Middle-American Landscapes
June 2 – July 2, 1994
When I moved to Ohio in 1984 to take a job teaching photography, I had little experience of America. I had come to the U.S. ten years earlier after growing up in Europe and North Africa, but I had only lived in large cities in the Northeast. Once I had settled into my new job in Akron, I began to explore and photograph the place that would become my home for the next forty years. For the next decade I made pictures everywhere and anywhere: in my neighborhood, across the region that became known as the Rust Belt, in the South where I went to visit friends.
Eventually I began to photograph specific geographical regions, but in those early years I considered my subject to be all of Middle-America as I gradually discovered it. Four of the pictures that I showed at Blue Sky in 1994 became part of my book about the Ohio River Valley, Along the Ohio; I have included those in this selection.
The way I look at the landscape has been heavily influenced by the writing of geographers such as J.B. Jackson and John Jakle, leading me to try to make photographs that contain a great deal of information and that tell the complex story of a place. The landscape of these small towns — their odd juxtapositions of architectural styles, the arrangement and decoration of back yards — provides clues to the values and aspirations of their residents. I’ve tried to describe the efforts people make to achieve some semblance of the American Dream under less than ideal circumstances, and to convey a sense of the recalcitrant, gritty beauty of a landscape that has been shaped by man over the past few centuries.
Andrew Borowiec was born in 1956 in New York City but moved to Paris with his parents when he was nine months old. He spent his childhood in France, Algeria, Tunisia, and Switzerland, where he graduated from the International School of Geneva. He received a B.A. in Russian from Haverford College in 1979 and an M.F.A. in Photography from Yale University in 1982.
Borowiec has photographed America’s changing industrial and post-industrial landscape for almost four decades. His books include Along the Ohio (2000), Industrial Perspective: Photographs of the Gulf Coast (2005), and Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills (2008), Wheeling, West Virginia (2018) and The New Heartland: Looking for the American Dream (2021).
He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation.
Borowiec’s photographs have been exhibited around the world and are in the collections of the Chicago Art Institute, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among others.
He has worked as a photojournalist, as the staff photographer for the International Center of Photography in New York City, as the Assistant Director of Workshops for the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, as the manager of a digital and analog printing lab, and as the Director of the University of Akron Press.
Borowiec has taught photography at Parsons School of Design, the New School for Social Research, Germantown Academy, and Oberlin College. From 1984 until 2014 he taught at the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art where he was named a Distinguished Professor of Art in 2009. He lives in New York City and Akron, Ohio.
