BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : Small Towns, Big Pictures

There is one American story and it is always about a small town.

Any story, any small town--the story gets told about people fleeing small-town nosiness and guilt or about people trying to return home to small-town innocence.

It gets told in fiction, photographs and movies. The characters can be rich like the people in “The Great Gatsby’s” East Egg, or poor like the Depression sharecroppers photographed by Walker Evans. If they’re unhappy, like Hemingway’s people in Paris, we call the stories realistic. If they’re happy, as in a small-town Christmas movie like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” we find the stories life-affirming.

Photography books tell these stories especially well.

“When a small town gets so small that a photographer can round up all of its residents and get them into one close-up picture, you have a town small enough to be the punch line of a joke,” says Garrison Keillor in his introduction to Dennis Kitchen’s photographs of the residents of the smallest town in each state in America. “In a town this small, you have to learn to laugh at yourself: There is nobody else to do it for you. The bride has to sing at her own wedding and the groom has to hold the shotgun himself.”

The title of the book is “Big Falls, Blue Eye, Bonanza & Beyond.” Like small towns, the pictures are pretty much the same.

In Blue Eye, Ark., there is much fat distributed among the population of 34, and a lot of squinting into the winter sun. The picture is sepia for warmth and memory, wide for commemorative panorama, and wide-angle for a touch of weirdness, all the straight lines curving a little.

Or Florida, Mo.: “I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida,” Mark Twain wrote. Today the population is two, an old couple standing by the monument marking Twain’s birthplace. The wide-angle lens gives the tree-line an impending feeling. The old couple wants to leave, much as Twain did, but they can’t sell their trailer.

On and on, the duel between quiet desperation and quiet satisfaction.

“Screaming Life” by Charles Peterson depicts the Seattle rock scene as a small town that takes as much pride in its grunge bands as some places do in their football teams. As the only punk rocker at Bothell High School in Washington, Peterson understands both kinds of towns: He photographed the football team while they screamed that he was a punk rock creep and warned: “We’re gonna kill you!”

More at home in Seattle, he photographed the screaming, snarling music scene. A motor-drive sequence captures Nirvana’s late Kurt Cobain leaping backward into the drum set. Another memorable moment is the nipple-ringed stage diver in camouflage pants and tattoos, caught in mid-flight over the crowd at a Mudhoney concert. They all seem to know each other.

Journalist Michael Azerrad’s introduction has a classic small-town story ending: “What had begun as an unspoiled little musical community . . . ended up being a ubiquitous and pervasive arm of the international culture industry.” You just can’t go home again.

Adrienne Salinger makes you wonder why you’d want to. She isolated teen-agers in a book called “In My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms.” Her lighting, either flash or flood, creates an unsettling scattering of shadows on the walls. The teen-agers look not so much trapped as spread out on a dissecting board, along with their sound systems, posters, telephones, prom pictures, skateboards and stuffed animals.

The introduction is by a grandiose Tobias Wolff: “Not since ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ have I come across such a rich collaboration of image and story.”

Come on, now. This book is a good example of the continuing invention of the “teen-ager,” one of post-war America’s great fabrications. The teen-ager, by definition, is miserable and misunderstood. There are unhappy quotes next to the pictures: “They brought me to the hospital and put me in this quilted room . . . house caught on fire two years ago . . . .”

Give people a chance, and they’ll look proud and dignified in a photograph. The trick is not to give them the chance and no self-respecting photographer has, at least for the last half century or so. But in 1898, Mattie Gunterman, her husband and young son left Seattle for the mining and timbering country of southeastern British Columbia. She worked as a camp cook and she made pictures with a bellows Kodak and 120 film.

Here are men with magnificent mustaches and carefully tilted hats. Here’s Mattie’s mother, whose sedate self-assurance turns her wheelchair into a divan worthy of Gertrude Stein. And here’s Mattie herself, with hat, lace-throat blouse, shotgun and the grouse she just shot. Miners, lumberjacks, bathers, much horsing around and costume partying. What great people! Where did people like that go? The book is called “Flapjacks and Photographs,” with text by Henri Robideau.

Then you look at the truck drivers of Marc F. Wise’s “Truck Stop.”

These guys have inherited the frontier legend, but they look tired, dirty, fat and whipped. The younger ones can still gin up big attitude with tattoos, belt buckles and hard stares. Maybe the older ones could too, but they don’t bother--the fact is that if you hold a camera on anybody long enough their pose will disintegrate into suspicion or bewilderment.

What these pictures are really about is loneliness and color, particularly the color red. Wise gets it into his photographs the way Whistler got butterflies into his paintings: red phone booths, spaghetti sauce, work shirts, Confederate flags and restaurant banquettes in those serial small towns made up of truck-stops hundreds of miles apart.

After half a century of trying, photographers are still working out the aesthetic problems of color film--how to keep the color from getting in the way of the subject.

Constantine Manos’ solution is to make color the subject. Ostensibly, the subjects are bikers, beach-goers, Marine bands, boardwalks, brassieres, banners, a brush fire . . . but what he’s interested in is the super-real quality of Kodak 64 film, a decades-old slide-film miracle that verges on a sacrament of color. He combines it with Ilfochrome paper to produce colors that are saturated until the blues are ultimately blue, the whites seem to ablaze whiter than the paper they’re printed on and the shadows seem to have actual weight. This color is realer than real, perfect for a country that, as the poet said, is eternally dedicated to going too far enough. The pictures are psychedelia, not documents; confectionary revelations. The name of the book is “American Color.”

The biggest problem with color photography is black and white photography. There used to be a lot of it. It was very good, a craft whose subtleties still resonate in the viewer’s eye. It was better than color photography, by and large.

In “Reframing America,” immigrants (a small town in themselves) make black and white pictures of what they see with their new eyes: a newsstand with papers in a score of languages, Broad and Wall streets in the empty street-washed sunlight, the beautiful small-town widow of a husband killed at Guadalcanal, the wonderful hamlet of New York’s East Side, John Gutmann’s “The Open Window,” with that vast American vitality we once believed in. Part of a three-volume series on newcomers to America (the other titles are “A Nation of Strangers,” published by San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts, and “Tracing Cultures,” published by San Francisco’s Friends of Photography), “Reframing America” also features the quirky angularities of Lisette Model and the dead-on recognitions of Robert Frank.

Photography makes the small large and the large small. Either way, it’s the American story and the town we all live in.

****

FLAPJACKS AND PHOTOGRAPHS: The Life Story of the Famous Camp Cook and Photographer Mattie Gunterman, By Henri Robideau (Polestar: $19.95; 204 pp.)

IN MY ROOM: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms, By Adrienne Salinger (Chronicle Books: $16.95; unpaged)

TRUCK STOP, Photographs by Marc F. Wise, essay by Bryan Di Salvatore (University Press of Mississippi: $50 hardcover; $29.95 paperback; 96 pp.

SCREAMING LIFE: A Chronicle of the Seattle Music Scene, Photography by Charles Peterson, essay by Michael Azerrad (HarperCollinsWest: $35; unpaged)

BIG FALLS, BLUE EYE, BONANZA & BEYOND: Our Smallest Towns, By Dennis Kitchen; introduction by Garrison Keillor (Chronicle Books: $16.95; 111 pp.)

AMERICAN COLOR, By Constantine Manos (Norton: $29.95; 96 pp.)

REFRAMING AMERICA, Essays by Andrei Codrescu and Terence Pitts (The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona: $19.95; 96 pp.)