Review of the work of Joshua Lutz at Clamp Art; Meadowlands
by Joshua Blank

“The Meadowlands is a place to pass through and forget on the way to someplace else.” This excerpt is part of an introduction to Joshua Lutz’s Meadowlands series now on view at Clamp Art. This sentence illustrates my personal impression of the area, or at least what images I can visualize when trying to define it in my mind. I recall traveling there only twice in my life, when I was forced by my uncle to go to a Banjovi concert at Giant Stadium and the other time was a class trip to Medieval Times; (a eat and watch arena style medieval performance), when I was in the forth grade. I remember wide-open fields split by highway intersections, service roads, and rail limes. As depicted in Lutz’s images some people seem to just end up there, like the African American family displaced by hurricane Katina. The Meadowlands is an insignificant place located in an area of transit between New York City and Continental America. It embodies a grey area of a contemporary American culture that is successfully illustrated in Lutz’s images. The pictures in this series describe the Meadowlands as if written in an essay of social satire semantically through the use of the deadpan photography esthetic. The juxxposintining of landscapes and environmental portraiture present a vivid representation of this areas complexity.
The Meadowlands series seems disjointed in subject matter, covering topics of promiscuity, pregnancy, new suburbia, apparent disaster, religion, travel, big wheeled trucks, motels, portraiture. Landscape, and digital manipulation to name a few of its relevant topics. However this series begins to account for the social and developmental makeup of the area that is as mismatched as is the combination of subjects in Lutz’s series. Today society’s cannot be defined by ethnography and the divisions of class, but by the current local history’s emerging and dissipating with time and change in an environment. The Meadowlands series documents moments of architectural and social allegory within the duration of the project. However some of the portraits are staged and the artist has changed the text in one visually to state a satiric comment. Moreover the images presented without captions and or specific information about the context of each image leave the viewer to interpret through personal semantic reference.
Lutz’s audience wont know that an image has been manipulated and they wont know the stories of the people who find themselves in these situations of circumstance. They will only be provided with visual information’s on the immediate context of each photograph. Viewers however may be able to deconstruct the road filled landscape as well as his images of suburban architecture, because their phenomenon and history are widely known, simple, understood, and more blatantly ”New Suburbia” is part of the American experience.
However interpretation is insignificant when talking about Lutz’s work, as he dose not publicly acknowledge the Meadowlands series as a member of the documentary genre. He regards his minor manipulations on some images to have hampered that possibility. Lutz seemed to not want to appear to make any judgments on his subjects, some of whom where essentially models who his interactions with took the form of photo shoot instead of conversation. In other photographs this is not the case as Lutz described in his lecture, situations of discord and distress in two of his images one of the priest and also in the family from Louisiana. However he seemed to refuse to elaborate on the discourse and more over seemed weary of stating his opinion on them as if sweeping the underlying subject under the rug.
The Meadowlands series by Joshua Lutz is impressive, full of stimulating visual content. The deadpan compositional style used in this essay embodies a contemporary documentary esthetic. These images are all documents in the form of environmental portrait and landscape. This denial of this series as a document, distances Lutz from his subjects, and aides in the framing of his portraits as potentially of sensational interest. These images are similar to those of Richard Rinaldi whose similar project was shot across the country in bus stations and in places he traveled to. However a portion of Rinaldi's project “Figure and Ground” focused on Newark, New Jersey, where he photographed young Muslims dressed with traditional burkas as well as other locals of Newark. Rinaldi acknowledges the documents inherit in his work but seems not to bother investigating any story of discourse from his subjects. He instead interprets the subjects symbolically almost as a typology of contemporary American culture. This approach is simple in contrast to the approach of Joshua Lutz in his Meadowlands series, where he camouflages the subject in Art, while Richard Rinaldi presents visual facts, which at the same time are art and speak of photography’s





