28 september 2021, Flor Linckens
Mimi Plumb: “I remember thinking that I wanted to have my voice in the mix”
Until 9 October, Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen is showing an exhibition by American photographer Mimi Plumb, who grew up in a sleepy town in California in the early 1950s. Although that state has acquired an almost mythical image in our cultural imagination — partly because of the movies — that image is not so much in line with her own monotonous childhood, in Walnut Creek, just outside San Francisco. A town isolated from intellectual culture, but also from the counter-culture movements of the 1960s. Walnut Creek was inhospitable in a physical sense: scarred, torn and bleached by drought and fire.
Plumb: “I remember clearly thinking when I made the work that I wanted to have my voice in the mix of photographers depicting the suburbs. The images I had seen from others did not reflect my experience of growing up in suburbia. I made pictures of sullen teenagers, like I had been, and kids running wild in the inhospitable, drought-ridden California landscape.”
Mimi Plumb, Two Girls at the Festival, 1975, Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen.
In the 1970s, she returned occasionally during her studies, to capture the culture of this monotonous suburb as she had experienced it in her youth. Not as an outsider, but as an insider. She records the monotonous landscape in monochrome tones, but she also captures a coming-of-age story that seems to reflect her own childhood. She looked for a common shared experience, that reflected what it was like to grow up in this place. Plumb: “Sometimes I talked with people I photographed, and sometimes I didn’t. If people were interested, I’d tell them I was photographing people and places that reminded me of where I came from. Everyone seems to understand that motivation, which is simple and true. I see photography as a means to excavate not only my life but the world around me.”
Mimi Plumb, Pool, Fire above San Rafael, 1976, Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen.
At the same time, her photos foreshadow the many urgent natural disasters of today. That is a parallel that the photographer draws as well. Plumb: “The land of fire and drought that I photographed in the 1970s today is ablaze, with 28 major fires burning throughout the state. As I look outside my window in Berkeley, California, the sky is orange. The American dream as embodied in the California suburbs has collided with a climate in crisis.”
Plumb earned a master's degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1986 and taught photography for many years, including at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford University, and San Jose State University, where she taught nearly thirty years. It was only in 2014 that she delved deeper into her image archive. It resulted in two remarkable photo books and her work has been included in the collections of the SFMoMA in San Francisco, the LACMA in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Yale University Art Gallery.
The exhibition 'Mimi Plumb' will be on show in Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen until 9 October.
