A Photographic Folk Song for the Midwest
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Growing up in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, 22-year-old photographer Tom Hoying was connected early on to life in the American heartland. Yearly visits with his extended family among the fields and farms of the Ohio River Valley bonded him with the midwestern pace and perspective.
Like many of us though, once he hit his late teens he began to question how he fit in with the image of his origins. Instead of rebelling against it (with the exception of flouting his parents’ wishes by becoming an art photographer instead of an engineer) he dug deeper.
He began to recognize and empathize with the mounting struggle of blue collar farmers, whose place as the heart of the nation has for some time been shifting, along with the manufacturing jobs that built the region — all compounded by the economic crash of 2008. Hoying also began to see his own values in contrast to the more conservative, religiously devout principles he was raised by.
In response, he shot I Almost Drowned in the Blue River, a series that seeks to represent the Rust Belt at the cusp of its (as well as his own) inevitable transformation.
“I think there’s a period between when you’re an adolescent, and you hit the wall where you realize that all the things you sort of idealize as a kid are worse off or different than you expected them to be,” he says. “A lot of my relatives were unhappy and out of work, the way the recession hit. … I felt like I owed it to this area, not to pay tribute because I don’t really think it’s like a community that’s dying or is dead now, but just sort of my love letter to this area.”
His images, shot over a two month period in parts of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana are infused with a sense of nostalgia, a series of impressions that seem at once universal and specific to his own experiences. Like a photographic folk song, they feature family, friends, people he grew up with and members of their community. None of their names are given though, nor are the places where they were shot, and that is quite deliberate.
“Regardless of who I’m photographing I wanted it to be sort of ambiguous enough that this could be anywhere, ‘Midwest USA,’” Hoying says, “which is part of the ambiguity of photography and why I like using it as a medium.”
Some images clearly epitomize their subject — churchgoers drenched in dusty sunlight, sprinklers on green grass, a trucker-hat-wearing man beneath Old Glory watching a tractor pull. Others though capture a subtle sense of foreboding — a starkly lit horse kicking on its back, a minister at an empty wedding stand, an unattended bowl of salad on a quilted tabletop.
While some of these images were in Hoying’s head before the shoot, many were simply products of his experience as he bounced from place to place and person to person — what he didn’t want to do was overemphasize material elements, or create a caricature.
The economic challenges facing the Midwest are well known. While Hoying does hope his photos stir a discourse about the situation there, his goal was not to document the region journalistically. Instead he set out to find a visual language that showed the colorful nature of Midwestern life, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) imbued with the signs of the changes that are taking place.
“It’d be like, oh here’s the ‘junk’ photo, here’s the ‘guy working on his car that’s never gonna be fixed’ photo,” he says. “I know that church is a big deal and I need to sit in a couple services and see if I can’t get a photo, and I know that my cousins own so many guns, so many guns … You can’t be too rigid about what you’re doing because, if you’re documenting the world, the world is so organic and changing, so you have to constantly be able to adapt.”
The sequencing is critical to the series as well. It’s the subtle impressions these medium format frames give that counts, inspired in part by the tradition of road trip and Americana photography a la Robert Frank, all the way up to modern masters like Alex Soth and Bryan Schutmaat.
This photographic vocabulary runs a risk of type casting its subjects, which is why he strove to convey the perspective of an insider looking out, not the other way around.
“You want to be able to use the same tradition and say something new, and I think that’s super hard. I don’t think I would have done this had it been any other area, had it not been an area that I felt a strong connection to.”
Hoying moved to Columbus for school, where he plans to stay for the foreseeable future. Like the people in these photos, he is looking for meaning in the place he’s called home for his entire life.
“I’m still most inspired by being here in the midwest, and the landscapes here,” he says. “A lot of what I’m doing is romanticizing these areas, which is not necessarily journalistic, but I felt like there’s something beautiful and sad and poetic about the landscape itself, and the people. [I hope] I can make something that feels how I feel when I’m in these areas, and express that to somebody who’s never been there.”
