Real things from a dream was written last year for Japanese photographer Mike Nogami. He moved to American in the mid-1970s and by 1978 had settled in Washington, D.C. I had recently finished reading Don DeLillo’s Americana, leading me to think Mike’s photography was more than the stuff of chance encounter. The late 1970s was a hangover dream from the decade before, filled with postmodern glimpses of exiled landscapes and automobiles, of Jorge Luis Borges and disturbed sleep. Mikes stares at America with migrant eyes. Even the emptiest street he stares at stares back with its own sense of detachment, where the cultural landscape was an import of architecture borrowed amid the combined exhaustion of recession, the Vietnam war and an oil shock felt as far away as his own country. And as a stranger now living in Japan, I found myself looking for clues in Mike’s fascination with Postwar, Postmodern America, picking at threads that tethered him to this country for twenty or more years. The following is a version of the essay that appears in Study of Americana: Washington, D.C. Region 1978 published one year ago this month by Osiris.
Waiting for events to unfold and then focus, Mike Nogami had already been living in Los Angeles for a year by 1975 when he left the city to head east. He arrived in Washington, D.C. weeks later, the pile of snapshots taken along the way were more personal than anything profound. As he moved in and around the Washington, D.C. region over the next few years, his eyes would focus on remembering more places than could be reached by foot. Study of Americana: Washington, D.C. Region 1978 is a photographic record of each of these places.
Nogami bought a small Honda Civic in early 1976 which afforded him the freedom of movement but at the same time created its own contradiction: Leaving for the suburbs of D.C. he could travel anywhere but everywhere looked the same. During one trip to Richmond, Virginia, he pulled up to the side of the road with an empty wall on one street corner. The wall had been painted with “Enjoy Coca-Cola.” Below that the raised gesture of a hand could be seen clutching a coke bottle all picked out by sun cutting through the large graphic with shadows from a nearby pole and cable running off along the street. The scene could have been anywhere but on that particular street his snapshots amplified the quiet corner. Even Andy Warhol who years earlier had spent much of 1962 painting Coca-Cola bottles was drawn towards what other artists ignored in a split second. His photographic eye was drawn to persuasive things: “All the Cokes are the same,” he remarked, convinced the more proliferate the image the more powerful it was. 1 By the early 1970s everyone seemed to agree: “It’s the real thing” cried adverts everywhere as Nogami’s unconscious eye committed the image of the advert to film. There was no getting away from the fact that Warhol’s own graphic eye inspired no end of photographers. Daido Moriyama had earlier found comfort in secondhand images clipped from a newspaper alongside his images of real life pulled from the street with his own camera. The sight of an auto wreck and ‘smash-up’ or the view seen through a car window were all motifs of speed. 2 But as far as Nogami was concerned, the car was more simply a way of going from A to B offering solace after weeks spent hitch-hiking.
The view from the driver’s seat pictured America. “An empty country and filled with wonders." 3 Hitch-hiking through it, the distances between things, their sharpness and depth of field were being invigorated by slogans and visual information which two architects from the West Coast, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, recognized as an altogether new landscape on the edge of the city. Streets, the distant horizon, and everything in between were now being seen through the windscreen of vehicles owned by everyone swapping a physical experience of the world for a visual one—a carscape understood by moving through it and not standing still. After their own road trip through the desert with a group of curious students, Venturi, Scott Brown, and their colleague Steven Izenour wrote Learning from Las Vegas (1972) and sought to characterize the American landscape as symbolism over form. Buildings represented rather than described what happened within while the border between the city and its suburbs produced a grey zone of flat, featureless space enticing the passerby with the possibility that anything *could* happen. “What were these very private buildings, possibly of film stars, [really] communicating?” Scott Brown later remarked. 4 And what might they telling us about the rest of America as scenes like this spread out?
The further east Nogami went the more Las Vegas rippled out in every direction. The landscape was vast, graphic, temporary and constantly changing. Billboards and buildings were one and the same. The endlessness of the West Coast; undulating Hollywood hills; the drive-thru; the shopping mall; the vacuum of Las Vegas; these were all part of that emotional vastness. Industrial warehouses appeared flat and lifeless but also filled with life and personality. Lone gas stations almost abandoned were still open in the middle of nowhere, ravaged by heat and desert wind. Behind the scenes, the economy was faltering. By early 1973 the Vietnam war, along with several oil crises in the Middle East, wore away at national mood spilling out onto the street. Cities like New York went bankrupt and businesses either closed down or fell into disrepair. During this time Warhol’s Pop eye stared at things everyone else took for granted just as Nogami was drawn to things that were disappearing before the eye. The windows above Franklin Uniforms in Washington, D.C. are seen boarded shut as the shop window below, absent of people, is dressed in nurse’s uniforms and a vicar’s robe. And cars in a Silver Spring parking lot mirror each other, two cars parked back to back. A gold Buick in the background looks pristine behind the dropped license plate and broken headlight of the white '67 Ford T-Bird out in front.
