GLOBAL LIBRARY

There are approximately 17,000 public libraries in the country today, and Robert Dawson set out in 1994 to document a portion of them. He spent the next eighteen years traversing the country from California to Maine and from Alaska to Florida photographing America’s public libraries. With specific itineraries based on demographics, political history, geography, cultural diversity, local literary heroes, and architectural interest, Dawson would get on the road, shoot, edit and evaluate, and see where the photographs were leading him. What were these institutions—some modest and rural, some grand and urban—telling him about the library’s relationship to its community, to the history of a place, and to our national identity?
With a bow to Lee Friedlander and Timothy O’Sullivan, this album offers Dawson’s photographs as a partial survey—a slice of the vernacular landscape of contemporary America through the lens of libraries and the communities they serve. Greatly influenced by the landscape work of Ansel Adams and the work of the Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Dawson sought to go beyond a predictable architectural study to provide a greater social, political, and cultural context to his photographs. The project grew out of his long-term commitment to photographing “what we share”: water, landscape, parks, infrastructure, the built environment—the commons. What we share, what we need to take responsibility for, and what binds us together as a culture. As Bill Moyers states “Dawson shows us . . . what is at stake—when the library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.”
Public Library is in the permanent collections of the Ute & Bill Bowes Art & Architecture Library at Stanford University and the Huntington Library.