AWC 32 – AMERICA DESERTA I-II

"That was not why we took that shot; the intention was to photograph "Phone Booth Mesa" on the way up from Shiprock to Cortez. Neither of us remembers seeing any building in the foreground of that view: but there it is, a standard, off-the-peg, industrially produced Butler building with an air conditioner unit on its flatly pitched roof. It is finished in an inoffensive tan colour, but that doesn't make it any less outstandingly visible against the background of sagebrush. Why then does the eye of memory not see it? It must be that it is such a usual building in a landscape where only the exotic or the outrageous in architecture tends to look at home and be remembered." "In a landscape where nothing officially exists (otherwise it would not be "desert"), absolutely anything becomes thinkable, and may consequently happen. In 1982, Reyner Banham publishes Scenes in America Deserta.