Véronique Plesch – The Passenger: Five Decades of Gary Green Following the Light

I have long intended to write about Gary Green’s photography. Now, as he prepares to retire from Colby College—where he single-handedly built the photography program—the timing is finally right. His tenure at Colby holds a personal resonance for me; as department chair in 2007, I remember the thrill of offering him the position and the surprise of discovering his early work: raw, gritty scenes from CBGB’s where the likes of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith made appearances. Beyond his retirement, this issue’s theme, The Shape of Time, offers a pertinent framework for an oeuvre spanning five decades. As photographers do, Gary captures the “now,” though his practice challenges the traditional boundaries of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” For Gary, a recorded moment might be a fraction of a second or the distillation of a decade. Yet, regardless of the duration of the gaze—and whether it captures motion or stasis—what we see in any photograph is always, even in our instantaneous digital age, inevitably the past.

Time(s), Place(s), and Timelessness

Taken exactly fifty years ago, this photo marks the start of Gary’s career. He was twenty-two, a recent transplant from Long Island to Manhattan, attending a Ramones show. In a 2024 interview (“From Punk to Pastoral”), Gary recalled being intimidated by these two “fierce-looking” women, but he overcame both shyness and technical hurdles (at first, the flash failed). He went on to publish in New York Rocker and shoot album covers, but this was more than a job—it was his world (he even shared digs with Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls, who became a close friend and a kind of “older brother”). From then on, Gary’s work would be defined by moments in time in specific places.

The photos Gary made of the Prairie while teaching in Missouri depart sharply from the grit of Lower Manhattan. Stillness replaces the chaos of the punk scene with a sense of immutable permanence: the light is uniform, with no clear sense of season or time of day. The simple composition—just grassy land and sky—echoes this permanence. These works reflect Gary’s time studying at Bard College with Stephen Shore (and John Divola), when he learned to eschew seductive, flashy subjects for “quiet” images. Gary often quotes Gerry Badger’s essay “The Genius of the Quiet Photographer,” which extols images that don’t try to impress. As Badger writes, “quiet photos require work on the part of the viewers in order that their subtleties might be fully appreciated.” Such pictures stand diametrically opposite the Romantic awe-inspiring “sublime”; In contrast to images that elicit strong emotions—that move the viewer—quiet images invite meditative stasis.

Timelessness is also central to the Maine Trees series, “tree-torso portraits” that act as “a human surrogate.” Looking closely at these trunks, we become aware of years—decades even—of growth. In the trunk reproduced here, marks bear the memory of where branches once grew. A striking parallel exists with Giuseppe Penone’s sculptural series, Alberi, which literally excavates the tree to reveal its history.

Timelessness and the marks of passing time recur throughout Gary’s work—most notably in the photos taken following a visit to Giorgio Morandi’s house and studio in Bologna. In After Morandi, Gary enters a “visual conversation” with this master of stillness, whose serene, nearly monotone compositions feature containers reduced to their essence and a palette bordering on monochromatism. Whether capturing the countryside around Assisi that holds the memory of Saint Francis (Three or Four Hills), or ancient Egyptian obelisks that defy time and grace Roman piazze (and reappear in American towns as reflected in Gianluca Rizzo’s accompanying poems), these works, along with the Morandi series, reveal another aspect of Gary’s practice: his relationship to the past.

Interestingly, the photos Gary took over a decade (1976–86) at the beginning of his career—when, freshly arrived in New York City, he hung out at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, and other venues—were rediscovered and published in 2020. Today, half a century later, these images serve as witnesses to a specific moment in time.

Home(s), Past and Present

Gary is currently at work on a series, started in 2019, in which he revisits the Long Island town where he grew up; pictured here is his childhood home. The photos ask poignant questions: Can one return to the past? What happens when you go back to the place where the past occurred? Can a photograph conjure up the past? The weathered and abandoned places, invading weeds, strewn trash—all this signals the passing of time, the mark of time as destructor. This is not noble patina as William Hogarth lampooned in his print of Time Smoking a Picture, but a poignant record of the decay of mid-century urban sprawl with buildings that were not meant to last the test of time.

