This interview is dedicated to William Mark Sommer‘s captivating project, A Road Home Along the Lincoln Highway. The series of photographs explores the idea of home and what returning to it means after a polonged absence. Sommer’s project is on view at our annual public outdoor exhibition, Vision(ary) | Portraits of Cultures, Communities, and Environments.
Follow William Mark Sommer:
Website: www.williammarksommer.com
Instagram: @williammarksommer
Interview by Vicente Isaías.
Vicente Isaías: At the risk of being trite, let’s begin with a quote. In The Changing American Countryside (1995), Emery N. Castle states that “rural people and places in America are poorly understood and largely neglected” by the people who write and speak about these communities. What are your thoughts on this topic? And how can photography help us attain a less obfuscated vision of these places?
William Mark Sommer: That’s a wonderful quote, I agree. Many of the people that tell stories about the rural experience are tourists in their own right. Though looked down upon as a word now, many people travel to these places for short amounts of time and leave when it suits them; I have also found myself within the realm of being a tourist through a few of my other projects too. Coming and going with a set amount of time, I feel this mode doesn’t lead to giving a full story, much past the story creators seek to tell. Travel is a great thing to open your mind to everything else in the world, it has been for me, but it can only give with the amount of time we give.
Many of the higher education centers are also located in the cities, which leads to this topic, but one thing I found positive within the connection to higher learning and rurality is the community college system. Coming from the community college system myself, some of my best teachers got their start in education through the localized community college. Though these schools haven’t had as big of a voice as many of the universities, I feel we will start to see more people that come from these colleges that will speak and share more about their home communities.
VI: A Road Home deals with your quest for making sense of the idea of home after having been gone from your hometown. Where are you originally from and what was life like there before?
WMS: I’m originally from Loomis, California and am currently residing here again. It’s hard to think of it in the same way as my childhood. Growing up in Loomis, it was a quiet old bypassed town on the Lincoln Highway. Though it had economic hardships as many of the larger businesses had left the town with/before the bypass with Interstate-80 the business and people that stayed grew the community to make a truly special place. Loomis was a blue collar place where you knew everyone in town or at least had a friendly hi or how’s it going to everyone we passed by. I always fondly remember going into the drug store and having ice cream with my mom or having fun conversations with the family that owned the local Chinese Restaurant. Though not rich in monetary wealth, It felt like a place that people cared about and who cared for everyone else around them too. Though this might be a nostalgic look at my past, I was happy to be raised here through the 90s.
VI: And what about after? And what made you want to leave?
WMS: When I was younger, I had always dreamed about living in San Francisco, whether it was the city’s connection to art, education and skateboarding, I felt pulled there. Moving to the city was a huge philosophical change that shifted my feelings of home and stretched my concepts of place. Though short lived in SF, I stayed constantly moving back and forth from place to place and across states, all adding to my ideas of home but also losing much of what I had in the process.
Coming back home after 5 years of displaced movement all around the west, I found many of the places I frequented within my youth had closed, been sold or transitioned into something else, this gentrification of the came with a broad change of the rural space as a retirement town was built and many of the open lands were subdivided bringing in a more “higher class of living;” a quote used by them. With these demeaning idealistic changes in my hometown, many people I grew up with no longer could afford to live within the town they also called home.
VI: How did your personal experiences of returning to your hometown and feeling disconnected shape the direction of this project?
WMS: It was hard returning, both personally and creatively, seeing the gentrification of rural space that happened in my absence was really hard to accept. These challenging feelings truly pulled me to seek out the places that remained and were hopefully un-changed. Driving the main street of my hometown, the Lincoln Highway, became my guide to re-find and connect with these places of my childhood. Though finding some places still remaining, I still didn’t feel whole, it was just a small piece to what was and is home, and then Covid hit. As I worked through finding place, I started to reconnect with the community and friends that I was away from. With the pandemic, it displaced me from being able to connect and create works that weren’t affected by the changes of Covid and it severely changed my ability to connect with anyone outside my house. Coming out of this Covid time, I was charged to connect with people of any sort that related to home, from high school classmates, past relationships, lifelong friends and the people I had the opportunity to meet through creating this series. Developing this side of A Road Home, my connection with the people filled that missing piece, and gave me more direction to my search for home.
VI: I am a big fan of your work, especially of projects like The Loneliest Highway and Dusted. Why did you choose to shoot on black and white for A Road Home? And how does your film choice reflect storytelling/thematic choices when working in projects where color is prevalent such as, let’s say, 66?
WMS: Thank you for your kindness about my works. I was really inspired to create in black and white after spending years creating exclusively with color film for 66 and Lost Highway. After using color as a thematic device to convey time with the aesthetics of the 30s-50s culture within those projects, I really wanted to dive into the image and focus on the story. When creating Dusted, I started in both forms of film, but quickly fell in love again with the Black and White image through working with the landscape and the people who inhabited those mining towns. Through Dusted, Black and White became my way of seeing creatively and really charged me to think about, see the topic and convey the story within the image as I pursued new projects back home. When creating A Road Home it felt natural to see and document the landscape in a similar way to Dusted, but as I spent more time in the field it took on its own shape.
