Stacy Iannaccone is a photographer in Phoenix, and for her most recent project, she decided to document some of the city’s abandoned and derelict buildings.
She calls the show “Vacant Visions,” and it’s a series of images that show what Iannaccone calls the city’s “silent decay.” In one piece, called “Empty Tables,” we see the crumbling remains of an old restaurant. Another, “Last Time Card,” shows the rusted-out door to the employee entrance of what used to be a sugar beet factory in Glendale.
In all of these images, the color scheme is a kind of haunting, luminous black and white. And the photographs themselves also have an almost curdled quality to them, which is the intentional result of the photographic process Iannaccone uses to print them.
Iannaccone joined The Show to talk about her inspirations for Vacant Visions, and what she hopes the work makes viewers think about.
Full conversation
STACEY IANNACCONE: My husband and I have a darkroom on Grand Avenue, and Grand Avenue — especially the section that we’re in, it’s sort of right before you get to the highway section — it’s full of these buildings. And I see them every day. I’m down at the lab, and we take photo walks, and we look at them, and just day after day you see them and you see no movement whatsoever in any of the buildings.
They’re just getting more graffiti. They’re just falling apart more. Some of them look like they’re about to literally fall over. And it just made me think: They’re interesting to look at, but at the same time, overall, the neighborhood always kind of looks like it’s in the middle of blight and doesn’t look great.
SAM DINGMAN: I love the way that you just describe that because it’s, in a way, you’re describing a stillness to these buildings in the sense that there’s no occupation of them — at least no maybe legal occupation of them.
But there’s also this dynamism to them in the sense that they’re being reclaimed by these other things, whether it’s graffiti or unhoused folks, whatever it is. There’s something to me about the photographs — and maybe it’s the color scheme of them — but there’s a little bit of a melancholy.
IANNACCONE: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a sadness there. It’s a sadness of, OK, you can tell there was a lot of thriving businesses on this street at one point, especially down on Grand. Like, that’s sad. What happened, and where did those people go? And it just, the project that I’m doing with the photography — the Mordançage, the process that I’m using — really matches up well with that feeling that you get.
DINGMAN: Tell folks what the Mordançage is, so that they can kind of appreciate how that fits in.
IANNACCONE: Yeah. So basically in the dark, when you make a silver gelatin print — so if you go to a museum or anything like that, that’s what you’re looking at when you’re looking at photography traditionally, especially black and white. And in essence, you’re destroying the silver gelatin print with the Mordançage. It’s actually a really fun chemical process that actually will destroy the print.
And what it does is it takes the darkest parts of the print, the blackest parts, it’ll actually lift them off of the paper. It loosens up the gelatin that’s there, and it actually creates something called veils on there. And in some ways it’s uncontrollable. Other ways you can control a little bit.
For this project, my goal was really just straight up destroy. So the whole print went into this chemical bath, and I really just wanted to look as rough as possible.
DINGMAN: What felt appropriate to you about it for this particular set of images?
IANNACCONE: It honestly, when I was looking at the buildings and thinking, “Man, I should do a project with this.” And then I’ve been experimenting with Mordançage now the last, I’m going to say three, three and a half years, and I just love it. I just started thinking about, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’m destroying the prints. I’m destroying them like the buildings are destroyed.” I’m like, “This is great!”
DINGMAN: Right, right, right, right. Yeah. There’s this element where you are kind of perpetrating upon your own work the same damage that this city is perpetrating upon its own buildings.
IANNACCONE: Exactly.
DINGMAN: But there’s also something very interesting to me about the lack of control that you have over the process, because you can apply these chemicals to your prints. And then they do their chemical thing, and you don’t really have any control over what the outcome of that is.
IANNACCONE: I like that. And I also don’t like things being perfect. The world is not a perfect place. I see a print that, it looks like it just came off a digital camera or a phone, and it just leaves me personally kind of bored.
DINGMAN: It makes me think you’re treating these buildings, which are arguably dying, and you can’t maybe, as an art photographer, you can’t necessarily save the buildings. But you can make these images that are living in some way.
IANNACCONE: Yeah. Exactly. And I want people to look at them and really start conversations with each other. I’d love them to be reused. You see a lot of redevelopment in Phoenix with new. And you see a lot of these buildings, and then you’ll see a brand new, shiny, boring tower go up beside it.
And then you have this building that’s obviously full of character. It had a lot of love at one point. I’ve been here for eight and half years. I came from the East Coast, and I’m used to a lot of history in the building, so I’m used to a lot of time that makes things beautiful. And people, you have an old building and they embrace that.
You go into, like — I had lived in Brooklyn for a while, and there was this building that was a CVS, and it used to be like some bank from like the 1800s that was super beautiful inside. I’m like, “What is this?” Even as a basic business being in there. And Phoenix just doesn’t seem to do a whole lot of that.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I mean, you’ve really unlocked a very interesting level of all this, I think. I moved here from the East Coast, also from Brooklyn. And there is this thing that happens in a lot of East Coast cities — it’s not just New York — where, like, there is literally a Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn. Where they have the salad greens, it used to be the vault where they kept all the money in this old bank.
And you could argue that it’s sort of sad that this beautiful antique building got turned into a chain grocery store. But you could also argue that there’s something very powerful about being forced to experienced modernity in this artifact of the past. The erasure is not complete.
IANNACCONE: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, what’s worse, having the CVS or the Trader Joe’s in the bank or having it totally torn down and having a really ugly square? I’d take the CVS every day.
DINGMAN: Well, and it’s particularly interesting in a city like Phoenix, where the original building hasn’t even been there that long.
IANNACCONE: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Stuff’s not even old.
DINGMAN: The cornerstone maybe says what, like 1954 or something?
IANNACCONE: Yeah, yeah. That’s old here.
DINGMAN: As we’re talking about this, I’m realizing I think one of the unfortunate things about living in New York is that everybody there feels like they’re an expert on New York, and they want to tell you about, if you’re in the Trader Joe’s that’s in an old bank in New York, the person shopping next to you probably wants to tap you on the shoulder and be like, “You know, we’re in an old bank.”
IANNACCONE: Yep. Absolutely.
DINGMAN: But here there’s a lot of people who don’t even necessarily know a lot of the history of this place, because relatively speaking there is so much less of it. And because it seems like, based on your project, there is less of an attempt to preserve what history there is.
IANNACCONE: Yeah. I tried to do research on everywhere I shot, and it was hard. I had to just go in the city and look at property records, and then that wouldn’t really even give me much. Just like, “Oh, here’s the owner.”
And there was a surprising amount of non-Phoenix residents that owned a lot of these buildings. But that’s really all the further I could get. I was like, “What’s the history?” And the only way you really know is if you talk to somebody that’s been here for a very long time, and there’s unfortunately not a ton of people. It’s a very transplant city.
DINGMAN: And you’re creating a record.
IANNACCONE: Yeah, exactly.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Stacy Iannaccone's name.
