Ghost Towns, Photographs by Gary Anthes and Timothy Hyde
Both Gary Anthes and Timothy Hyde are compelled by damaged sites, but where Hyde's "Book of Job" explores several continents, Anthes's "Dust and Destiny on the Great Plains" investigates a single region. This six-state journey, mostly undertaken in 2023, documents a region exhausted by both drought and corporate agriculture.
The Anthes photos at Studio Gallery often focus on buildings, viewed straight-on or occasionally from a slightly low angle. A lot of these aging structures appear abandoned, and many are dwarfed by their surroundings: sweeping brown grasslands and vast and sometimes turbulent skies. Yet among the weathered wood-frame houses and farm buildings are a few edifices that seem to be humming with energy. One of these, appropriately, is an industrial structure whose sign identifies it as an outpost of La Junta Light & Power. Equally vivid is an unidentified building in Amarillo, small and boxy with its bright red facade illuminated by a series of lights embedded in an overhang roof. These two pictures are the only ones made at night, and the outlining blackness intensifies the visual drama.
None of the Great Plains photos include people. Instead, they tell of the region's inhabitants by depicting their environment. Signs of life include a colorful freight train in motion; a new-looking, bright green combine harvester; and the purple wooden frames around a door and a window of a neglected New Mexico building. Cultural change is embodied by the "gourmet coffee" sign in front of a battered New Mexico feed and supply store.
These impeccably composed images sometimes center on a road, accentuating the area's history as a place to move to and through -- and out of. One thoroughfare is paved with asphalt, but most seem to be dirt or gravel. The roadway in "Northwestern Kansas, 2023" rolls jauntily across rolling hills, all drearily desiccated but with a juicy blue sky and pillowy white clouds beckoning in the distance. Most alarming is something that resembles a dirt path but is in fact Kansas's bone-dry Cimarron River, framed periodically by a dead tree. The waterless waterway's course meanders toward a new Dust Bowl.
Anthes almost never enters the structures he photographs, although he does offer one evocative interior: a commercial garage stuffed with grimy, trashed trucks and cars. Hyde includes plenty of exterior shots in this show, his final one at Multiple Exposures Gallery, but his signature shot is one that reveals a shadowy chamber, its details dim but impressively distinct.
Hyde's photos, like Anthes's, document ruined locations. But Hyde tends to visit places that witnessed struggle, cruelty, and sudden violence, whether the responsibility of man or nature. Among the latter are places as distant as an impromptu memorial to a family killed by a 2012 tornado in Indiana and the remains of a Japanese town devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Inside and outdoors merge ominously in a mud-hued study of a water-logged room after a flood in Iowa. Made in 2008, the picture is the show's earliest entry.
Most often, Hyde is drawn to spots where humans brutalized each other. These reflect the artist's sense that "like Job, we are not entirely innocent," according to his statement. Hyde took his camera to the site of a 1919 massacre of Black Americans in Arkansas; Nazi concentration camps in Poland, Croatia, and Italy; and buildings wrecked or bloodied during the 1990s wars in Bosnia and Croatia. Photographed just this year is a bombed-out streetscape in Ukraine, in which an incongruously cheery Toys-R-Us-like store can be glimpsed through the gap left by a flattened building.
The only picture that portrays humans observes a bonfire surrounded by small figures, silhouetted against a red-tinted breach in the black night. It's one of a half-dozen remarkable photographs that are crisp yet gloomy, legible yet mysterious. Hyde has an exceptional ability to lead the eye into darkened spaces that contain just enough light to be inviting, bracketed by darkness that feels overwhelming.
Gary Anthes: Dust and Destiny on the Great Plains
Through Oct. 26 at Studio Gallery, 2108 R St. NW. studiogallerydc.com. 202-232-8734
Timothy Hyde: Book Of Job
Through Nov. 17 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. multipleexposuresgallery.com. 703-683-2205.
