A Blazing Suburban Gothic Imagines the American West on the Brink
In the 1970s, Mimi Plumb began photographing adolescent life and the bleached-out landscapes of California. Her suspenseful new book foretells the disasters of the present and the future.
Mimi Plumb,
The first time I moved to California was in late summer 1998, when I was young and romantic enough to refer to the place by its nickname, “the Golden State,” and to believe that this was what people there called it. (They didn’t, it turns out.) Then fall began, ushering in the ban on the use of affirmative action in admissions at all campuses of the University of California; the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and the tule fog, which engulfed the Oakland Hills like a fuzzy grey mold. I left within the year, but not before I experienced my first earthquake and learned that the empty white skies in nineteenth-century photographs of Yosemite were casualties of overexposure reminders of information lost more t