On his book Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place
Cover Interview of July 10, 2019
Lastly
Slab City is a field guide to a remote, transitory
place. A folded map in the back pocket shows the layout and inventory of the military
camp’s 1946 facilities. We carried that map each day we walked among the slabs.
It helps locate the sixty-five slabs that have remained after the camp was
decommissioned and its structures were removed. Like the slabs, the map is also
a substrate for coming to terms with this place, for understanding how Slab
City’s residents endure the difficulties of desert life and the frequent
challenges to its public status. To pour concrete on sand is to test permanence
in a mutable place. To live in Slab City is to experiment with the idea of
freedom in a vestige of frontier space. And to write about and to photograph
Slab City’s structures is to narrate an ongoing struggle between autonomy,
necessity and control.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Slab City is a field guide to a remote, transitory place. A folded map in the back pocket shows the layout and inventory of the military camp’s 1946 facilities. We carried that map each day we walked among the slabs. It helps locate the sixty-five slabs that have remained after the camp was decommissioned and its structures were removed. Like the slabs, the map is also a substrate for coming to terms with this place, for understanding how Slab City’s residents endure the difficulties of desert life and the frequent challenges to its public status. To pour concrete on sand is to test permanence in a mutable place. To live in Slab City is to experiment with the idea of freedom in a vestige of frontier space. And to write about and to photograph Slab City’s structures is to narrate an ongoing struggle between autonomy, necessity and control.