A photograph from a photo essay about the life of Tom Castell, a man who lived in a county home for the mentally ill and abandoned elderly. Szalay completed the project while attending Ohio University in 1978-79.

In one photo, a man sits with one leg crossed over the other, the dark pants leg of his raised knee interrupting the solid white mass of the cape completely wrapping his torso. The barber stands behind him, trimming his hair with electric shears as he impassively submits to this routine maintenance and the camera’s presence. The large metal chair is centered in the picture, so dominating its space that it’s only after a moment that some odd hints begin to appear. Most notably, a pair of crutches lie diagonally, nearby on the floor. The barber is a woman, underneath whose smock can be seen practical, wide-legged trousers suited to more active labor than cutting hair. This is no barber shop; its institutional reality reveals itself in clues like the tall, matching sash windows that cut into empty white walls, so high we don’t see the ceiling, and dark tile floors that in case of frequent falls might be made of rubber.  

Thomas B. Szalay has an eye for this kind of anomaly, which shows up in many of his photos. It’s something he also has a knack for: odd, juxtaposed details that reveal themselves only under contemplation, but which after they are seen cannot be unseen. Instead, they come to dominate what had until then been read as ordinary, candid snapshots. Five middle-aged men stand or sit around the perimeter of an ambiguous room. One drinks coffee, the raised mug and his glasses covering his face. Another reads a magazine: he and the third each smokes a pipe. A fourth averts his face from the camera. Partitions divide the area into doorless stalls, and each man has occupied one of these. Looking closer, two of the partitions support toiled paper holders and another hides what appears to be a porcelain bathtub. In this efficient, unwelcoming but confining facility, one thing that has no place is privacy.

Szalay has been weaving his tapestry of Americana for nearly four decades, sometimes as a journalist and others as a teacher, but always with the point of view of an artist. The journalist reveals himself in a taste for black and white film fast enough to permit grabbing hand-held shots in poor light, which in those days coded the results with a telltale graininess. It also shows up in a passion for following a lead. When the would-be parents who adopted Romanian orphans found out too late how sorely damaged they were, Szalay not only covered the story on this end, but pursued it back to the sources in Romania, where he became determined to interrupt the conveyor belt by which children would age out of orphanages straight into geriatric facilities. Along the way, he painted a portrait of a culture and people that were unknown to Americans.

A decade as a teacher may have something to do with his continuing work as a contributing photographer for the Utah Center for Documentary Arts. There’s also a performative side to the best teaching, and listening to him tell gallery visitors his well-practiced stories about how he came to create this work, his claim to love teaching and straightforward conjecture that he might have done without journalism, and spent his life in the classroom, makes some sense. 

A custodian mopping at the Lincoln Memorial at sunrise, taken in 2012.

But educations’s gain would have meant a loss to the fabric of human self-awareness. The truth is, in those days when all America waited all week to really see the news in weekly magazines like Life and Time, the photojournalists were the nation’s eyes, and often as not their ears. Each of Szalay’s projects and individual photos contributed to a lasting, overall mental image of the real world that everyone shared, even if the names of those who created it weren’t always. In one of this color pictures, an anonymous man in heavy work clothes mops an expansive marble floor in front of a distant image that is too familiar to mistake: Abraham Lincoln in his eponymous monument. One of the satisfying things about Washington, D.C., is the way it represents government of, by, and for the people by never closing. The idiots who recently have repeatedly shown their pique by shutting down that government have presented a challenge to its caretakers, who have had to close off places that were built without doors or fences. All that is somehow contained in Tom Szalay’s image of the man who gets up early every morning, dresses for the cold, and goes out to scrub away the signs of yesterday’s wear and tear so today’s pilgrims can view the temple with the same respect and awe as was felt by those who built it. 

In addition to his multi-volume photographic portrait, Szalay tells stories about his life and times, such as those about his brother, whose painted image he burned and whose vest he still has. These accounts need more taming if they are ever to satisfy documentarians, but photographs have a way of putting the viewer there, in the place of the camera. That might be enough. That might even be better. 

Szalay’s photograph of his brother’s portrait burning is part of the exhibit. Photo be Geoff Wichert.

The Unseen Struggle: Invisible to Visible, Gallery at Library Square, Salt Lake City, through Sep. 22

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.