Sergio Purtell first went to America – to Hamilton, Ohio – as an exchange student from his native Chile in 1972. He returned again, at the end of the following year, this time as an exile, after the CIA-backed coup against President Allende. He had been studying architecture, but was moved to try to understand instead the structural paradoxes of his adopted home; photography seemed to offer that freedom. “I wanted,” he says, “to unravel its mysteries as an outsider who had witnessed the capriciousness of power and the tenacity of the displaced.”
A new book of Purtell’s photographs, Moral Minority, mostly from the 1980s, charts the ways in which he went about that quest. He mostly looked to the margins of his adopted home. Robert Frank’s magisterial 1959 odyssey The Americans was one template, but Purtell was interested in something less in earnest, more accidental. He found that place, he has said, at small-scale events that brought families out of their houses, to “gather or perform or compete in some way”, so: “parades, agricultural fairs, sports events, flower and reptile shows”. Suburban America at play.
The quiet comedy of this image – taken at the Eastern States Exposition, “The Big E”, in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1981 – is typical of his method. The girl trying on her monkey for size exhibits a kind of consumer seriousness at odds with the laughing ape; the picture seems to offer a sly critique on the evolution of shopping culture in Reaganite America, but is not judgmental. Purtell’s camera is simply amused by the restless human zoo of buying stuff, America’s gift to the world. “My aim,” the photographer says in the introduction to his book, “was to reveal a certain order, to see the world with intention. I hoped to evoke a view of America at once familiar and estranged.”
