evidence, and so forth. Color photography existed, but it wasn’t the norm and I think people exercised a kind of suspension of disbelief and accepted black and white photos as realistic.

However, these days it seems that black and white is perceived as something exotic or quaintly old-fashioned, as intentionally unrealistic. The suspension of disbelief is gone. I don’t think it’s possible any more for me to make black and white photographs that are convincing descriptions of the contemporary world; there will always be a hint of artifice or self-consciousness due to the absence of color. 

Paradoxically, however, most of the photography that I look at regularly, and like best, is black and white. And I still have a darkroom, which lets me maintain the delusion that I will one day be caught up with printing a lifetime’s worth of black and white negatives.

Your work now sometimes involves making large prints with detailed imagery that serves to “amplify, clarify, and sometimes complicates the photographs’ meaning”.
How does this approach enhance the storytelling aspect of your photographs?
Why is it important or meaningful to complicate a photograph’s meaning, and what do you hope viewers take away from examining these details?

When I was in graduate school one of my professors, Frank Gohlke, introduced me to the writings of J.B. Jackson, who was one of the pioneers of a field of geography known as Landscape Studies. Jackson wrote extensively about how to look carefully at a place: how to read the clues that it provides to arrive at an understanding of its history, its economic circumstances, of the people who inhabit it. That way of looking is central to how I photograph. In my photos I try to include as much information as possible. Rather than giving my pictures a quick glance, I hope that viewers will take the time to examine them closely and that the details they discover will contribute to a more complete understanding of what they are looking at. The stories of the places I photograph aren’t simple and I want viewers to see those places in all of their complexity.

For example, in one of the photos from my New Heartland project, you see a street of houses that are so new that their yards are still just bare dirt. Viewers have commented on the horrible monotony of those identical houses and have perceived the photo as a criticism of new housing developments. However, what I learned when photographing those places was that the people who live there love them. For them, a brand new house represents the American Dream: hope for the future, a new beginning unencumbered by the past. And the pink balloons tied to the mailbox and lamppost signify that a baby girl was recently born in that household, a quintessential sign of celebration and hope for the future that belies the barrenness of the setting.

Let’s now talk a bit more in detail about “The Post-industrial Rust Belt”, the result of almost four decades of reportage on the decline of  America’s vast industrial heartland, which extends from upstate New York to the shores of Lake Michigan and into Appalachia, south of the Ohio River.
The economic decline that the Rust Belt has experienced since the 1980s has resulted in significant job losses and urban decay.
How did you navigate entering such a difficult, vulnerable and I presume very private reality, to the point of being welcomed to witness and capture people’s individual, social and economical struggles? 

It’s not easy to photograph places where life is hard. People are self-conscious about their situation and firmly convinced that one can’t photograph their property without their permission. Especially in the US over the past eight or nine years, I’ve noticed a significant increase in hostility. When I was photographing in the 1980s and 1990s a man walking around with a camera was perceived as a curiosity. Nowadays people frequently assume I’m part of the media, a group whom Trump has conditioned his followers to consider their enemy, and I often have to contend with threats of violence.

I try to approach people with tact and respect. I usually do a considerable amount of research before photographing a place. For example, before I ever set foot in France’s Bassin Minier I spent a year reading about it, not only guidebooks, but history, government policy papers, and literature, such as Zola’s “Germinal.” Consequently, when I talk with people they recognize that I am not some casual tourist, but that I know about their town: its landmarks, its geography—its story.

I’ve heard about a very well-known American photographer driving around in a Rolls-Royce while photographing some of the most impoverished parts of the South, which obviously creates a particular power dynamic. I take the opposite approach: I dress the way others do, I drive a modest car, and I strive to have people recognize me as someone on their side.

Despite the difficulties faced by residents of the Rust Belt, you mentioned that you hope your shots also convey signs of hope: “The photographs are, in part, about the specific identity of a landscape — its topography, its architecture, its history, the arrangement and decoration of back yards. At the same time, I try to make pictures whose details serve as clues to understanding the values, aspirations, hopes, and dreams of the people who live in that landscape.”
Can you share some examples of the resilience that you’ve encountered?