Gary has exhibited iterations of his Long Island photos in three  Faculty Biennials at the Colby College Museum of Art. In the remarks I offered at the 2021 opening, I noted:

Gary Green takes us down memory lane. Even if you don’t know that the sites he photographed in Long Island are where he grew up, when I look at the twelve images in the show, I feel like I am stepping into Gary’s shoes and looking at this mundane suburban landscape through his eyes, sensing that each, despite their profound banality, holds a special resonance for him. There’s decay and faded signs, there are reflections and street views that merge with a window display, untidy lawns, and rubbish. Together these images produce a poignant meditation on time and memory.

The term “Pastoral” in the title alludes to a very ancient poetic tradition that evokes a locus amoenus, an ideal and beautiful place occupied by shepherds. There is of course a humorous dimension to this title, but I cannot avoid thinking of a subgenre of the pastoral, the pastoral elegy—poems that mourn someone’s demise. There is a profoundly elegiac dimension to Gary’s Long Island pictures: this is a past that cannot be regained. The place can be physically traveled to, the sights seen and photographed, but the times spent there will never return. In a 2024 interview, Gary declared about Long Island Pastoral: “I’m hunting for closure. I’m hunting for my past so that I could move on to the present. I’m hunting for what I missed” (“From Punk to Pastoral”).

The Long Island that Gary photographs once was home, but no longer is. We all long to find home, and Gary’s latest book, titled Almost Home, focuses on the Central Maine town where he settled after starting to teach at Colby. The first image in the book is of a large sign one used to see upon exiting the highway, which signaled arrival in Waterville (I remember seeing that sign for the first time in early March 1994, as the driver who had picked me up at the Portland airport drove me to Colby for my job interview).

This body of work is about Waterville, where Gary and his wife Pat Sims live now—a place that feels like “almost home.” The photos in the book also document the changing face of Waterville—the once-bustling “Elm City”—which, like many post-industrial Maine towns, has fallen on hard times: we see closed businesses and abandoned dwellings, architectural scars of a shifting economy.

Terrains Vagues and Wish-Fulfilling Jewels

Within Almost Home there’s a body of work that bears the French term Terrain Vague. A terrain vague is, by definition, an ambiguous place—is it urban or rural? In it, nature reclaims its rights, but not where it is supposed to. The presence of terrains vagues within the urban fabric signals neglect; the vegetation, rather than being understood as a sign of life, becomes blight. But a terrain vague is also a site in flux, and there, too, time plays a role. In an abandoned plot, there is at once stillness and growth. Gary borrows the term terrain vague from the Catalan architect and theorist Ignasi Solà-Morales, who, in exploring the term’s layered meanings, notes that “it is impossible to capture in a single English word or phrase the meaning of terrain vague,” and unpacks the etymology of the two words that form it. Terrain “connotes a more urban quality than the English ‘land’,” while it also possesses agricultural and geological meanings. I would add that in French the word also functions figuratively, much like the English “field”—as in terrain d’enquête (field of research) or terrain de jeu (playground). Terrain is therefore a place where agricultural, intellectual, and ludic growth is possible. Dual Germanic and Latin origins endow vague with a semantic field that encompasses many notions. Its Germanic roots gave us “wave”—in French, vague—with all the dynamic meanings it carries, while the Latin gave us “vacant,” which possesses positive connotations of being “free, available, unengaged.” For Solà-Morales, this paradoxical space is at once empty and filled with potential.

The terrains vagues that Gary photographs in Waterville respond to his childhood Long Island, where there was “still-empty and undeveloped land that lay behind [his family’s] block of houses” (Green, “Pastoral”): in the mid-century suburbs, empty lots were waiting to be “developed,” while in post-industrial Waterville, they signal the end of a period—the decline of a capitalist ideal.

