Jeremiah Ariaz is a photographer based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His exhibition, The Fourth Estate, documents the struggles of the local print newspaper industry in the artist’s home state of Kansas. Ariaz’s display weaves an engaging metanarrative, using images and words to document the endangered and abandoned places where reporters and photojournalists labor to craft the everyday stories of communities. The Fourth Estate offers an uncanny sense of watching the watchers, and it prompts a conversation about the role of local print journalism in communities and their economies, cultural memories, and democracy.
The highlights of the show at Zeitgeist Gallery are several large photographs printed at nearly one to one scale and mounted directly on the gallery’s walls. Their dimensions make these images immersive, and Ariaz’s subjects take viewers on a time machine trip back to the second half of the twentieth century through vintage print journalism environs complete with the ink stains and darkroom fumes of vinegary stop baths and sulfurous fixer. Marion County Record Office, Marion, KS, (2022) pictures the eponymous newspaper headquarters. Viewing the image is like peering into a block of amber and spying on an unrepentant display of the Kansas office circa the 1980s: the room is covered in a cascade of golden oak wood veneer paneling that’s well-paired with the cabernet-colored vertical blinds closed over the windows. A contemporary flat screen computer monitor is one of the only elements in the room that tells viewers that this is a contemporary photograph. The vintage interior design is nostalgic, quaint—even cozy—but the anachronistic environment speaks to an industry that’s experienced shrinking readership and a decrease in revenue since the advent of television in the 1950s, before the dawn of the public internet in 1993.
The Fourth Estate includes a large suite of smaller framed photographs arranged in a rectangular grid. Within the rows and columns of the identically-sized works, there are empty spaces where pictures are missing. This suite of Newspaper Office Facades pictures the exteriors of the simple, straight, and solid Kansas office buildings that still house working print journalism operations, from The Kansas Chief to Osborne Country Farmer to The Prairie Post. Ariaz took these images of still-bustling paper offices over a handful of months between 2022 and 2023. Six of the newspapers closed during the time it took the photographer to assemble his portfolio of exteriors. The images of the closed offices were removed from the grid installation to hang in a separate suite, which acts like a purgatory for recently deceased local print publications. Rest in power.
In addition to vintage interiors and disappearing industries, The Fourth Estate also revels in displays of outdated and even antique technology. Younger viewers may not remember—or even be able to recognize—these artifacts from a time before digital technology. Printing Press, Valley Falls Vindicator, Valley Falls, KS, (2022) pictures a cast iron printing press from the nineteenth century in the corner of the Vindicator’s former office. The walls are coated in peeling white paint. The press rises from the desert of a faded, checkerboard linoleum floor like a cast iron sphinx. Darkroom, The Western Star, Coldwater, KS, (2022) pictures a photo-enlargement machine tangled in a snarl of dusty film negative rolls. There’s a hand-cranked timer poking out of the mess in the corner of the image, as if it’s timing how long it takes viewers to guess what they are seeing.
The Fourth Estate even includes a fictional newspaper created by Ariaz, featuring contributions by a number of local Kansas print publications. Ariaz’s paper, The Kansas Mirror, offers “dispatches from across the sunflower state.” The individual pages are displayed in the show and viewers can purchase their own copy of the paper at the gallery. In reading the stories Ariaz commissioned for his project, I discovered that many of these papers owe their longevity to dedicated families who have supplied their communities with news and even helped to define national conversations for generations. In a world where the front lines of the battle for local print journalism are being defended by a remnant of mom and pop publications, housed in antique spaces, and distributing an aging medium, I’m betting on the truth.
The Fourth Estate is on view at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville through October 26, 2024.
