Neon Mesa: Wonders of the Southwest
Atkins’ dazzling color photos of the transience of the artificial within the seemingly indifferent perdurance of the landscapes and skies of the U.S. Southwest appear broad as the horizon and deep as the distance in this wider-than-high album. This is so even when a picture’s subject in its entirety is close to the camera, as in several shots of decorations on the walls of defunct roadside businesses. The stiff kachina-like Indian figures and bronco-busting cowboys project from their flat, expansive backdrops like 3-D ghosts, despite the fact that their paint is peeling and cracking apace with that of the walls. In the minimal texts Atkins inserts every so many pages, he often sounds like the great black-and-white photographer of small-town and rural America, David Plowden, when he remarks that what we see in a given picture was gone when he returned to its site a year later. These are elegiac images of a social moment still within the living memory of millions. These are modern memento mori of stark, liminally humorous beauty. --Ray Olson