Meadowlark
Ian Bates
To make the pictures in Meadowlark, Ian Bates spent seven years, between 2014 and 2021, driving the vast, sparsely-populated spaces of the American West.
Ian Bates is a photographic artist originally from New Jersey and currently based in the Bay Area (San Anselmo). When he started working on his book Meadowlark he was 24 and just out of photojournalism school. After he graduated in 2014 he began making work without the constraints and standards of photojournalism.
Meadowlark is another book about rural America. Rural communities in America, but also in Europe and Japan, face multiple challenges. Their poplulation is decreasing and aging. Young people migrate to the city where there is more work. Rural dispopulation causes poverty and the countryside is “left to waste”. Infrastructure, buildings and roads, is decaying.
Matt Black and Curran Hatleberg in their latest books also focus on rural America. In his book American Geography Matt Black emphasizes poverty. There is no hope: you cannot escape the poverty trap. In River’s Dream Curran Hatleberg shows there are few future prospects for young people who stay in their community. But he also shows how strong those communities are through the bonds between family and friends. Rural life in Ian Bates’s Meadowlark is also hard. But amid the harshness there is tenderness too. Living in a rural area gives a more relaxed pace of life. Bates emphasizes, even glorifies, the simple life. He reminds us that there is beauty in the simplicity of the world that he captures.
Bates’s photographs combines flooded farmhouses with sun-dappled clearings, and smiling couples with upturned cars. The landscapes are stark and barren; buildings lean, peel and fall in on themselves; people have false teeth , scraggly beards and battered clothes. He pairs his photographs with Jim Harrison’s poem “I Believe”, which is a paean to everyday things, humans and nature, coexisting in simplicity. Conspicious in their absence are shots of the western meadowlark itself. The bird proved difficult to capture. It only appears once in Bates’ book as a painted depiction on a weathered scrap of plywoord.
Meadowlark opens with two photographs. One echoing the sublimity of nature and the other giving voice to the extraordinary that can often be found in the banal, everyday things we usually ignore. There is a comfort in these memories of everyday things. Bates’s work in this book is very poetic. The calmness and the loneliness of the photographs are a nice counterpoint to our ever-increasing frenetic pace of life. Sometimes the profundity of life and living is drawn out in simplicity. Maybe we just need taking note of the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Meadowlark
Photographer: Ian Bates
Publisher: Deadbeat Club
Published in 2022
Hardcover, 24 x 29 cm, 96 pages
Featuring a poem by Jim Harrison
Chosen by people immersed in the photobook world as one of their favorite photobooks of 2022