By Annette Hinkle
As a photographer, Adam Bartos has shot around the world. India, Egypt, Kenya — even Russia where, between 1995 and 1999, he photographed what’s left of the Soviet space program at the Baiknour Cosmodrome in the Kazakh desert. One hundred of Bartos’ images from that once top-secret complex are offered in his book “Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age” which looks back at the space race from the Soviet perspective through what (and who) is left behind.
“I made five trips — each of two or three weeks,” says Bartos of his trips to Russia. “That was a very targeted project and the subject required a lot of advanced planning. It grew out of a specific idea and inspiration.”
“Once I did get myself in those locations, it was very exciting,” he adds. “That was the appeal — to really have access to this incredible place.”
It is often the over-looked, forgotten or pushed-aside views that find focus in Bartos’ lens. The faded or worn places that suggest a former manmade vibrancy. Places that have lost their veneer through heavy use and changing times, yet remain beautiful in their structure because they manage to merge form and function in a seamless whole.
These are the places that persist in existing, regardless of the fact that most people don’t give them a second glance when they pass by.
But it’s not just far flung locales that Bartos has documented in his work. Long Island, where he spent much of his childhood, and the East End, where he now has a home, are the subjects of a new show opening this weekend at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton.
“Liminal Ground: Adam Bartos Long Island Photographs, 2009-2011” is the photographer’s first solo show at the Parrish, and on view are 16 large-scale ink jet prints of his Long Island work. A majority of the images were shot on the East End in towns, villages and hamlets we know well — East Hampton, Water Mill, Southampton, Greenport. But unlike the familiar imagery of pastoral farm fields and flowing waterways that are frequently the subject of artists out here, Bartos offers a far different vision.
His are views that many of us have likely never seen — even though we may have passed them hundreds of times. Forgotten places that speak to another era or of the working class roots of the island, but in which Bartos finds a stark beauty.
The faded blue script on the wall of a long-gone florist shop on Montauk Highway in Southampton; a rusted corrugated warehouse, rich in detail and texture, at a well-worn marina on the North Fork; a funky stretch of functionality along the Long Island Rail Road tracks in East Hampton; a car repair shop with vintage models parked out front. These are images that could have been taken last week — or last century.
In a way, it seems as if Bartos’ work is revisiting the slower byways of another era. The days before the super highway usurped the Route 1s of the world with their 35-mile-per-hour sensibility and the ability to actually see what lies along the way.
“That’s some of my impulse as well,” admits Bartos. “I’m usually driving on the expressway. This project sort of grew out of wondering what was off the highway.”
“I started photographing off of 495, then I kind of let that go a couple years. Then I started deciding I would photograph in Long Island with no agenda and ended up doing the work I did,” he says. “It’s of course informed by all the years I spent in Long Island when I was a kid. My parents had a place in Huntington which at that time, had parts that were still rural. I remember 25A in Huntington, this Chinese restaurant built in a pagoda style, so I think that’s definitely part of the attraction.”
But for Bartos, this is no sentimental trip down memory lane. While the images may reflect that post-war suburban baby boom when people suddenly had cars and were on the go, it’s not a literal focus for Bartos.
“I’m not interested in straight forward nostalgic recording,” he says. It’s a combination of things that draw me. The form, and I think the color — the way those blue florist letters on that white sits on the wall. In the print itself, it’s a kind of amazing blue.”
Though these are not the landscapes that people typically seek out on the East End, Bartos has discovered a whole new and intriguing world in his own search for them.
“I kind of smell things out. I love marinas — the whole complex is just astonishing,” he notes. “I look at marinas and there’s a certain kind of landscape where I begin to feel I’m interested.”
Bartos is visual by nature. He started his first year of college at NYU film school. But he quickly shifted his focus toward photography. In the medium, Bartos explains that he found a certain simplicity which filmmaking, with it’s large crews and ample politics, lacked.
“I guess there was an appeal to working by myself,” says Bartos who was drawn to the work of photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson. “You don’t really need very much to take pictures. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I thought I would figure out photography and get back to filmmaking.”
Though the principles behind the two art forms have their similarities, Bartos never really went back into filmmaking, at least not in the traditional sense of the word.
“I sort of think of myself as a still cinematographer,” says Bartos.
And whether it’s on Long Island or around the world, he never stops looking. The photographs in this show began with that notion of what lies off the highway, but like an intricate scavenger hunt, the process took Bartos further and further away from the main road to hidden points on the East End that few of us could ever find on our own.
“When I started doing this Long Island work, I thought I would sort of do mid-island stuff,” he says. “Route 25A, those old areas like Farmingdale, which I did.”
“I found the North Shore I just couldn’t get into,” he admits. “The more I did, the more it sort of became about places I knew. So I just kept going to those places. In the show, the most the pictures by far are of the East End, the South Fork.”
“I’ve sort of been poking and prodding for a long time,” he adds. “I definitely discovered places I didn’t know – I’m very interested in doing more around Riverhead.”
Like any good explorer, Bartos is always on the lookout for the next place that others haven’t seen — even if it is because it’s been largely forgotten.
“Liminal Ground: Adam Bartos Long Island Photographs, 2009-2011” runs from June 24 through September 4 at the Parrish Art Museum (25 Job’s Lane, Southampton).
Bartos and the Parrish’s chief curator Alicia Longwell will conduct a walk-through of the exhibition on Friday, July 20, as part of the museum’s Fridays @ Noon: The Artist’s Eye series. The program is free with museum admission. Call 283-2118 for details.
