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Florida Strawberries. By Anthony Blasko.
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Photographs by Anthony Blasko
STANLEY/BARKER, London, UK 2022. 120 pp., 11¾x9".
Start with fun facts about strawberries. The fear of strawberries is fragariaphobia. Strawberries are members of the rose family. They come in many colors other than red. They have eight copies of seven chromosomes. They don’t continue to ripen after picking. And Belgium has a museum dedicated to them.
Fun’s over. Let’s talk understated elegance in photobooks.
Those fun facts are harder to find.
Maybe it’s because I’ve seen too many photobooks masquerading as something else, something other. Trying to be clever with unnecessary design. Unnecessariness, period. This book — Florida Strawberries by Anthony Blasko, published by Stanley Barker — is not that book. This book takes its cue from the humble strawberry. It is fresh and ripe and deliciously simple. The only hints of design whimsy appear outside the book, like the ‘seeds’ of the strawberry itself (called achenes, inside which is the actual strawberry seed). The front and back covers feature hand-painted fruits by Shaun Morris. And the book comes wrapped in disposable, takeout-style wax paper packaging that I can’t bear to recycle, it’s too darn cute.
Unobtrusive white borders frame most of the full-color images. When I say color, I don’t mean regular everyday color. Nor Eggleston, Ho, Greenberg, Cousins, Aldridge or even Kodachrome color. Blasko favors the color of a warm squishy hug. Freckled face-plant into a melty cream cake color, soaked in one-too-many strawberry slushies color, sugar-rush sunset fairy floss color. The color Sherwin Williams might call “All The Fun of The Fair.” Even the endpapers look like Pantone 1788C Strawberry.
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The complexity of this book is strewn in the pictures, which Blasko has made at the annual Strawberry Festival in Plant City, Florida since 2013. Except for a six-year hiatus during and after World War II, the event has run since 1930. For eleven days, people from all over gather for attractions, parades, entertainment and of course enjoying strawberries in ways you never thought appealing or possible. It is this intoxicating combination of people, place and time Blasko focuses on.
I grew up attending two local county fairs, the sounds and smells of which persist. I mention this because despite the visceral joy and excitement, what I remember most are the unsmiling faces. Yes, there was screaming and sirens, clapping and balloons popping, the relentless heckling of carnival workers. But there was also a sense of sadness, distraction and longing. Fairs have a way of transforming reality into something else, something other. Something mysterious but also menacing and risky, all the while giving off vibes of simpler, happier, safer times. It is this paradox that photography too is good at, and that Blasko elicits with his camera. The squinting, watching, waiting, chomping, wriggling, head-tilting and draping. Fairgoers devouring corn dogs with ketchup and show rides on repeat but without the overt rapture. Going to see and going to be seen.
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For all the action and bewilderment these photographs imply, they unfold in slow motion. The light hypnotizes. The shadows lull. There is an undertow of disconnection. It is as if Blasko wants to lure us to the gates, fill us up until we’re tired or sick or our ears and feet hurt, and then, only as we’re walking to our cars, look over our shoulders and get a bout of the warm fuzzies from seeing the Ferris wheel still turning. Knowing that the fair is still fair. We go without questions, we leave without answers. We socialize and learn and enjoy. And, if we’re lucky, get reminded that less is more, and to stop and smell the roses. Or in this case strawberries.
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