No Plan B: Photographs from 1993-2016
by David J. Carol
published by Peanut Press, 2016

Review by Stephen Clarke

In the last line of his introduction to Robert Frank’s photobook The Americans, Jack Kerouac focuses on the picture of a ‘lonely elevator girl’.  Caught by the photographer as the elevator doors momentarily stand open, the elevator girl gazes forlornly out: she is moving in one direction as Frank travels in another. Frank’s book of black and white photographs, chronicled his travels across 1950s America. Kerouac’s On the Road, an exhaustive flow of stream of  consciousness prose that came to encapsulate the American road trip, had been published two years earlier in 1957. Swiss by birth, Frank’s pictures reveal his understanding of his adopted country and have served as a landmark for the work of later photographic travellers. David Carol’s publication No Plan B (2016) follows Frank’s lead, continuing the pursuit of what it means to be an American.

David Carol was born in New York in 1958. He attended the city’s School of Visual Arts, and the New School for Social Research. At the latter, he was taught by the Austrian-born Lisette Model, another European émigré like Frank.  Observation of the peculiarities in the world around him may have been nurtured by contact with Model. Both Frank and Model photographed an America that was alien to them; consequently, they introduced Americans to the strangeness of their own country. Composed of fifty states, the USA is diverse and spread wide; most of its population will know only a small part of the whole. In the preface to No Plan B, Carol relates that as a child he had not travelled far. At the age of 20 he was inspired, by the example of Jack Kerouac, to undertake a road trip. The trip fuelled his ambition to travel and to become a photographer. Although a New Yorker, his images are not confined to this city. For Carol, photographs and exploration are bound together as he visits places within his nation’s borders and beyond.

Carol’s pictures are not programmatic: ruled by disciplined whimsy, his pictures are noticeably humorous. It is the playfulness in Carol’s work that attracted the attention of Craig Atkinson at Café Royal Books (CRB), a UK-based publisher of photozines. In 2013, Atkinson had published work by the New York photographer Joni Sternbach that Carol had seen and admired. By October of 2013, Carol had produced his first book with CRB, Where’s the Monkey? The photobook’s cover shows a number of out houses strewn across a New Mexico desert landscape: an unwitting nod to Britain’s Dr Who perhaps, the American photographer took his British audience on a tour through his observations. Two further titles by the independent publisher were released in 2014: Here’s the Deal and All My Pictures Look the Same! These became a part of Carol’s growing archive of pictures that record everyday occurrence. Atkinson recognizes that in Carol there is a sensibility akin to British photographers. His small, witty statements come together as coherent analysis in the same manner as projects by Homer Sykes and Patrick Ward, two other names who have made books with Atkinson at Café Royal.

No Plan B has been published by Peanut Press, Carol’s own imprint co-founded with Ashly Stohl in 2015. It’s augural publication, Charth Vader, is Stohl’s gently humorous picturing of her youngest son Charlie. Since the publishing of Stohl’s book, the partners of Peanut Press have worked with Rammy Narula (Platform 10, 2015) and Richard Bram (New York, 2016). Carol’s No Plan B is its latest publication, a compilation of 32 black and white photographs, printed in an edition of 1000. Opening with a brief text by Carol, and closing with an equally concise afterword by Jason Eskenazi, the book is an eclectic collection of images made over twenty-five years. Its title refers to Carol’s whole-hearted commitment to the medium: there was no turning back once he had made the decision to become a photographer.

At the start of his visual journey, the picture Turnaround (2012) challenges the viewer to go no further; the road sign of Long Island, New York demands, in capital letters, that both the photographer and his audience go back. Carol’s attitude can be truculent, something we expect of a confident New Yorker, and so his travels were not going to be that easily curtailed. Leaving his native shores, Carol washes up on a beach in Turkey where he is confronted by a slow moving turtle; on the sands of Acapulco three dogs lazily stray into his view. The Movie Theater Lady taken in Moscow in 1993, shares a strong visual correspondence with the man in the New York Newsstand taken over twenty years later. The poetry of Bubble in Paris, France and the mystery of Boat in Mystic, Connecticut reveal a more sensitive view. These are photographs made to please himself, as he notes his surroundings; they are not made to please others. A closing picture titled Who Cares reinforces this attitude. Written on the back of what appears to be inflatable headgear atop the shoulders of a man crossing a street in New York, the remark is both a defence against critics and acknowledgement that these images may only matter to those who do care.

As the Director of Photography at a large organization dealing with outdoor signage, Carol was aware of the constraints of commercial photography. In contrast, Carol’s twenty-five year road trip has allowed more freedom. Like many others, he has followed the travelogue laid out by Frank and Kerouac, but on this road found his own American identity. Conscious of the vastness of the United States, Americans are encouraged to take an individualist journey. On his odyssey, this traveller experienced the world as quick glances and chance meetings. The hand-held camera is ideally suited to record these moments. The subject passes out of the frame at speed before the photographer can determine the significance of what has been seen. In 2013, the glimpse of a girl on the subway in New York City becomes the focus of Carol’s lens. Caught between stations, the photographer and Subway Girl have a predestined rendezvous.

No Plan B: Photographs from 1993-2016 by David J. Carol.
Hard cover, 32 black & white photographs.
Published by Peanut Press.

No Plan B is available to purchase directly from the website www.peanutpressbooks.com

For more information on David J. Carol visit his website www.davidcarol.com

Stephen Clarke is an artist, writer and lecturer based in the North West.
His photobook St Helens is published by Café Royal Books.