But that’s not the end of the story: the Waterville that Gary has experienced in the past decade and a half is in transition. The book opens with an epigraph from a poem by Patrick Donnelly, “Read the Signs.” Donnelly, who taught for a while at Colby and became friends with Gary, wrote this poem about Waterville. The epigraph reads: “Here the brightness that caught the eye by the river was only a marble in the grass, a wish-fulfilling jewel I put in my pocket.” Gary structures the book’s photo sequence in a way that alludes to the positive changes that are occurring in the community as the town is being revitalized; Donnelly’s epigraph invites us to find these humble jewels no matter where we are. It also encapsulates Gary’s creative philosophy about the importance of looking attentively—even at unremarkable sites. Perhaps even more so, for such sights are where true “wish-fulfilling jewel[s]” that catch the light can be found.

In the end, Almost Home is a projection into the future, and its message is at once aesthetic, social, and political. As Gary said in the 2024 interview, “the landscapes I’m photographing—empty lots, abandoned buildings, etc.—provide a snapshot of who we are as a society” (“From Punk to Pastoral”). The message is, just like the photos, a quiet one; Gary hopes that the “provocations and political statements” that might “infuse” his works will “occur as naturally, as quietly, as possible.”

As one point of his essay, Solà-Morales mentions how German philosopher Odo Marquard “seeks to transcend the split between aesthetics and ethics, between experience of the world and action on the world”—a tension we could apply to Gary’s work. There is more—and although this would be the topic for another essay, I am compelled to mention it because it is further proof of the depth of his inquiry. As Marquard calls our late-capitalist era an “epoch of strangeness in front of the world,” he refers to the Freudian notion of the Unheimlich. (Solà-Morales notes that this notion was “glossed in recent years by those who have sought in the individual experience of dislocation and displacement the starting point for the construction of a politics.”) The Unheimlich is fundamental to Freud’s theories and is, like so many German terms, impossible to translate. The English translation, “uncanny,” is a disappointing approximation, and the French inquiétante étrangeté (literally “unsettling strangeness”) is even farther from what the German word conveys. As Freud famously notes, heimlich (homely/familiar) and unheimlich (unhomely/eerie) aren’t simple opposites; the prefix “un” doesn’t completely obliterate the original meaning: something unheimlich is thus at once homely and alien. With Marquard and Solà-Morales in mind, the very title Gary gave this series takes on an additional dimension. The Waterville Gary has photographed for fifteen years is home—almost.

“I Ride, and I Ride”

At the heart of Gary’s deliberate practice lies a commitment to repetition, a concept that directly engages with time. One could say that most of his projects are diaries of sorts. In fact, a defining moment in his work was when, while commuting between several jobs in Maine (at the University of Southern Maine, Bates College, and the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport), he decided to stop en route at the same spot to take photographs every time he passed, both on the way up and on the way back. A similar situation occurred during COVID, when he resolved to go on walks and shoot an entire roll of film each time, no matter what. This brings me to other themes that lie at the heart of Gary’s work: moving, whether by automobile or on foot, and looking.

Since Gary started his career photographing the punk music scene in the 1970s and ‘80s, perhaps it’s not a coincidence that, as I reflect on his work, I am reminded of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger.” Recall the opening lines:

I am a passenger
And I ride, and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they’re bright in a hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight

I am the passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright
I see the stars come out tonight
I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the city’s ripped back sky
And everything looks good tonight

Of course, Iggy belongs to that era, and the Stooges performed most (in)famously at Max’s in the summer of 1973 when Iggy fell onto a pile of broken glass and finished the set covered in blood. But, most importantly, this parallel is compelling because the song provides a potent lens for Gary’s modus operandi. Take the rhythmic monotony of Ricky Gardiner’s riff, the simplicity of Iggy’s lyrics, and the refrain’s banality (“la la la”). There is a remarkable lexical economy as the same words are used to repeat the idea of riding, looking, and noticing beauty in the city’s “backsides.” This is what Gary has done for decades: moving through the world and photographing the mundane, even the boring. But just as the Passenger sees the bright stars, Gary sees the marble that captures the light. About the Assisi project, Gary explains that as he spent an entire month “walking the winding mountain roads above Assisi,” he “had no particular direction except to follow the light.” “The Passenger” is the record of what a scholar would describe as “scopophilia”: the act of deriving pleasure through looking. In the song, this happens as the passenger stays “under glass” and looks through a window (and even “looks through his window’s eye”)—a recurring image that aptly evokes the photographer’s viewfinder.