For all their signs of life, photographs barely feature people. Take the two men for instance, shopping at Morris Millar Liquor with their backs to the street, or the man spread across the sidewalk by DuPont cinema. At night, the window to Arlington’s Tuxedo Rentals is bathed in pink fluorescence. A mannequin looking off to one side leans against a wall of ruffled shirts and a photo of two real people ready to go out. But the ‘real’ people have already left or simply vanished. Curtains in Arlington’s Rico’s Barber Shop are half-drawn as an ash tray stands to one side with the back of an empty chair pressed hard against the glass. An empty barber's chair is barely visible through Rico’s sign-written window, past the Partello Building sign above and the reflected tree line below. Other life signs symbolize a country easily persuaded and a community within it seeking influence. Beside a palmistry store shutter sign of “Reader & Advisor” hangs a black and white poster of Goldie C. Johnson taped to glass. The civil rights activist and beautician had sought election to the city council in 1978 but faced a bevy of other candidates, from councilmen to a local cab driver. Even still, her persuasive reputation flew in the face of discrimination. She had served in the Women's Army Corps during the 1950s, then applied to the Air Force a decade later but the application was rejected. It was something she refused to accept and wrangled a meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to plead her case. The persona of a businesswoman fighting inequality in all quarters still resonates today. Across town near the U.S. Capitol building, Apex in 1978 was a run down hotel and former self-service liquor store (plate 66). It now stands as the National Council of Negro Women.
A photographic record of real things, Study of Americana is also part of a longer, more fragmented story where places and situations, like the writing of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, appear as “arbitrary, coincidental, and in no particular order, like things seen in a dream.” 5 Or was that a nightmare? When Nogami first moved to D.C, he was convinced the house he lived in was haunted. He had unearthed an old painting in the attic and hung it on the wall of his room and when the house groaned and moaned at night, the portrait of twins made the sound all the more unnerving. Anonymous characters of places he would later photograph resonate with the flat graphic landscape he later explored by car. The Americana Nogami witnessed is haunted by a carscape without depth. Buildings are arbitrary and orderless. They appear to fade away as the land remains flat, limitless and almost transparent. But on closer inspection pictures reveal a place popping in and out of action. Across the Potomac River in Arlington, away from Georgetown and the Lincoln Memorial, the self-service HI-FY gas station at night stands deserted. Instructions above each lit-up gas pump read: “Pay Attendant” but the attendant is nowhere to be seen. In the background, two vending machines stand comatose shoulder to shoulder. They wake up when cars pull in and screech to a halt as dawn approaches.
Study of Americana is available from shashasha
Lynne Tillman’s essay Warhol, Existentially begins with a quote by Andy Warhol from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), 1975: “What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” in Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018), 103
Andy Warhol painted his Death and Disaster series, 1963, replicating traffic accidents pictured in newsprint. One painting, ‘Black and White Disaster #4 (5 Deaths 17 Times in Black and White)’, 1963, relives the same moment again and again in varying states of visual distress, as if obscured by wet glass. Daido Moriyama later paid homage to this with ‘Smash-up' (from his Accident series), 1969. While picturing his own stretch of road, ‘National Highway 1 at Dawn (Around Kougosho, Suburbs of Kakegawa City, Shizuoka Prefecture),’ 1968, each image from Accident draws out the violence and moving vista as momentarily graphic. Warhol’s eyes are locked on an upturned car and passengers wriggling free. Moriyama meanwhile sees the Shizuoka tree-line at speed separating the sky from passing fields and the road veering to one side as no less graphic and tragic — a tree-line, drawn across the sky like a jagged blade that has been dragged across the photograph.
Norman Mailer, A Fire on the Moon, London: Penguin, 2014: 86
Barberie, P., “Denise Scott Brown on the Signs and Symbols for Living,” (interviewed by Peter Barberie), Aperture, #238 – House & Home, 2020: 126
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Wait,” in The Aleph, London: Penguin, 1998: 107