Wadley, Georgia (population 2,468) City Council, September 13, 2001, 2001, color inkjet print on canvas, 33 x 66" [Enlarge in New Window]

Paul Shambroom: Meetings

An immense American flag lends its imprimatur to the proceedings of a city council meeting in Lewiston, Minnesota (pop. 1405). In Markle, Indiana (pop. 1134), the mayor sits about a foot higher than the other town council members. Meanwhile, in Dawson, Iowa (pop. 174), the town council meeting appears to be tucked away next to the photocopier in a nondescript corner of somebody's office.

These folks are not accustomed to having their meetings captured on film. In fact, the presence of an acclaimed photographer like Paul Shambroom is probably the last thing they would expect. "I often feel like I'm walking uninvited into someone's living room, but they always welcome me," says Shambroom, who's been photographing local government meetings all over the country since 1999. "Some of the smaller towns don't have any employees, so the number I'm calling to confirm the meeting time is usually the mayor's home phone." Shambroom has also traveled to urban centers like San Francisco and New York City to capture community boards and other local organizations at work. His goal with the series Meetings and Power is to explore power on a local level and to get at the way people in the U.S. today feel detached from their government--even in its most seemingly accessible forms. "With local government, there's nothing legally stopping people from getting involved, but there's still a sense that it's not their government," he says.

Shambroom's photographs explore this curious interplay of intimacy and detachment he finds in local government meetings. His large-scale, panoramic images are ink-jet-printed on canvas with pigmented inks; the effect is distinctly painterly. Shambroom explains, "By utilizing conventions such as eye-level centered compositions, panoramic formats, and large-scale presentation, I place this work squarely in the traditions of group portrait painting." At the same time, he continues, "I moved toward experimenting with digital output on canvas because it's more respectful, less of a voyeuristic 'insects pinned under glass' look" than some of the cool, glossy, large-scale color photography that's been so prevalent in the last decade. Who hasn't had to attend meetings, whether for work or in connection with some other civic, religious, or social obligation? "People can relate to the subjects in these photographs, whether they admire or disdain them," Shambroom insists.

Certainly for this Minneapolis-based artist, the experience of these meetings--locating them, selecting them, attending them--has become intimately woven into the fabric of his work. "It's a very involved and kind of obsessive process," he says. First, he contacts statewide organizations that maintain data on which towns are holding meetings on which days throughout the year. Then he enters this information into his database, which he keeps on his laptop computer. As he drives to a particular region of the country, he'll sort the database for towns in that region holding meetings that day or week, and then he'll import that data into a mapping software program that will draw him a map showing where the meetings are that night. Sometimes he'll photograph two or three meetings in a single evening. "It's sort of like a military campaign, planning logistics and collecting documents," he laughs. "This isn't stuff they teach you in art school!" He also sees his process as part of that long tradition of road tripping practiced by American artists like Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank.

This obsession with "hidden places of power" is one Shambroom has been pursuing since the late '80s, when he began photographing interiors of offices and factories. More recently, his Nuclear Weapons series showed the rarely seen warheads, missiles, and control rooms that are the stuff of nuclear age nightmares, up close--disconcertingly close. The local government meetings he is photographing now are "hidden" only because most people never think of attending. They're hidden in plain view. Other performances of power--swearing-in ceremonies, say, or public speeches--might provide visually interesting subjects for Shambroom's lens. But he has chosen meetings over those more symbolic events, because he is interested in the iconographic quality of the people sitting at the tables. He says, "I see these meetings as emblematic of everything that's right and wrong, noble and dysfunctional, about power in America."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Photography | Americana | Politics | 2001