Anyone who lives in Silicon Valley for a long time sees them with bird-like regularity: delegations from distant Europe.
Groups of ministers, state secretaries, various representatives of the economy, who, somewhat disoriented, visit the unimposing pilgrimage sites along US 101: Stanford University, a few company headquarters, a start-up incubator, then it's back to the consulate in San Francisco.
What exactly they are looking for remains a mystery.
Where to look for it is always pretty predictable.
If you ask the entourage, you get something like hearing that you want to see what you could learn from the Valley.
Of course, you only see a tiny, carefully curated section of this valley.
And, strictly speaking, they only want to see this tiny section of the Valley.
In their impressive photo book “Seeing Silicon Valley”, the photographer Mary Beth Meehan and the communication scientist Fred Turner confront this selective image of the promising, success-spoiled region with the more complex reality.
The scars of the ascent
Meehan specializes in portrait photography and settles in the communities, whose stories are then sensitively captured by her camera. Turner, who as a historian has traced the rise of the region in several books, invited Meehan to Northern California to capture the other Silicon Valley. The book they are now introducing searches for the scars that the seemingly unstoppable ascent has left on the landscape and its people. The book was first published in French in 2018 as “Visages de la Silicon Valley”, and the main focus is actually on individual faces and fates in this region. The scenic beauty of the area or cliché images of quirky Valley nerds are in vain in this physiognomy of Silicon Valley. The book, so the subtitle,wants to trace nothing less than “life in an America that is falling apart”.
This is probably why the book was first published in Europe and is only now coming out in the USA, because the fact that Silicon Valley has its downsides is nothing new.
But Meehan and Turner also confront us with the question of why we are so willingly satisfied with excerpts.
Your question is not what the outside world is mistakenly seeing in Silicon Valley, but what it absolutely wants to see in it.
The few company headquarters and the few villas that appear in them seem all the more insubstantial because they are surrounded by the much more dynamic faces and stories of the forgotten people of Silicon Valley.
How unusual these images are anyway, that probably shows how willing we were all to be fobbed off with the established iconography of this region.
Insignia of homelessness
These pictures are less about exposure than about delimitation. Meehan's Silicon Valley confronts the images that we associate with technology companies - the topping-out ceremonies for chic company headquarters, the luxurious villas, the expensive Teslas - with motifs that are diametrically opposed to them. Meehan's pictures are not dedicated to poverty per se, but show hardship, worries and a lack of prospects that not only run parallel to the prophetic promises of the companies, but also make them possible in the first place.
For example, Meehan photographs Iraq veteran Cristobal in his little hut in a garden in Mountain View - and not in front of the Facebook headquarters, in front of which he regulates traffic every day. Elizabeth, who works for one of the big tech companies but is homeless at the same time, photographs Meehan in nature against the wide California sky. Motorhomes and tents, insignia of homelessness, which the mega-rich cities of Silicon Valley have mercilessly declared war on for years, are discreetly in the background. The focus is on these people and their lives, not the obscene wealth they unmask.