This ties in with my earlier comments about details affecting the meaning of the picture. To pick one example, in a photo from “Along the Ohio” a modest house is squeezed between two larger buildings that are clearly not residential. When you look closely at the photo you realize that the building on the left is a hospital—sign reads “patients and visitors only”—while the building on the right is a church, judging by the inscription over the door: “This is none other than the house of God.” The house stands on elevated ground, indicating that the land to either side has been carved away to accommodate parking lots. Despite the unwelcoming surroundings, the inhabitants of the house clearly continue to make use of their front yard, as they have furnished it with a canopy and lawn furniture and erected makeshift fences to either side. It’s as if they have stubbornly resisted the urban changes that surround them, holding on to their small piece of the American Dream while their neighborhood disappears.

Speaking of “Along the Ohio” – your series that documents the life of the communities along the Ohio River – what drew you to focus on this particular region, and how does it compare to other areas within the Rust Belt that you’ve photographed? 

A couple of years after I moved from New York City to Ohio I stumbled across the Ohio River Valley by chance, as I was driving around exploring the region that was now my home. That day I took some photos that showed gigantic industrial structures looming over modest residential neighborhoods and I liked them enough that I kept returning to the area over the years, even while working on other projects.

I think my interest in that particular region was partly due to the river’s function as a kind of highway: after the Revolution the river served as the principal migration route between the eastern states and frontier settlements to the west, so communities along its course were more varied and cosmopolitan that inland towns, which made them more interesting to photograph. Also, the river offered a kind of geographical framework that defined where I would photograph, much as I would later use the Lincoln Highway to provide structure to a project that was really about the whole country.

From your point of view, how does the decline of the Rust Belt reflect broader themes of inequality and economic hardship in twenty-first-century America?
As someone who has witnessed and documented the changes in the area over several decades, what do you see as the future of its communities?

It’s now finally common knowledge that economic inequality has steadily increased throughout the world over the past few decades. Setting aside differences in topography or architectural style, the situation in the Ohio River Valley is similar to that found throughout the United States where economic conditions have changed for the worse, as well as in post-industrial regions of Europe.

I am not particularly hopeful about the future for post-industrial small towns. Most of them flourished because of specific industrial activity and when that activity ended, the towns deteriorated. There is plenty of literature about the many reasons for those changed circumstances, but the inevitable decline in population that results from the absence of jobs precludes any kind of return to earlier prosperity. I know that many of the inhabitants of those places are angry and bitter, and in some cases they are driven to unfortunate political choices. However, the past is not coming back; all we can do is remember it and, perhaps, learn from it. As a photographer, I try to evoke the past by describing the present: I try to make pictures that contribute to the collective memory of a place.

Your work was selected as the winner of the 2023 URBAN Awards’ Portfolios by Jérôme Sessini, who stated: “I chose Andrew’s project because it felt like the most accomplished, both technically and from a journalistic reportage perspective. I can see the photographer’s commitment through his work, his proper distance, and his refusal to use the usual gimmicks to try to seduce the audience”.
What do you think of his review and comments?

I am very grateful to Jérôme for having selected me and especially gratified by his comments, which show that he exactly understands what I am doing. As I mentioned earlier in this conversation, I want my photographs to be believable, to seem true. To that end, I have tried to avoid the strategies that photographers typically use to give their pictures visual interest, to seduce the viewer. I want the viewer to think about the contents of the photograph, not the means by which it was made, so I don’t use extreme vantage points or overly dramatic compositions; I don’t use lenses that are significantly wider or longer than normal human vision; I don’t photograph at the “golden hour,” when even the most recalcitrant of subjects can look gorgeous; and I keep well away from the easy and deceptive allure of color photography at night.

Can you give us a little insight into any new projects you are currently working on, or have in store for the future?

I’ve recently been photographing post-industrial regions in Europe, specifically the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin in France; France’s former steel-making region in Lorraine; and Belgium’s Sillon Industriel. I plan to extend that work to other regions of Europe over the coming years.

I’ve photographed the Rust Belt for almost four decades. Every few years I move on to other subjects, but the Rust Belt’s story is constantly evolving and I keep coming back to it. I don’t expect that I will ever be finished…

We wish you the best of luck in all of this, then!
Again, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, and we look forward to seeing more of your work.