Spina Americana

Gost Books, 2024

208 pages | $60.00

In the end, the only thing holding the line between honor and the windblown dusk of a collapsed empire, is us. — Richard Sharum 

Both horrified and inspired by the events of January 6, 2021, Sharun set out to explore and document a 100 mile-wide column of America running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, a part of the country often referred to derisively as fly-over country and a term that Sharum rightly deplores for its callousness.

While Sharum was appalled at what MAGA adherents were doing at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, he was just as curious to understand what makes this part of America tick. “I knew that in order to find out what America is, I needed to travel its central corridor to see it for myself.”

And so he does in this magnificent book, Spina Americana, The Spine of America.

For two years, and more than 25,000 miles, he crisscrosses this corridor photographing farmers, factory workers, slaughterhouse workers, strippers, restaurant workers, nudists, and just people. Following in a rich history of twentieth century American documentary photography including work by Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, Michael Disfarmer, Eugene Richards, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, and Mary Ellen Mark, Sharum has set out to add to this archive exploring the meaning of America. 

Sharum’s point of reference is the failure of the American experiment resulting in the unspeakable horrors of the Civil War. As much as anyone can do with ink or toner on a sheet of paper, Sharum is mercenary in his goal to bridge gaps and heal wounds through not only photography but by the very radical act of photographing. The great photographers listed above, Sharum included, are not great because of the arrangement of grain and pixels on paper but rather because of the relationships they establish with their subjects and it is these relationships that we are so fortunate to experience through these images. 

Sharum is dubious that photography can solve problems, but he is sure that “When people are willing and able to speak to one another without platitudes and without preconceived barriers, they find that we are more alike than we are different.”

The book is divided into eight chapters beginning with “Home”, ending with “Work” and in between, “The Americans”, “Blue River Nudist Colony” and others. It is a reach for any photographer to label anything “The Americans” without comparing it to The Americans by Robert Frank. In Sharum’s case the 17 images in his “The Americans” chapter are not the strongest in the book, but taken as a whole, the entire book could be called The Americans—and stand up well—if the name was not already taken.

Among the strongest chapter of the book is the final, “Work”. Probably because Sharum is as interested in relating to people as he is to photographing them, and “Work” is comprised of ten plates of full-body frontal portraits of workers in gritty, dangerous, dirty places—a “gutter” and “skinner” at a slaughterhouse, a machine shop, a rail road yard, a coal yard, a foundry, and others. I only regret that Sharum doesn’t include a few words from his conversations with his subjects. 

Other sections of the book are equally compelling. While “Work” is all men, the “Bombshells, Kongo Klub, and Maximus” chapter is all women, mostly in various states of undress at three different strip clubs up and down the spine of America. Sharum’s black and white images are at his strongest here with the chiarascura lighting at play on the faces and bodies of his subjects, either backstage or performing. The photographs of these working women bring out their humanity, vulnerability, and agency more strongly than many of his other subjects—who often appear as victims of the great injustices bestowed upon working people across America.

Among the strongest photo in the book is an image of six strong, large, dark male bodies just out of a homemade sweat lodge at the James River Correctional Facility in North Dakota. What have they done wrong to end up in this place other than to attempt the impossible, to maintain their dignity while trying to survive in a system stacked against them at birth. 

To heal America is to heal its spine. Kudos to Richard Sharum for telling us the story.

Review by Glenn Ruga

Glenn Ruga is a photographer, graphic designer, and curator. He founded the Social Documentary Network (SDN) in 2008 and in 2015 launched ZEKE: The Magazine of Global Documentary. As a photographer, he has created traveling and online documentary exhibits on the struggle for a multicultural future in Bosnia, the war and aftermath in Kosovo, and an immigrant community in Holyoke, Mass.