The song’s rhythmic repetition—“I ride, and I ride / I ride”—mirrors Gary’s iterative and regimented practice, his working in series, and his embrace of the book form with its sequential organization of images. For him, the book is meaningful because of its tangible and personal nature, but also because, more than an exhibition, it guides the viewer through a particular narrative that unfolds over time. Gary stresses that a photo book is a collection and that, given its serial nature, it comes close to a movie—a time-based medium.

“The Passenger” repeats five times the idea of driving through the city at night and seeing the stars, but does so with slight differences (for instance, “I see the stars come out of the sky,” “I see the stars come out tonight,” and “We’ll see the stars that shine so bright”). As he travels through the city, he keeps noticing the brightness of the stars; the subject of his gaze remains the same while his observations ever so slightly shift. When Gary published a book of photographs of a stream by his home, he chose an epigraph by Mary Oliver: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” Just as the book’s title, The River is Moving / The Blackbird Must be Flying, alludes to Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” we see several photos of the reflection of the same evergreen. This series shows that an unremarkable stream can offer the opportunity for “quiet observations of the water and what was reflected, refracted, and shadowed upon its surface.”

As “The Passenger” progresses, we go from “I” to “he” to “we.” The movement to “we” is introduced by an invitation to join the Passenger (“get in the car”). The Passenger is at once “I” and “he”—perhaps an echo of Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration, “Je est un autre” (“I is another”). This is a perfect metaphor for the photographer’s work: he sees and takes a picture, and what he captures is something that he recognizes (“things that he knows are his”). Then, once revealed and printed, the photo represents for the photographer himself a passage from “I” to “he.” Finally—because, as with any visual art form, photography is ultimately about communicating and sharing—the subject shifts to “we”: we join the passenger/photographer in looking and finding light in the dark sky. Before the concluding refrain (“Singin’ la la la la la la la la”), the song invites us: “So let’s ride and ride and ride and ride,” a verse that sounds like a summation of Gary’s practice and teaching.

 

References

Badger, Gerry. “The Genius of the Quiet Photographer.” The Pleasures of Good Photographs. New York: Aperture, 2010. 20–35.

“From Punk to Pastoral: Gary Green’s Photographic Journey.” The Urbanaut Podcast, episode 29. 23 June 2024. YouTube.

Freud, Sigmund. “Das Unheimliche.” Imago: Zeitschrift für Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften 5.5/6 (1919): 297–324. English: “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [reprinted 1975]. 217–56.

Green, Gary. After Morandi. Bologna: Urbanautica Books / L’Artiere, 2016.

—–. Almost Home. Bologna: L’Artiere, 2025.

—–. “Pastoral.” Wilderness and Culture. L.C. Bates Summer Exhibition, 2022.

——. The River is Moving / The Blackbird Must be Flying. Bologna: L’Artiere, 2020.

—–. Three or Four Hills. Stow, MA, Dust Collective, 2024.

—–. When Midnight Comes Around: NYC 76–86. London: Stanley/Barker, 2020.

Green, Gary and Gianluca Rizzo. Obelisks. Ravenna: Danilo Montanari, 2021.

Marquand, Odo. “Age of Alienation from the World?” Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 10–24.

Pop, Iggy. “The Passenger.” Lust for Life. New York: RCA, 1977.

Solà-Morales, Ignasi. “Terrain Vague.” Anyplace. ed. Cynthia Davidson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. 118–23.