Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - How to look at America

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

We hear from two photographers who are masters at showing us what is hard to see, and always has been hard to see, in America.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called How to Look at America. In 2002, the Canadian photographer Naomi Harris was living in Miami. And since she's a nudist, she was spending a lot of time on the nude beach. One day, this older guy she sort of knew, Ron, asked her for a favor. Ron wanted to go to a swingers club called Trapeze. But being a single dude, he couldn't get in. So he asked

Naomi to come with him. He wasn't asking her to do anything, he just needed her to get in the door. And Naomi, being a curious type, said yes. We went to this club. It's in like an abandoned strip mall everything else is shut down except for this one club and then neon red you just see the word trapeze and um there's uh so we got there early so ron could give me the lay of the land and show me all the rooms and he showed me the back room which is the orgy room which was basically eight mismatched mattresses pushed together oh isn't this gonna be awesome awesome? And I'm just like, okay, they need a little decoration here. And the people started coming in and they're all like the same people I had been in line behind at the supermarket or the bank earlier that day,

just regular ordinary people like your dentist, your accountant, your school nurse, whatever. And the difference is they're all wearing like hoochie mama wear and stripper shoes and men in shiny shirts. And they proceed to go to a buffet where there's a big chef with a hat and the white crispy, you know, chef's clothes. And he's carving up roast beef and serving scalloped potatoes. And everyone's just, myself included, eating. And then 20 minutes later, everyone's going to the back room and I proceeded to watch

all sorts of different sexual acts unfold in front of me and I'd never seen anything like that before and I was just fascinated. Partially because I mean I had a bit of indigestion at the time and I just don't understand how anyone could eat you know steak and then have group sex but okay that was one of the things that I thought was so funny and I thought about it and I'm like no one's gonna believe me when I tell them that at 3 in the morning when I was leaving the club there was the breakfast buffet out and the naked woman except for her high heels getting like I

forget Danish or whatever you know and so I decided there and then that I really wanted to photograph it. Naomi Harris spent the next six years photographing swingers in clubs, festivals, and their homes. Her book, America Swings, has just been published by Toshin. And when I first saw the book, I knew I had to have her on the show. Naomi Harris shows us a USA you have definitely never seen before. So the first party I decided to photograph was an event called Swingstock,

which is basically a four-day camping and fornication festival. So I contacted them, and they said, yeah, sure, come along. So I packed up my tent and my cameras and flew out to Minnesota, got a car and drove to this campsite about an hour and a half away and went to my very first swing party. The picture I'm showing you now is a scene I stumbled upon in the woods where it was this woman, Marty, who I found out afterwards she had done something like, I don't know,

she had taken mushrooms all weekend and had something like 50 orgasms over the course of the weekend. You know, here she is in this sex swing that's been propped in the trees. And this woman is helping her husband bring her to orgasm manually, so to speak. And there's a crowd that has come to watch. And, you know, there's the one woman smoking a cigar and drinking a beer. And then another woman just sort of walked over. She's topless and she's brushing her teeth. It seems to me that right off the bat you're kind of capturing laid-back moments, attitudes. It's not just casual sex, it's casual attitude. These people are into reclining, putting pillows back under their... They're on holiday. I mean this is,

people have to remember like, okay some swingers take it really serious. It's a serious business for them. Like, we're going to come, we're going to get laid, we're going to go home. You know, we don't even care about getting names. For other people, it's very much about the social aspect. It's very recreational. It's very much about friendship. A lot of the swingers I've met, they've stopped being friends with vanilla,

regular everyday people. They're friends with other swingers. I guess they feel they have a connection and they understand each other more. So let's talk about the things that come to mind when I'm watching the woman brushing her teeth and the fat woman and the guy with the beard. They don't just look like the guys and girls at the bank or the dentist office. Right now, we've got all these rallies going on across America, and it's mostly older white people. And it kind of reminds me of them.

And I'm kind of wondering, with this liberal attitude towards sex, how do they see the rest of the world? Were they liberally well-rounded in life? The statistic for a swinger in America generally is someone who's between the ages of 35 and 55, middle class, middle America, white, liberal in their sexual attitudes, but not in their political views. And

this is one thing I found very interesting. I started this project in 2003, photographed it up until the beginning of 2008. So during 2004, the presidential election between Bush and Kerry, I'd be at parties where fights would actually literally break out. There'd be the few people who are very liberal and saying, how could you vote for him? And then there'd be the other people who are like, and it would get to the point where the host would have to step in and say, you got to stop talking politics, leave it alone, leave it out the door. We're here to fuck. But I would say most swingers tend to be

Republican actually. I think another thing to look at in the book is how many pictures illustrate how America and American this activity is. Sure, this goes on in Europe, but for me, what was really fascinating, like going to a Thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey and pecan pie and then people having sex. As a Canadian, these are the things that stick out in my mind as what is America? Fourth of July parties, you know. What's more American than football, beer, and blowjobs? The picture I'm showing you now are these series of pictures that take place in Des Moines, Iowa. This

is in the living room of Paul and Robin. It's a very nice upper middle class home. A sofa with three men sitting on it and three women sitting with their tops off kneeling down at their feet and servicing them so to speak while all the men in the picture there's a few other men on the sidelines are watching the football game and their poor dog buddy is just lying there with his bone next to them kind of like what the hell am I doing here? This is the thing. This dog looks like he knows that something is not right.

Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he's just kind of like, how did I get messed up into this? I also particularly like the fact that there's a crock pot in the background where they have the little mini cocktail weenies and stuff it's all it's and that was one thing that I always found amusing at the swinger parties there was always food always food at every party and never sexy food never like sushi or light stuff like a crudite platter it was always like chips and dip

and pizza and heavy heavy, a lot of meats. And depending also geographically where you were, like when I was in the South, they had, you know, the way the one party had the buffet at three in the morning, they pulled out their biscuits and gravy. I mean, to me, that's just hilarious to be having biscuits and gravy after a night of sex. You make America look really ugly. Obese, flabby. I didn't do anything.

This is what America looks like. And I can't help the fact that as a country, exercise and good nutrition and taking better care of yourself is not the top priority. But this is just a cross-section of what America is with their clothes off and having sex with each other. These people, they're 200 pounds overweight, 300 pounds overweight, and in their minds, they are the bomb. They are the sexiest person there and you can see it. There's a picture I took with one of the very last parties in Texas where this woman has about seven rolls on her stomach. But the look she's on her back and I'm above her and the look she's giving me is I am the

sexiest motherfucker in this room. Don't you forget it. And in her mind, she is. And that's what I love about swingers their confidence their absolute lack of I don't want to use the word shame because there's nothing to be shameful of but these people are there because they're confident in who they are and what they are and they are just going for it it seems that by the sheer fact that people were so comfortable with you photographing them, that they have a very liberal attitude towards being in the open.

In other words, not being something hidden. I think one of the reasons a lot of people allowed me to photograph them is they felt that they were, it was their duty, that they were the ambassadors of swinging, of the lifestyle if you will. And if they didn't allow me to photograph how would they get their gospel out? They needed to be out there so they could get other people into the swing world. They want people to know about it. I think the message is that I am you and you could be me. That there is no type as to what a swinger is. It's not the porn star. It's not, you know, this impossible image of sexuality.

It's the soccer mom. It's the regular guy who goes to the factory every day. It's the police officer. It's everybody. A swinger can be anybody and it can be you. And I think that's why so many people did allow me to photograph them because they wanted to show that, you know, I may look plain to you on the outside, but this is my life. You go home every day to your wife. I go to a party on the weekend and I have five guys' wives. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, photographer Richard Misrach wandered the deserted streets

of New Orleans with his cameras. It became more like a post-apocalyptic movie. It felt like that. These are the kind of things you expect to see when the end of the world happens. Richard Misrach spent weeks photographing the disaster, but he didn't rush to publish his photos as others did. He put the work away for almost five years. I actually was going to put away for longer, but I felt that, you know, basically people had already started to forget about Katrina. And I thought maybe the five-year anniversary was a good time to sort of introduce

some of the work. And I went back through 3,000 negatives. And one small portion of that large shoot popped out of me. And that was the photographs of people's messages in spray paint and charcoal and pencil, whatever they could find on their homes and cars and trees. And I felt like for the first time I heard the people's voices, the people that the survivors or the rescue workers, people that were on the ground. And it made me very self-conscious if you will, of the fact that whether it's a Spike Lee film

or a Robert Paldori photograph or all these other important, really, really important documents and treatments of Katrina, that there was always an editorial component that sort of overshadowed everything. There was always the voice of the artist or the filmmaker or the writer. And I found this to be an opportunity to let people speak for themselves for the first time. It sort of jumped out at me. And when I was going through the pictures, I noticed that there was a narrative just laying

there in front of me just to organize and represent to the public. So the first body of work that I released from that whole series that I photographed was that body of work for that very reason. The book is called Destroy This Memory, and Richard Misrach goes to great lengths to let the images speak for themselves. There are no essays, no captions. There's no page numbers. There's no titles. I really wanted just the words that people wrote to do all the work. So the book opens actually with a photograph. And all it is, is on the side of the building, somebody wrote help with exclamation points twice, help, help. I mean, what would it take for somebody to write on their home with spray paint a message to some unknown presence?

I mean, it's pretty strange and powerful sort of act of, I don't know, despair or hope or fear or sort of maybe more existential, just sort of just communicating with the universe. A number of the messages Richard Misrach photographs reference the dead. Some are chilling, like possible body, and some are simple, RIP signs on houses and fences for Zach and G. Perkins and Thomas Burke, aka Tab.

