In many ways, Ohio has become for America the quintessential
heartland state, for what happens in Ohio happens over all of the
United States. Ohio has been a bellwether swing state for the
winning candidate in every presidential election since 1944 except
one. It's also the place where fast-food companies test-market new
products and the place where chewing gum, Teflon, and the first
cash register, first vacuum cleaner, first airplane, first traffic
signal, and first gas-powered automobile were invented. You can't
get more heartland than that. Even the state's Division of Travel
and Tourism has relied on "Ohio, the Heart of It All" as its
popular motto since the Reagan years to attract visitors to the
state.Yet everything seemed to change after the 2004 presidential
election, when political scientists and long-time journalists
looked more closely at the election results: Ohio was changing,
just as America was changing. Big differences were noted between
voters who lived in the cities and those who lived around the
cities who aligned with voters from rural areas. Andrew Borowiec,
an eminent photographer based in Akron, took notice, and he headed
out with his camera to take a closer look at the electoral map on
the ground. And what he found was astonishing. The once rolling
farmlands that used to surround the cities and define Middle
America were rapidly giving way to vast suburban housing
developments of nearly identical, hastily built mini-mansions with
enormous garages and fancy yards. These were new bedroom
communities for long-distance commuters to the cities where there
were jobs. And the traditional Main Streets of yore were being
eclipsed by "lifestyle centers": shopping malls filled with
national chains whose commercial architecture is a cacophonous
blend of multiple periods and styles somehow blending into a
fanciful display in which every detail is reproduced out of
extruded foam and all of it designed to evoke an imagined past era
of luxurious consumerism. Distinctive architectural and landscape
styles of the region had given way to a ubiquitous culture of
global marketing in which J. Crew was a more familiar name than
James Joyce. Homogenization and conformity had won over the
American dream.In the tradition of other famous interpreters of
American land and life---among them J. B. Jackson, Walker Evans,
Robert Frank, and the New Topographics photographers---Andrew
Borowiec has used his keen eye and dedication to field work to give
us a fresh, at times humorous, and ever razor-sharp view of what is
going on in America today. There is a new heartland, a new American
dream, and it can be found in the new residential and commercial
landscapes of Ohio, and the rest of America, if we choose to open
our eyes and take a look.
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