Town of C

Richard Rothman's Town of C is a photographic meditation on what lies beneath the unsettling surface of American culture, as seen through the lens of a small town along the Front Range of Southern Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. Rooted in the tradition of the socially critical photography books that have taken America as their subject  — Walker Evans’ “American Photographs,” Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” and Robert Adams’ “What We Bought,” among them — “Town of C” both encompasses and expands on the American theme, provoking thoughts about the larger environment. It begins with a prologue of alternating titles and images that announce the elemental forces of nature: water, and the source of the river that runs through the town; the region’s tectonics and the mountains that have risen above them to shape and frame the landscape; and light, the source of energy that fuels life itself.   The increasingly dystopian American experience is placed within the larger context of our disturbed pres