Richard Estes’s Passages (Shopping Center), 1981, blurs the line between photograph and painting. Here, the Southern California suburb, Lakewood, serves as the subject matter for the present work. Though a departure from Estes’ urban landscapes, the present work depicts a scene that is no less evocative of classic American imagery: the post-war suburb. Lakewood, which Estes visited in the mid-1970s, was one of the first planned, mass-produced communities built in the 1950s, becoming an icon of suburbia in literature and art.
The present work has many trademark characteristics of Estes’ work—an unpopulated street, a dazzlingly reflective storefront window, meticulously constructed geometry of architectural structures, and a velvety depiction of sunlight’s effects on surfaces. The shoe store facades, aligned rooftops, and sidewalk pavement, seemingly damp from recent rain, come together to form an evocative portrayal of a deserted Sunday-morning shopping center, the artist’s favored time to gather the snapshots upon which he based his paintings.
“What I’m trying to paint is not something different, but something more like the place I’ve photographed. Somehow the paint and the intensity of color emphasize the light and do things to build up form that a photograph does not do. In that way the painting is superior to the photograph.”
—Richard Estes
While this specific image has been made into a popular, editioned print, mass-produced like a pair of shoes in the mall’s display, the present work uniquely reveals the painterly details often hidden in reproductions of the artist’s work. By examining the work up close, one can see the loose brushstrokes forming the pavement lines and the shrubbery’s free-hand dashes, all of which make the hyper-realistic scene even more impressive. This plainly painted quality is indeed what set Estes and his fellow Photorealists apart from photographers themselves. In Estes’ work, what appears at first as photographic is a carefully constructed composition, with elements that heighten the feeling of reality beyond what a camera could produce. Indeed, Passages (Shopping Center) highlights the uniqueness of the artist’s practice, setting it apart from the duplicative mediums of photography and printing, all while referencing the very mass production that it calls to distinguish itself from.
