Jack D. Teemer photographed working-class neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and Dayton during the 1980s, and Rust Belt gathers that work into a single sustained sequence. The book examines how industry shapes the streets that surround it—bridges and freeways passing over homes and restaurants, fences marking each small property. Teemer’s larger vistas establish a city’s structure before the sequence moves closer, to yards crowded with signs, cars, and gardens, where children play on porches and with hoses. Even where such yards have seen better days, their residents cultivate and enliven their plots. Published posthumously by Nazraeli Press in 2019, the book is edited as an object: a slipcased hardcover of 48 pages and 35 four-color plates, at 12 by 15 inches, with an introduction by Lisa Sutcliffe, the Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Teemer belongs to the early 1980s turn toward color photography, when a growing group of practitioners argued against color’s subordination to black-and-white. His work appeared in the survey American Independents: Eighteen Color Photographers and later in Where We Live: Photographs from the Berman Collection, placing him in conversation with others describing the American social landscape. Rust Belt concentrates rather than surveys, holding to particular blocks, porches, and yards. The pictures are quiet rather than dramatic. They treat ordinary arrangements of fence, auto, and garden as evidence of how people make private space inside dense neighborhoods, and how economic conditions and zoning appear in the look of those spaces.
For a collector attentive to color’s place in postwar American photography, or to photographs that document ordinary urban life without condescension, the book’s coherence matters: the sequence alternates broad urban views with intimate domestic ones, and the human presence never becomes anecdote. Lisa Sutcliffe’s introduction frames the city and the family together. As a posthumous presentation of this body of work, this volume gives the 1980s Rust Belt a considered, unsentimental form.
