These photos of growing up in the Bay Area suburbs tell a story of innocence and disaffection
Mimi Plumb captured the clearing of orchards and farms for subdivisions
Since the 1950s, exponential growth has pushed the San Francisco Bay Area built environment into, and over, the wetlands, valleys and hills of the region. What were once rural outposts are now commuter towns, villages are malls, farms are paved over and the ranches boxed in. In the postwar era, Walnut Creek transformed from a pastoral small town into the wealthy enclave east of the Oakland Hills that it is today.
Berkeley photographer Mimi Plumb, 64, spent her childhood in the town during its vast expansion. What Is Remembered is her record of alienated youth in 1970s suburbia—a milieu common to towns across America.
She arrived in Walnut Creek in 1956, at age three, after her parents upped sticks from Berkeley and moved out to one of the town’s first tract housing developments. They were quite content to trade in the intellectual life of the liberal college town for “a place where their kids could run around.”
Between 1950 and 1960, the population of Walnut Creek quadrupled from 2,460 to to 9,903. (It’s now more than 67,000.) Beginning in her teens, Plumb documented the townsfolk — particularly the children — living in the shadows of perpetual construction. Time was marked by the completion dates of new roads and housing projects.
“At the start, we were surrounded by walnut orchards. I could horseback ride, so there were things I could do, but for the entire time I lived there they were constantly tearing up land and building new sub-divisions.”
Plumb never felt comfortable among the cul-de-sacs and manicured yards. She rarely had the words for what she was experiencing, so when her older brother introduced her to photography (ironically because of his class at the University of California, Berkeley), Plumb embraced the medium and found her voice. She learnt darkroom techniques in the janitor’s closet at her high school.
The bland atmosphere of the suburbs stood in stark contrast, says Plumb, to the cultural and violent upheavals taking place across the country — the shooting of John F Kennedy, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement.
In 1971, the two lane road to the city became four lanes. Aged 17, Plumb left for San Francisco. It was, as she saw it, a move to reconnect with real life and real issues. “Suburbia felt like something of a purgatory to me,” she explains. “It was intellectually hard; you couldn’t really talk about what was going on in the world.”
After a career teaching photography, only recently has Plumb returned to her archive and What Is Remembered. Nostalgia, partly, accounts for the current popularity of Plumb’s work. But, frankly, it is only now that people have the stomach for it. While her college instructors at the time loved the work, it was too unadorned and too uncomfortable for many others to appreciate.
“The raw dirt yards and treeless streets, model homes expanding exponentially, with imperceptible variation. A lot of it’s pretty dark and some of it is pessimistic.”
The four lanes to San Francisco are now ten. The house that Plumb grew up in which sold for $35,000 in 1972 is now valued at $1.4 million. Walnut Creek is a destination for weekend shoppers who flood boutique stores and strip mall boulangeries. Even recent history can be easily forgotten, but Plumb’s photographs remind us how newly built our artificial landscapes are.
“I watched the rolling hills and valleys mushroom with tract homes,” says Plumb. “To me and my teenage friends, they were the blandest, saddest homes in the world.”
Mimi Plumb’s What Is Remembered is on view at San Francisco International Airport through November 2nd, 2017.
