From downtown Louisville to the trailer parks of rural Pennsylvania, John Sanderson's National Character reads the United States through its roadside signage, decaying industry and familial porches.
The series begins with a picture Sanderson could not shake. In downtown Louisville, Kentucky, a shirtless man stands on the pavement holding a carton of Marlboros, a work shirt tossed over one shoulder. Above him, a red neon Modern Living sign, once the crown of a furniture store, arcs out from the painted white brick of a building long since closed. The graffiti is new, the sign is old, and the question Sanderson uses the picture to ask is already there in the frame: what, by now, does modern living mean in this country? Luxury, indulgence, leisure, work. None and all of it.
Sanderson was born and raised in midtown Manhattan. His earliest memories are of family drives from New York down to rural Pennsylvania, and the work has kept to that rhythm since. On foot or behind the wheel, he moves through the non-metropolitan United States drawn to the common noun: the trailer park threaded onto a wooded ridge, the brick VFW hall floodlit in orange and teal, the white clapboard house with a tar-patched roof, the bare tree taller than the shed beside it. The pictures are large-format and square, shot in the diffused light of overcast afternoons or the last pink minutes before night.
Industry is everywhere in National Character, mostly as residue. The abandoned Brier Hill steelworks in Youngstown sits behind a makeshift white guard shed and a line of yellow bollards. An open-pit mine displays a single yellow haul truck the way a town might display a cannon. In the Kinzua Valley, a man on an observation deck photographs what is left of the viaduct after a tornado folded it into the forest. A row of pastel clapboard houses sits beneath an enormous industrial shed topped with eleven black ventilation stacks, the one scaled to the other like a grown-up correction to a child's drawing.
Leisure and travel carry their own weight in the sequence. A vintage Greyhound coach, chrome and turquoise, is parked beside a mid-century station clad in pale-blue aluminum. A blank billboard burns white over a deserted industrial lot at two in the morning. A Great Lakes lighthouse, red brick with a green slate roof, keeps watch over a gray shoreline no one is using. And at the project's softest register, a double rainbow lands over a valley town in the Northern Rockies, the railroad still running between factory and mountain.
The one full portrait is the Cooke family of Carbon County, Wyoming, nine-strong on a ranch porch, cowboy boots and denim shirts and a snow peak behind them. Sanderson lets it sit alongside the Marlboro Man and the dead tree in Manny's Yard in Michigan without commentary. National Character is not a thesis. It is an inventory, built slowly by a New Yorker turning the car toward the places the country prefers not to photograph itself in, and finding there a social geography more honest than the one the advertising keeps promising.