VI: What equipment are you using to capture these photographs? What cameras kept you company along the road?
WMS: Through this series, I used a Hasselblad 500c/m with a 80mm lens. This camera became my way of visualizing the world around me and helped me work through and create many of my other works too. The Hasselblad has been my favorite camera to work with but I’ve recently been challenging myself and expanding back into old and new projects that utilize 4×5, 35mm and digital too. When traveling now, I keep this diverse range of cameras with me to engage with the landscape in the best way from slow to fast; it has made it an interesting way of visualizing the road.
VI: What is your editing process like, or in other words, what makes a good photograph?
WMS: I feel my editing and sequencing of photos changes between projects, from focusing on linearity to creating chapters for the book to adding a few surprises for the viewer. Sometimes the best photograph won’t work in sequence with others, but it’s about finding the photos that best fit the story. In the creation of this project, I used the road to guide my sequence and development, starting at one end then going to another. Working though this sequence with a book in mind, I feel it takes the viewer through my story of finding home again.
In focusing on the handling of film, I like to work in the darkroom range of editing. I came from a darkroom style of working and I look to focus on keeping the scanned film the same way, but with the added dust spotting corrections too.
I couldn’t tell you what would exactly make the perfect or good photograph, it’s up to the viewer to find what works best for them.
VI: Highways as metaphors for loneliness and seeking home are prevalent in art, literature, and music. Are there any writers, visual artists, or musicians that have inspired you or accompanied you in your search for home?
WMS: I feel when developing and working on a project a soundtrack definitely addresses many feelings we all work towards. In the creation of The Loneliest Highway Project, I had Radiohead’s OK Computer and The Bends on repeat as I traveled through Nevada. Those soundtracks truly spoke to me through that time. With this project about home, I tended to switch between the local radio stations, everything from country, 90’s pop, alternative to old school R&B and hip hop. I feel listening to these stations connected me closer with the tastes of different parts of my childhood. It might add to the nostalgic views within this project, but the radio truly used to hold so much in the creation of mine/our music interest. It’s always amazing when you catch that song that fits the mood perfectly at the right time.
Having conversations with everyone pictured within this series helped truly grow, inspired and advanced my ideas the most through creating this work. Asking everyone what home was to them truly gave me a larger picture of what home is to me.
VI: What inspired you to want to “inspire others to cherish these places and moments that feel like home” before they change?
WMS: I feel that my loss of community and seeing so many places close and change, isn’t just an experience for me. Crossing the US multiple times by car, I’ve seen many other communities shift from boom to bust and into growth much like my own. I look for this work to show that these places and people make up my feeling of home and that we all don’t last forever. Please take the time to enjoy them while in the moment, because time inevitably changes everything.
VI: How do you see this project relating to broader themes of nostalgia, change, and our relationship to place?
WMS: I feel it relates to all those themes in many ways from trying to find the home I have in my memory to seeing how it has changed over time and how it is now a different place that is progressively still moving on. Our feelings of place constantly change through our own perceptions and growth as people, trying to see this place as it was in my memory is futile, but growing with it or finding a new way to envision home in a different context is a more positive creative experience, I look to follow.
William Mark Sommer is a visual artist creating along and through America’s Highways. Embracing spontaneity within an intuitive practice along the road, Sommer seeks to engage and come together with these spaces that were bypassed by society, much like his hometown of Loomis, California. In creating photographic works through the road, Sommer seeks to bring attention to the left behind to promote preservation and love of these unique people and rural spaces.Through Sommer’s practice within analog photography, he has earned a BFA in Art Photography from Arizona State University and traversed the United States developing multiple projects that engage with themes of human nature, preservation, empathy and time. Sommer has exhibited and taken part projects across North America and Europe; venues including, The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, Center For Fine Art Photography, Masur Museum of Art, Griffen Museum of Photography, Yellowstone Museum of Art, Center For Photography, Midwest Center for Photographic Art, Belfast Photo Festival, Incadaques International Photo Festival, Northlight Gallery, His awards include Life Framer’s First Prize Award Selected by Alex Prager and British Journal of Photography & 1854 Media “Open Walls” and “Decade of Change,” refocus Awards Color Award “3rd Overall,” and a first place in the Still Life Category of the 2023 Chromatic Awards; Sommer has also taken part in residencies with Chalk Hill in Sonoma, CA, Open Wabi, Fredericktown, Ohio and Off The Cost, Online; He has been featured in publications like Lenscratch, Another-Earth, Stay Wild magazine, Lodown Magazine, Aint Bad, Booooooom, C41 magazine, Nowhere Diary, Fiiiirst and Subjectively Objective.
