Endangered ICONS BY CRAIG DEMAN
From 2009 - 2018 I created photographic essays about cultural artifacts. “Endangered Icons” consists of three essays, which include selected images from my drive-in movie theaters work, a road trip essay with a 1950s beauty parlor chair and record stores across the USA.
The first essay of Endangered Icons, the Drive-in Project was shot between 2009 and 2013 with both digital capture and medium format film cameras. Over 40 drive-in movie theaters in 11 states across the Northeastern, Southeastern, Southwestern and Western United States were photographed. Today, approximately 90 percent of drive-in movie theaters are closed from their peak in the late 1950s. I am drawn to the texture of the distressed and decaying wood of the ticket booths and the shapes of the overgrown and unwieldy shrubs and trees growing where cars once parked, while all of it sits in juxtaposition against the enormous scale of a towering movie screen.
Drive-in movie theaters represent a defining moment in the social history of recent generations of Americans. It is the openness and sharing of personal memories and raw emotion, still present, with people that I came in contact with all across the country that made me realize, drive-in movie theaters are a metaphor of American folklore. The Drive-in Project was created to evoke such feelings.
Road Trip With Marilyn (RTWM) involves a 1950’s “Normandie Starline Mod 1” beauty parlor chair, which I named Marilyn. Marilyn has a beautiful chrome dryer top with a pink chair that has an ashtray in the left arm and a swing handle on the right side that lifts the lower part for a leg rest. RTWM is the essay that in my mind, defined the Endangered Icons portfolio. In that, I was watching an old episode of a Huell Howser program where he reprised an episode of a Los Angeles beauty parlor that also functioned as a gathering place of Fairfax neighborhood residents for decades. Untenable rents were ultimately the demise of the beauty parlor, but the row of Normandie Starline's where women bonded for generations spoke to me as a cultural artifact - I had to find one!
After acquiring my very own Normandie Starline, I photographed RTWM between 2012 and 2015 at more than 60 locations across California and Nevada. The series includes images that juxtapose Marilyn against outdoor landscapes, studio work and street scenes. I found that Marilyn helped me in a couple of ways as a photographer working in my studio or in rural and/or urban setting. In general, Marilyn is a great ice breaker - her physical appearance attracts and pulls people into the space she is placed in. I believe her sisterhood at all the beauty parlors where they once lived would be proud of her.
The third essay of Endangered Icons, the Record Store Project was shot between 2016 and 2018. A total of 37 record stores from ten states across the West Coast, Mountain, Midwestern and East Coast regions of the USA were photographed.
To me, record stores represent cultural artifacts that have been a place to meet and share passions about music, musicians and bands. Unfortunately, even with the resurgence of vinyl, record stores are endangered cultural artifacts. From the time that initial research for the shoots had been started, record stores in each state on the itinerary had closed before visited. The other part of the Record Store Project photo essay story is about the owners and employees of independent record stores. These people match or often even exceed the passions of their customers for music while running a business that is being endangered by not only technology but generations that prefer an absolute minimum of physical human interaction.