Notes on “Fat City Journal”
Works and words by Richard Max Gavrich
Interview via emails, November 2019
What is Fat City Journal? How did this series get its name?
Fat City Journal is a loose series of pictures I’ve been making in and around the Central Valley since 2017. The moniker ‘Fat City’ comes from Leonard Gardner’s novel, which he borrowed from the old nickname of Stockton, California. I felt the impulse to add ‘Journal’ because I didn’t want something that felt so definitive or purely illustrative. After about a year or so in I began thinking about the work as more of a sketchbook. This felt freeing in bringing disparate pictures together but also reflected my interests and incongruities within the process of making.
Where were you in your life when you began this work, what was going on?
I had just moved back to California after being away for eight years. My grandmother, who appears in the work, had been having health issues and I wanted to be nearby. It felt important to reconnect with family but also internally I felt like it was the right time to return home.
How did this project start. Are the concepts behind your projects typically decided in advance, or do they present themselves in your pictures?
It tends to be messy combination of the two. I’ve come to think of my process as one of stumbling into an idea on the way to something else. At the start, I usually just have a place or person I’m interested in, coupled with a vague mental image of what I want a photograph to look like. The pictures I end up making usually bear no resemblance to the original idea I had, or on the surface don’t appear to. In this way I think of them as failures to carry out a concept or to arrive somewhere. But after sitting with the physical images for a time, the diversions are usually more interesting than anything I had envisioned or planned. In this way I’ve always felt indebted to chance, that the world is always more interesting and strange than anything I could come up with.
I had been photographing in the Central Valley for years, mostly documenting the slow construction of the 1400 plus homes within my grandmother’s community. I was focused on the men, day laborers and construction workers, as they scrambled about these structures. Every few weeks a whole new row of homes was up. I was amazed by the insane efficiency of this process (refined over the past seventy plus years for maximum output), how the worker is reduced to a piece of this massive engine, spitting out living rooms, kitchenettes, patios, driveways. I was dumbfounded by the extreme repetition — in the gestures and movements of the workers, but also in the ‘products,’ the prefab homes, that resulted from their constant labor. I would walk through half-finished structures and stand in the exact same garage over and over again.
As my grandmother’s health steadily declined, I thought about the workers putting these structures up while her body continued to break down in her new home. More and more I felt drawn to photographing her. At the same time, fires in Paradise, Sonoma county, and LA had me thinking about California as a site of unbridled growth and recurring disaster.
Tell me about the image of a women in a doctors office.
This photograph has felt very important to me. In it, my grandmother performs a strength test. As the doctor pushes on her head, the contact of his hand feels both clinical and spiritual, like the shamanic act laying of healing hands. As an image it surprised me after the fact. I was not expecting it nor planning for it, but my camera was there waiting and the moment unfolded and it made total sense. It also reminded me that the simple act of ‘being there,’ in the presence of others, not just as a photographer but as a person, can provide something. More and more I find this desire to be confused, challenged, surprised. I’ve been thinking a lot about the failure of the body and the resulting gestures and movements. I don’t know if failure is actually the right word. I’ve been thinking about the act of care taking, how one body operates on another. The role of touch and contact. This image feels like it has had an effect on the work I’m currently making.
What did you learn as you continued to investigate this idea? Did anything surprise you?
I’m constantly being surprised by pictures I’ve made in the past, ones I cross out initially but return to much later. I’m learning that I work much better when I push outside the confines of a defined project and really see where it could go.
What were the challenges you faced in attempts to find an ending to this work? Is it finished?
I don’t feel that I’ve found an ending — the more I look at the pictures the more incomplete it all feels. I recently left California to attend graduate school on the East Coast and felt disappointed it wasn’t ‘complete,' but at this point it honestly feels exciting, like there’s so much more I can do, whether it means revisiting certain pictures or places with an entirely new approach. It’s as if I’ve scribbled initial sketches, the first few pages, but the rest still feels blank and open. I’ve found photographers, myself included, can get stuck within the narrow scope of a project. I’m trying to push myself out of the initial concept into more unknown territory.
What artists and influences were you looking at during your time developing this work?
At the start, I had the ghosts of Eadweard Muybridge and Lewis Baltz hovering over me. I had been reading Rebecca Solnit’s books River of Shadows and Hollow City, Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, and of course Leonard Gardner’s novel.
I was listening to Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads and looking at Anthony Hernandez’s photographs of bus stops, courtyards, fishing holes and other semi-urban spaces. I was also obsessed with the little known German photographer Wilhelm Schürmann and his book Road Map to Happiness: Pictures of a Street, 1979-1981.
