Clayton Haggarty and Marc Tasman
For the Look Here! Project, Haggarty and Tasman looked at images of people and places, mainly from the UWM Libraries’ Milwaukee Polonia digital collection of photographs by Roman Kwasniewski, taken on Milwaukee's south side in the early 1920s. Haggarty and Tasman are interested in tracing the history of communities, places, and institutions by using digital artifacts to create an analog augmented reality. Using images from the collection – in particular Kwasniewski's “insurance photographs,” which document car and wagon crashes and bodily injury – as well as portraits of daily immigrant life on the south-side a century ago, Haggarty and Tasman seek to present an anachronistic contrast to today's cultural zeitgeist.
To that end, the artists enlarged objects and people in these photographs to life- or larger-than-life-size, mounted these images on wooden structures, then placed and re-photographed them in their original locations nearly a century later; or presented new contexts and locations for the figures.
“Truck Crash,” or “Cars Stop Here” is a monumental piece that can be seen on the loggia at Villa Terrace. Originally photographed by Kwasniewski at the intersections of 11th St., Windlake Ave, and Becher St. on Milwaukee’s south side circa 1920, the image shows a truck that has apparently careened through an irregular intersection, crashing through and dislodging a telephone pole and pushing into a business store front. An ironic and iconic sign on the pole, “Cars Stop Here,” remains attached to the pole, but defiantly resting on the front of the crashed truck.
The artists found other curiosities in researching the “Truck Crash” event, including an interior photograph of the building after the crash, with poster image of a cracked Liberty Bell on the wall. As it turns out, that image was made from tens of thousands of American soldiers—a human Liberty Bell—made by Chicago photographers Mole and Thomas in 1918. This kind of recursive series of images and documentation can be seen at the south end of the loggia, inside the Villa Terrace on the second floor. The re-installed “Truck Crash” can be viewed from that location, looking north through the windows across the loggia. The artists have replaced the wooden utility pole in the original photograph with one of the iconic columns lining the courtyard and loggia. The new crash site is a metaphor for the tenuous status of cultural institutions and the delicate relationships between public support and private patronage that sustain them.
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