Now that he’s mostly retired, Ted Degener has been spending time digging through his archive of film. He’s been taking photographs since the 1960s and only switched to digital eight to 10 years ago, so there’s a lot of material.
By last spring, he’d combed through enough slides and negatives to put together a book, “American Celebration,” consisting mainly of photographs he’d taken at festivals around the country.
I’m ashamed to admit that Degener’s book got by me. Photography is my favorite medium, and I’m especially curious about work with “America” in the title. No other art form is as closely linked to the open road and the country’s expansiveness.
But I’m in luck, and so are you; Degener had more than enough material for a second book. “American Celebration 2: Storefronts and Hand-Made Signs” comes out Friday, and Degener will give a talk about his work at AVA Gallery and Art Center at 5:30 Friday evening.
“When I started doing this second book, I realized I had been shooting signs and storefronts for 40 years,” he said in a phone interview from the road. He was driving back from the printer’s, in Minnesota, with 500 copies of the book in his car.
Signs and commercial tableaux have been photographic subjects from the medium’s earliest days. Think of Eugene Atget’s studies of Paris storefronts and street vendors from the 1880s to the 1920s and Walker Evans’ photographs of American commercial life and lettering from the 1920s to the ’70s.
Degener, who owned and ran Folk, a Hanover shop selling international artisan and handmade goods and clothes for nearly 45 years before closing it in 2018, has been driving around the country since the 1970s. He made his first trip, to see the Watts Towers, a celebrated complex of structures in Los Angeles, after reading “Shelter,” by Lloyd Kahn and Bob Eastman, a book about sustainable building that featured vernacular architecture.
Since then, Degener, a longtime Cornish resident, has crisscrossed the country, photographing what’s commonly called “outsider art,” a term signifying that the artist works outside the system of training and history practiced by what I like to think of as “insider artists.”
He didn’t set out to study photography. He majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and started taking photographs while he was there.
“My girlfriend in college was in art school,” he said. He bought a Leica IIIF, a somewhat antiquated camera even in 1967, and shot black and white film. He graduated to a Nikon and 35mm color slides — Kodachrome was king — until the 1980s, when he started to use color negative film in medium format, larger 6X7 and 6X9 frames (56-by-70 and 56-by-84 millimeters) that are rich with detail.
“I think photography’s perfect for me,” Degener said. “I kind of like that it’s immediate.”
He never embarked on a photography career, but it wasn’t exactly a hobby, either. He would take time off from Folk and drive a planned route.
“I just kind of approached it for the 10 days or two weeks I would be away, I would treat it like a job,” he said, photographing pretty much all day. The outsider art might have been the destination, but he stopped the car for all the signs and other handmade wonders.
“They seem to rise out of a time capsule,” North Carolina-based curator Mark Sloan writes in an introduction to the new book, “except the capsule is the roadside itself, where weather, sun, mildew, exhaust, and time do their slow work.”
I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy of the book yet, but have seen a few of the photographs from the materials Degener sent me. The photos I’ve seen convey a sense of freedom and longing that hint at America’s commercial imperative.
The signs “were built to work now, in one place, for one particular need,” Sloan writes. “Gathered in a book, they read differently, like messages arriving from a world already slipping away.”
A sign for the Bluebird Diner, in Ohio, features a rotund bird and looming over it a massive cheeseburger that looks like it’s made of painted stucco, held aloft on a piece of steel rebar. Someone labored over that sign, probably the same person laboring over the diner’s grill.
I wrote last year that the photography book is itself a kind of endangered species. Degener took this book on himself. His sister is a book designer and she recommended a printer, Smart Set Community Printing, in Minneapolis, which printed both “American Celebration” volumes.
Sometimes I wonder whether attention paid to vernacular art is condescending. Some of it must be, I suppose. But Degener has found a wellspring of American creativity, and he loves it for what it is.
“We underestimate the impact of the art that percolates from the street, the talent and the sincerity that reveals itself in our mostly banal architectural landscape,” Degener wrote in a short appreciation included in the book.
“What we have here,” he concludes, “is a type of public art worthy of celebration.”
Ted Degener talks about his work at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon at 5:30 p.m. Friday, May 8. Admission is free, but donations are always accepted.
Spring art
Mezzanine Gallery, in Woodstock’s Norman Williams Public Library, opens “Fertile Ground,” an exhibition of spring-themed art, with a reception at 2 p.m. Saturday, May 9. The show is up through June.
Hall Art Foundation, in Reading, Vt., opens for the season on Saturday with a slate of shows that, on their face, sound a little off-putting. “A Farewell to the Western World,” a group show of 70 artists in multiple media, focuses on “imagery suggestive of global shifts and an irreverence towards systems of established order.” Also opening is “Made to Be Destroyed,” work by Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay, whose long career comprises work in video, performance, photography and installation art. And Piotr Uklański’s “The Nazis,” from 1998, features images from Hollywood films of actors portraying Nazi SS officers.
The foundation also is holding a film series at Woodstock’s Town Hall Theatre that starts May 20 with “Georgia O’Keefe: The Brightness of Light.” It continues on the third Wednesday of every month through November with films about artists and culture.
Unlike nearly ever other visual art venue in the Upper Valley, the Hall charges admission: $15 for adults; $5 for kids 12 and under; half off for Reading residents. For more info, go to hallartfoundation.org.
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