'To Live in Some Sodding Seedy City'

When he was asked in 1979 by Miriam Gross of the Observer if he liked living in the port city of Hull, Philip Larkin replied:

“I like it because it’s so far away from everywhere else. On the way to nowhere, as somebody put it. It’s in the middle of this lonely country, and beyond the lonely country there’s only the sea. I like that.”

Geographically, Atlantic City isn’t nearly so remote, a mere sixty miles from Philadelphia, twice that distance from New York City. My wife and I stayed there one night, in May 2001, on the way back from a wedding in Maryland. Neither of us had visited the city before. Our older son wasn’t yet a year old. We went for an evening walk along the Boardwalk but kept it short because it was windy and cold. We took turns stepping into the lobby of a casino while the other stayed on the sidewalk with the baby. We don’t gamble. I remember lots of bright flashing lights and loud music, a prescription for a headache. Nothing we saw in Atlantic City has moved us to return. In memory, I’m left with the obvious contrasting impressions: seediness and glamour. Neither is appealing yet both are compelling.

   

Atlantic City: The Last Hurrah (Daylight Books, 2020), a collection of fifty-four black and white photographs taken by Timothy Roberts, reminded me of the remarks above and others by Larkin. He would have been appalled by Atlantic City (he never visited the U.S.) while finding it rich in material. It’s a city planned for extroverts but of lasting interest to introverts. For two years, Tim and I worked at the newspaper in Richmond, Ind. Our desks adjoined. I covered cops and courts; Tim, city and county government. In the thirty years since I last saw him, Tim has reinvented himself in true American fashion, returned to his hometown of Philadelphia, and made himself a photographer. His eye is both journalistic and sensitive to beauty and balance. Like the best photographs, Tim’s look at once spontaneous and perfectly composed. In her introduction, Amy Rosenberg, a features writer with the Philadelphia Inquirer who covers the Jersey Shore, writes:

“People are always drawing conclusions. If a beach in February is deserted, does that define a town? If people see shards of Boardwalk floating in the street after Hurricane Sandy, do they write off the place entirely? Rumors are spreading about Atlantic City’s demise. But the center somehow holds.”

It’s true. Looking through Tim’s book, I found myself tempted to draw easy conclusions – political, cultural, economic, aesthetic -- about the place. Tim challenges us to fight the pull of moralism because his subject is less Atlantic City than the people who live there. In his photographs there are few tourists and no slot machines.

One of my favorite photos shows a tall, slender young black man standing in a parking lot, slightly below and to the left of center. His figure is echoed by a series of verticals in the background – a lighthouse and nine power poles variously distanced from the camera. A note tells us his name is Kamal. His posture is perfect, almost military. He wears a baseball cap, a polo shirt and hoodie, jeans torn at the knees and running shoes. There’s a barely visible stud in the lobe of his left ear. In his left hand he holds a smartphone; in his right, he holds an ear bud to his right ear. His eyes are closed, his head is tilted twenty degrees to the right, and he smiles. His appearance is gentle and sweet-natured, and Tim photographs him without a hint of irony.

Another photo, a classic head-on portrait of buildings in the manner of Walker Evans, is shot from several hundred yards away. Tim’s note reads: “Three homes remain beside the Revel Casino (now the Oceans Resorts Casino). Others were leveled in hopes that developers would buy the land for new casinos.” The bottom third of the photo is bare ground, slightly out of focus, and then three narrow, box-like, widely spaced houses. Looming behind them, to the top of the frame and beyond, is the glass-covered monolith of the casino. The dwarfed houses suggest a gap-filled row of teeth. Humans are almost an afterthought. In his page of acknowledgments at the back of the book, Tim writes:

“I look for stories about places in transition or people struggling with changes and chances of life. The people I have included in these pages are not the high rollers, but the people who live and work in Atlantic City and those who come back to visit each year. The people who haven’t given up on the place.”

In a letter he wrote to his girlfriend Monica Jones in 1966, Larkin says: “The only good life is to live in some sodding seedy city & work & keep yr gob shut & be unhappy.”