A Raised Bonnet on the Lost Highway: Whither Les Cleveland?

Abstract

Six years have passed since Les Cleveland’s death in 2014 and next year will be the centenary of his birth. Recently, there have been two warm personal accounts of Cleveland the man and the respective writers’ personal relationships with him.1 However, amongst the obituaries published shortly after his passing, there was a tribute by Peter Ireland in which he claimed, “the reception of his work in the present day remains stalled”, and he concluded that although his “adventuring has ended . . . his work’s has just begun.”2 I would concur with the first of these claims and agree to some extent with the second. In what follows, I want to address possible reasons for this stalling by returning to the question of Cleveland’s place in photographic history and reexamining the significance of his framing within public exhibitions and related critical publications. I will argue that his position within local photographic history and intellectual culture in general needs to be clarified; and that the nature of his photography needs to analysed in more than purely local terms.