America 1981: Reviewed by Kim Beil

Book Review America 1981 Photographs by Simone Kappeler Reviewed by Kim Beil "In 1981, Swiss photographer Simone Kappeler traveled to North America with a friend. The pair bought a used Gran Torino and set out on the road, traveling from New York to Los Angeles over the course of three months..."

America 1981. By Simone Kappeler.

America 1981
Photographs by Simone Kappeler

Scheidegger and Spiess, Switzerland, 2020. 

256 pp., 160 color and 77 b/w illustrations, 9½x13½".

In 1981, Swiss photographer Simone Kappeler traveled to North America with a friend. The pair bought a used Gran Torino and set out on the road, traveling from New York to Los Angeles over the course of three months. Nearly a quarter-century after that other Swiss photographer, Robert Frank, made his road trip, Kappeler’s lens found different Americans. It’s not so much that this was a different America; it wasn’t. The Cold War was raging, Ronald Reagan had just taken office, and a new conservatism was spreading across the country. The blind politics and social divisions that Frank highlighted in the 1950s were returning after two decades of cultural radicalism. But Kappeler’s book seems to ask: What if Frank’s 767 rolls of film were edited with an eye for joy, instead of strife, separation, and hardship?

Kappeler’s pictures are mostly color. They feature the burnished tones of expired film, shifted color prints, and the focal aberrations that are characteristic of the toy cameras she favored. Kappeler arrived in New York with a Hasselblad, a Nikon F2, and a Polaroid SX-70, but soon began collecting other cameras. By the time she reached Los Angeles, she had acquired two Dianas, five Brownies, a Sawyer’s Nomad and a Micro-Pet, among other bargain finds.

Kappeler visited New York City, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, and Los Angeles like a tourist. Perhaps the unassuming cameras made people trust her? They smile openly into her lens, whether picnicking or posing by their cars. Or, she catches them on the fly: headless bodies in colorful clothing, arms wrapped around each other while crossing the street or taking in the view.

The edit is lively, too. Cars speed through the frame, sometimes pointing into the center of a double-page spread, sometimes roaring out of frame, as if onto the next page. These highway interludes stitch the destinations together, as they do in any American road trip. The thrift store cameras and Kappeler’s low-angle perspective give the pictures a youthful sense of wonder. The book is full of the sense of speed and excitement of travel, but without any of the boredom that comes from sitting in the backseat.

The pictures also evoke a sense of nostalgia, from the faded and shifted colors to the distorted view through the Diana’s imperfect lens. Looking back at Kappeler’s pictures now, knowing in hindsight what Regan’s policies cost the country, the stressed focus and twisted colors also seem to carry a hint of impending doom, not merely a loss of innocence.

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America 1981. By Simone Kappeler.

America 1981. By Simone Kappeler.

Kim Beil is an art historian who teaches at Stanford University. She is the author of Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography.