An empty stage is already a complete work of theatre. Clark Winter finds one in an Ohio field in 1972: a wooden platform raised on trestles, a white hand-lettered sign announcing the Summer Drive-In Church, a lone pole with its crossarm standing to the right like a bare cross. No cars, no congregation, no preacher. Three quarters of the frame is given to a vast curdled sky, so the architecture of faith sits small and provisional in the grass, a prop waiting for its audience to drive in.
Winter's approach is the cool, level survey that serious photography was then turning on vernacular America, but the picture also anticipates a later idea: the tableau that needs no figures because the staging itself is the subject. Nothing here was arranged for the camera; it did not need to be. The scene arrives pre-constructed, outdoor scenography built by believers who understood, as photographers do, that meaning can be produced with plywood, paint and placement.
The picture proposes an exact exchange between two kinds of spectacle. Worship borrows the format of the drive-in movie; the photograph borrows the stillness and patience of worship. The gelatin silver print holds the field's greys against the enormous weather, and above the little sign the sky carries on with its own unsponsored performance.
An empty stage is already a complete work of theatre. Clark Winter finds one in an Ohio field in 1972: a wooden platform raised on trestles, a white hand-lettered sign announcing the Summer Drive-In Church, a lone pole with its crossarm standing to the right like a bare cross. No cars, no congregation, no preacher. Three quarters of the frame is given to a vast curdled sky, so the architecture of faith sits small and provisional in the grass, a prop waiting for its audience to drive in.
Winter's approach is the cool, level survey that serious photography was then turning on vernacular America, but the picture also anticipates a later idea: the tableau that needs no figures because the staging itself is the subject. Nothing here was arranged for the camera; it did not need to be. The scene arrives pre-constructed, outdoor scenography built by believers who understood, as photographers do, that meaning can be produced with plywood, paint and placement.
The picture proposes an exact exchange between two kinds of spectacle. Worship borrows the format of the drive-in movie; the photograph borrows the stillness and patience of worship. The gelatin silver print holds the field's greys against the enormous weather, and above the little sign the sky carries on with its own unsponsored performance.