A number of these death notices, though, refer to animals. Tens of thousands of pets were left behind when the storm hit, and many of them died, many of them perished. People were not able to come back in time. And I think the most important, maybe the key photograph for me from this series is the one that says 9-30 september 30th spca to doa canine um here you have this really economical code of just cold simple information that lets you know that two um uh dogs were dead on arrival and the SPCA was there and when I saw that I was just like that just that that made me feel that there's

something going on with these messages they're so economical and their use of words that they're almost like poetry but without being trying to be arty not without trying to be poetic part of it is do is a lot of these these messages is you're not quite sure who they're written to. They're almost like text messages, but more primitive. In some of the messages Richard Misrach photographs, you can make out who the recipients are. These are the angry messages. Richard Misrach finds a lot of anger in New Orleans. There was this anger towards FEMA and Bush, you know political

anger uh and then one of the things that i found very interesting was the anger towards the insurance companies which hasn't been covered that much and i thought that that was really important because a lot of people brought it up when i first got to the gulf coast uh somebody told me that um you know if you had flood insurance then the insurance companies would say, well, the damage is caused by the wind. And if you had like hurricane or storm insurance, they said, well, it's caused by water. And the insurance companies just, you know, bent over backwards not to fulfill the claims because frankly, there was probably so, so much of it. They probably couldn't. So they had to find ways to get out. And so people were really, really angry. And you could see that in the photographs too.

Again, their words say it all. I got fucked by Allstate. I just, I think that's really powerful. The guy was so angry, he didn't even have time to add the E-D to fucked. And, but the message comes across. I noticed that there's all these different ranges of emotions people went through. There was even, you know, Gallo's humor,

which was really powerful and sort of showed the resilience of the New Orleans. I found that really very, very uplifting in some ways that people could find this kind of humor. Even well, there's things that are unintentionally humorous where there's a car on top of a boat and the boat owner puts a nice little note to the car owner to please remove his car carefully so it doesn't damage the boat. There's a house that had been lifted up and set in the middle of the road.

And then and if you look really carefully in the, in the background, you can see that there's a car that's actually been lifted up and put on top of a fence. And then, then somebody had the wherewithal to write wicked witch with an arrow pointing down at the ground on the, on the side of the house. And they actually put, um, boots and, and leggings that looked like a wicked witches. And, um, so somebody, I don't know who went to all that trouble, and who they were doing it for, but people were able to sort of find some humor to sort of deal with it.

And it's amazing that humor can really help there. And it was not only, yeah, obviously it worked for them, but it was messages sent out to the world. Something I think that's so affecting about these images for me, and this is why I photographed them, is that even the spray paint, people's personality comes through in the painting, in the actual way they're painting. Like this is a good example of the cover destroyed, this memory which is written in cursive. I mean, it's very painterly with people not trying to make art, not trying to be, you know, expressive. They're just literally just sending a message with paint. And it's very effective.

You know, it's so, again, these are just existential. I mean, to have the wherewithal to write destroy this memory in cursive on your home after a disaster like this. I mean, who would write that? What what what do they mean? And I love the ambiguity. I also love the fact that that's sort of a double entendre. It's very much about photography. And, you know, on one hand, it's saying we want to forget this.

On the other hand, I think it's so important for photography to preserve this chapter in Katrina history. There is something shocking about the images in Destroy This Memory because as much as we live in a moment where everyone supposedly can get their voice heard, these raw messages suggest otherwise. In fact, these messages are stark reminders of just how rare it is to hear the actual voice of the people, rather than some media or political construct. Of course, there are a few pictures in the book where Richard Misrach calls attention to himself as a photographer, especially if you're familiar with his work.

But there is one sequence where he deliberately makes himself known. He shoots the same message three times, a close-up, a medium shot, and a long shot. Yeah, that was very conscious. I wanted to break up the flow a little bit and just have the viewers stop for a second and think about, oh, you know, the pictures sort of mediate all this. And it's very subtle, but it was important to me.

I don't know if you can call the message subtle. The message is, fuck you. Yeah, I mean, actually, originally, originally the cover was going to be the first, fuck you. In fact, I don't think my publisher was sort of challenging me on that. But what you're looking at is the side. We don't know what it is. It's very abstract.

But somebody wrote, I can't tell if it's pencil or charcoal, you know, just fuck you. And it looks like a side of a wall or something as you pull back you realize it's the side of a semi-trailer i think and you see it in the landscape with a you know cribs and a home and uh i even think that's uh uh burt or ernie actually i can't tell yeah i think it's ernie ernie's in the crib and you see the context of the larger storm but originally I like you know the close-up of the fuck you for the for the book because it's again it's almost an existential fuck you it's like who is that address is that to the government is that to the insurance companies is that to God is that you

know uh it's just hard hard to um or to a. I mean, and I like the ambiguity of that. I felt like this was, this whole experience was one big fuck you. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called How to Look at America. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured two conversations from the archive with photographers Richard Misrak and Naomi Harris. You can still find copies of Destroy This Memory and America Swings online if you're lucky, but they have other books too. The Theory of Everything is a proud

founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.