Photographer checks out US public libraries' function, form

Robert Dawson used an accordion view camera on a tripod to snap a shot of the library in Allensworth in Tulare County. Robert Dawson used an accordion view camera on a tripod to snap a shot of the library in Allensworth in Tulare County. Photo: Robert Dawson Photo: Robert Dawson Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Photographer checks out US public libraries' function, form 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

When Robert Dawson told his son Walker to get ready for a summer road trip, it meant 11,000 miles driving around looking at public libraries.

Libraries had already been an obsession of Dawson for 16 years, and now, after two summers of cross-country tours, "The Public Library: A Photographic Essay" ($35; Princeton Architectural Press) has been finally released - in time for National Library Week, which runs through Saturday.

"Why public libraries? That's a question I often ask myself," Dawson, 63, says as he looks at a framed diptych in the entryway of his home in San Francisco's Noe Valley. It is the library in West Wendover, Nev., a drab building in a drab landscape, except that when Dawson arrived, a hunter safety course had just ended, and the students were lined up outside with their rifles and shotguns. That's the type of image he drove through 48 states in search of, missing only Alabama and Hawaii.

Since he's spent the last 35 years on a celebrated project called "Water in the West," the 20 he spent on libraries could be considered a side hobby.

"It wasn't that much of a leap in my mind to go from the shared commons of the environment to the shared commons of the infrastructure that we have," he says. "The architecture is a part of it, but more important is looking at the function of libraries."

Dawson, a photography instructor at both Stanford and San Jose State, is self-taught, though he did get some drop-in tutoring from Ansel Adams. Dawson would load up a stack of prints and drive down to Carmel in the late 1970s and early '80s.

"He had this amazing policy that as a young photographer, if you wanted to come to his house and show him your work, you came on Friday afternoon at 5 p.m. and had a cocktail with him," says Dawson, who still shoots Adams-style with a cumbersome accordion view camera on a tripod.

It's a lot of work hauling all that gear into 557 libraries and then getting under the hood to shoot one shot at a time. So after 16 years of going it alone, he reminded his 22-year-old son why he'd been named after Walker Evans. They loaded up the 2002 Toyota Camry to test its performance beyond the 250,000-mile mark during the summer of 2011. Then they did it again in the summer of 2012, to hit the libraries they missed the first time around.

A motel room was their one luxury at the end of each hot day, not for the mattress but the bathroom. That's where Dawson changed film for the next day. He'd go in with a bottle of beer, close the door and turn out the lights. Then he'd take the exposed film and put it into a box and reload 4-by-5 inch sheets of film for the next day.

Dawson shot both color and black-and-white, and he let the library tell him which to use. The yellow walls inside the library in San Antonio told him color even before he saw the red glass of a Dale Chihuly sculpture. The heavy stone gloom in Woburn, Mass., told him black-and-white.

He shot a log cabin library in Cable, Wis., and stone castle libraries in Van Wert, Ohio, and Fairhaven, Mass. He shot libraries without windows and libraries that are nothing but windows. He shot a library in a former bank in Glendive, Mont., a library in a former theater in Austin, Texas, a library in a trailer home in Death Valley, and abandoned libraries all over.

Father and son spent four hot days in Texas, driving 10 or 12 hours each day. When they finally reached Midland, the librarian was just about to bounce them when Dawson mentioned that he'd driven all the way from San Francisco.

This got him access to the "petroleum room" dedicated to George H.W. Bush.

"It was particularly interesting going to places like Midland that are really conservative and mostly hate the government," he says. "So what do they think of their local public government-supported library? To the place, they all love their libraries."

After 18 years of shooting, it took another two to put the book together, with essays by Isaac Asimov, E.B. White and Dr. Seuss, among others. Dawson is not finished with libraries. He and his wife, Ellen Manchester, a photo historian, have just received a Guggenheim grant to spend one year shooting library literacy efforts in one place, Stockton.

"We're going from the macro to the micro," he says.

The Public Library: Robert Dawson slideshow. 6 p.m. June 11. San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St. (415) 557-4277. www.sfpl.org.

To watch a short video, go to: www.sfgate.com/news/item/Robert-Dawson-28609.php.