Portraits of America - Brief Article

Photographer: William Albert Allard Publisher: National Geographic Society [c]2001, 256 pages, US $50 / CD $76

William Albert Allard has been a successful photographer for the last four decades. His work has appeared numerous times in National Geographic magazine and he has published several photographic books. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife and their son.

"Portraits of America" epitomizes Allard's photographic technique--one might better say, his photographic philosophy. Scenes of the American landscape, in its grandness and openness, are presented with its human inhabitants, at times seeming more like its human "intruders." For example, the portrait of Knox Ranch is shot, in all its empty flatness, from the saddle with the scene framed between the horse's ears. Countless cattle dot the plain and two mounted cowboys, dwarfed by the land and sky, are at the very center of the frame. Inevitably, the viewer starts to question the image--why is the photographer seated on a horse, where is he going, what is his relationship to the cowboys whose tiny images the horse seems to be contemplating?

Similarly, the image of "Texas" taken in 1974, shows a flat plain, a distant mountain range and an endless sky filling probably three-quarters of the photograph. At the bottom center, a lone cowboy is galloping across the frame. Where is he going? Is he going "to" somewhere, or escaping "from" somewhere? The immensity of Texas and the littleness of horse and rider is stressed.

Allard presents much more than the open landscape. In images of the Amish and the Hutterites, of Minor League Baseball, of the Rodeo, and of Blues singers, he captures with a remarkable tenderness these margins of American life.

Thoughtful essays punctuate the groups of images. Unromantic, unposed, the photographs suggest the dignity of everyday life and activity, but so often demonstrating this dignity against the background of a landscape that seems apart from, even threatening to the men and women in it.

This is a portrait of America that is unusual, moving and full of insight into the lives of those Americans who do not live in the big cities with palm-pilots and cellphones. They are, indeed, as Richard Ford notes in his thoughtful introduction, "solitary seeming individuals facially testifying to the artist's faith that man is the fundamental moral integer of life."

COPYRIGHT 2002 Photographic Society of America, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group