When I returned from Europe in 1967,
after a year living in other cultures, America appeared very different
to me. I saw how caught up the country was in consumerism and
self-indulgence, how the Vietnam War was unfolding in front of us and
people seemed to go about their lives as if it wasn’t their business. I
saw how corporate America was creating an environment of distraction
that seduced the majority of citizens into becoming a submissive body
politic. I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and
asked for support to look at the way people spent their “leisure time,”
that being a new concept in American life a mere decade earlier. But it
was leisure time seen in the same frame of reference as the Vietnam
War. How did the two relate and could I use photography to say anything
meaningful about this attitude?
Courtesy and copyright of Joel Meyerowitz
I was awarded the fellowship and took
several road trips around America. Everywhere I looked the country
seemed to be losing its edge, town centers were failing and malls were
proliferating out in the suburbs, poor-quality buildings were going up
on the outskirts of urban centers and little thought was given to the
quality of life of the low-income people who were being pushed into
them. Infrastructure didn’t seem to be keeping up with the demands being
placed on it, or else the people who thought about planning these
things couldn’t see far enough into the future to make them adequate for
what was to come. Wherever I looked it all seemed to be coming apart in
slow motion, so slow that it wouldn’t be seen until 20 years later when
suddenly, after a couple of unsuccessful wars, America was no longer
what it promised to be. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/photographing-a-new-era-of-american-leisure-during-the-vietnam-war/
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