“American Photographs” is Paul Shambroom’s ’74 retirement exhibit. For him, it feels somewhat like attending his own funeral.
As he retires from 14 years of teaching photography at the University of Minnesota, “American Photographs” catalogues a lifetime of photography. His style and techniques have changed, even from things he once taught students. And his perspective has changed, his body of work showing just how much America has changed. But looking through his career, Shambroom thinks he’s been asking the same questions the whole time.
His most recent work, self-published in a monograph titled “Purpletown” (2021-2023), is a collection of images from the most politically divided towns in America — 60 communities that were exact or near exact ties in the 2020 election.
“America is a nation almost equally divided,” he explained in a walk-through of his exhibit. The project explores what it means to be a civil community in America’s most polarized time and towns.
Shambroom doesn’t claim to be politically neutral. Though he didn’t introduce himself with how he voted while visiting these towns, he wouldn’t lie that he voted blue. He takes issue with left-leaning individuals who fear for his safety when visiting these towns. Shambroom thinks travelling and conversing across the spectrum is deeply important.
He’s never worried for his safety in his work — which is, as he acknowledged, a facet of his privilege as a white man. But he maintains that if he could drive a bus full of people in the blue Twin Cities bubble to visit red and purple towns with him for a week, he could change each one’s perspective.
The access Shambroom has gained across his career is immense, and perhaps most impressive in his work “Nuclear Weapons” (1992-2001), cumulated in his book “Face to Face with the Bomb” (2003). He approached the Pentagon with a proposal: unprecedented access to weapon and command sites, photographing “warheads, submarines, bombers and missiles, plus hundreds of individual missile silos.” The project concluded in 2001 before the September 11 attacks, and he knows this access would never be granted today.
On most sites, he was the only civilian photographer to ever enter. He could not photograph the confidential, but he still captured the never-before-seen.
One striking image, “B83 one-megaton nuclear gravity bombs in Weapons Storage Area, Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, 1995,” captures a worker sweeping around a row of a dozen nuclear bombs. The image is beautiful, calling to European landscape paintings with classic three-point perspective, each bomb a pristine white. It is beautiful, and it is ugly.
He cites reading Robert J. Lifton’s “The Genocidal Mentality” as part of his preparation for the project, a book that discusses the psychology that comes with working day-to-day in creating and maintaining weapons of genocidal proportions. Shambroom grew up with the arms race, practicing in class what to do when, not if, a nuclear bomb landed. In “Face to Face with the Bomb,” he includes a haiku he wrote in the fifth grade: “Look up in the sky./ See the pretty mushroom cloud./ Soon we will be dead.”
Another standout selection of the collection was “Lost” (2010-2015). Over many years, Shambroom collected weathered and battered missing pet posters, then scanned and enlarged them. Clips of texts and images are arranged together, occasionally humorous and always intimate.
“She’s not that friendly,” one scan of text reads, “but we like her!” Another, below a rain-beaten photo of a small bird, reads, “If your cat brings something like this home, or if you find a pile of green or yellow feathers, please save it and call us; we’d rather know what happened.”
Shambroom only collected heavily weathered and old posters, a process he still isn’t sure is wholly ethical. Each image of a pet isn’t recognizable to the animal itself. Their anonymity lends to their beauty, washes of colors only the chaos of weeks taped on a lightpost or scattered in a gutter can bring.
“I feel they’re beautiful and maybe a little snarky,” Shambroom said. “But this is kind of a personal thing, too. It’s about loss and grief. … For each one of these families that lost their pet, it’s a tragedy. It’s a big deal.”
The collection is a break from the rest of Shambroom’s work — it isn’t precisely photography and is presented more abstractly than the other works. But the pieces are still centered on what Shambroom has been enamored with capturing through his entire career: the often unseen experiences of America that shape the country’s identity.
Shambroom has been looking for that since his earliest collection in the gallery, “Portrait of Hennepin Avenue” (1979). Over two summer nights, he set up a pop-up photo booth where passersby could stop in. He took only two photos: the first a Polaroid he gave to the individual and the second with his camera for publication. He also asked their name, age and occupation. Each photo is engaged actively with the subject, a practice Shambroom has grown away from in his more recent works.
Here, each person is a vibrant character: a security guard puffs a pipe, a self-described hustler preens at the camera and a 12-year-old, occupation “shool,” looks the viewer down with bravado.
While the photos are exciting, Shambroom was clear that this collection, as with all his works, is political. The stretch of street he occupied, known as Block E, was notorious as the grittier side of downtown Minneapolis. The Minnesota Star Tribune described it as “exotic, energetic, occasionally evil and full of life.” Shambroom found it essential.
“There was probably illegal stuff going on, there’s probably prostitution and drugs and stuff,” Shambroom explained. “But to me, it was just this great high-energy place. It just felt good being there. … The city was talking about urban renewal, that was the thing back then. And they want to clean up downtown. They want to clean Hennepin Avenue. And that just really offended me. Treating these people like they’re vermin.”
The block is now home to the Mayo Clinic Square, after being demolished by city officials in 1988.
American Photographs is free to the public at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery and closes on March 8. Most recently, Shambroom has embraced iPhone photography, retiring (or at least adapting his decades-long tradition of always carrying a camera). You can find this newest work @paul_ shambroom on Instagram.
