Photograph by Tinseltown/Shutterstock.com
Jessica Lange
Susan Sontag once wrote in her seminal essay collection, On Photography, “To collect photographs is to collect the world.” I can't help but wonder if that's what Jessica Lange set out to do with her new photobook, Highway 61, while she wasn't filming episodes of American Horror Story or her new Netflix show, The Politican.
Her third collection of work features over 80 tritone photographs as the Cloquet native revisits the highway of her past, traveling from the Canadian border in northern Minnesota all the way to New Orleans to document and immortalize the ever-changing landscape of middle America. "These photographs are a chronicle of what remains and what has disappeared," Lange writes. "It has a long memory, Highway 61."
Jessica Lange / powerHouse Books
Jessica Lange, Highway 61
Imagine being approached by Jessica Lange asking if she can take your picture. Like an archivist, Lange is out to document and pause moments in time. On her journey, that Lange spent six years photographing during intermittent road tripping, she takes us through scenes of solitary landscapes, lonely road stops, arresting portraits of working class people–and even the Minnesota State Fair. Her subjects are contrasted in gritty black and white, revealing the intricate contradictions of "flyover country"–such a diverse stretch of land experiencing pockets of cultural decay and vibrancy all at once, where sites of incredible hardship are just miles outside of city limits.
“My most powerful connection is to Minnesota, to that part of the land," she once said in a 1982 interview with The New York Times. "I have a certain love for it I have for nothing else. I feel better there than anywhere else in the world.”
Jessica Lange / powerHouse Books
Jessica Lange, Highway 61
Going back to the highway of her youth is vicariously nostalgic, because what memories run deeper than the roads we traveled across the country as kids? Isolate a place in a moment in time, even ten years ago, and consider everything that's changed around it. Time is ephemeral. Above all else, the book highlights the ways in which Midwesterners persevere, and thrive with chance despite living in an unpredictable climate.
These photos suggest that Jessica Lange has not forgotten that small town reality where she comes from, or how the Midwest became a place she can love and still resent. It's the same area where she once sat on her porch "and saw lawn mowers and heard dogs barking and felt if I had to live there anymore it would kill me.''
Lange, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, received a scholarship to study art and photography at the Twin Cities school, uprooting her small life to the big city. It was through her passion for photography–which she'd revisit after starring in King Kong in 1976–that she ended up married to Spanish photographer Paco Grande for 11 years until 1981.
In sitting behind the camera, Lange claims a control over her art that's different from acting. Throughout her career, she's portrayed dozens of characters with complicated, down-to-Earth backstories. Here, her vision arrives uninterrupted.
The book's title is a reference to Lange's first record purchase, Highway 61 Revisited, the Bob Dylan album released in 1965. "Dylan’s Highway was different from mine, but he put it out there. He made it seem important. And I felt like I was in on the secret," she writes.
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Jessica Lange / powerHouse Books
Jessica Lange, Highway 61
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Jessica Lange / powerHouse Books
Jessica Lange, Highway 61
In the book, Lange writes about leaving Cloquet at 18, traveling Highway 61 to board a flight to Europe from the Twin Cities to begin her new life. She still drives the highway, from her New Orleans home to the cabin she keeps in Minnesota. Despite having three Emmys, two Oscars, and a Tony Award (and dozens of additional nominations for each).
The road is a place of endless possibility, as long as you take a chance on it. But the moments on the road are always transient in nature. "Long stretches of 61 are empty, forlorn, as if in mourning for what has gone missing," Lange writes. "Some of the people left, creating a ghostly beauty in their leave-taking. Some remain, perhaps yearning for that more vibrant past but reluctant to abandon the place called home."
At one point, she summons the critic Roland Barthes, who said “every photograph is a certificate of presence.” Her form of street photography is a way of making that presence known, affirming that, yes, she was here. A witness to the ways in which time inevitably moves forward.
What better way to preserve the moment than to document it? Another Sontag-ism: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality. One can't possess reality, one can possess images–one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”
No matter where her camera takes her, she will always remember home.
