{"id":18076,"date":"2023-06-08T13:35:12","date_gmt":"2023-06-08T13:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18076"},"modified":"2023-06-08T13:35:15","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T13:35:15","slug":"landscapes-of-despair-book-covers-and-the-visual-culture-of-the-opioid-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=18076","title":{"rendered":"Landscapes of Despair: Book Covers and the Visual Culture of the Opioid Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The landscape positions us at eye-level with a gray sky over a horizon of rolling mountains. We are looking both out and below from an omniscient nonplace. The eye cannot help but dance between these topographic qualities of the mountains and the words on the cover of Beth Macy\u2019s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America<\/em> (2018).1<\/a><\/sup> From the title, the eye passes over the far-off mountains, punctuated in the center by an industrial chimney. These signs of industry cause the mist coming out of the valley to appear more menacing than would a naturally occurring effect of mountain geography. Closer to us, directly following the author\u2019s byline, powerlines stretch out to the right like a signature flourish. The bold, harsh title and subtitle over industrially altered mountains throws the smattering of heterogeneous houses and the lone car at the bottom of the image into relief as pitifully small.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lauren Harms, jacket design for Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America<\/em>, 2018 (image provided by Little, Brown and Company; published under fair use; photograph by Josh Meltzer)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Captions, as Roland Barthes reminds us, anchor a photograph\u2019s meaning.2<\/a><\/sup> Seeing a human-altered landscape completely empty of bodies, framed by the word \u201cSICK\u201d\u2014not to mention the reference to America\u2019s \u201ctroubled soul\u201d in its blurb, written by none other than Tom Hanks\u2014gives a sense of ruin that will be familiar to readers who have been confronted with news about environmental ruin for decades. This connection suggests that extractive, unregulated capitalism and industry has stretched to the country\u2019s soul, and that all of this is related to an addicted America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dopesick<\/em>\u2019s cover is part of what I am calling here the visual culture of the opioid epidemic in America. This project is rooted in the observation that a specific type of landscape photograph, a rural setting devoid of human figures, has been repeatedly used on the cover of nonfiction publications about the opioid epidemic since 2015. In New York City, where I live, I saw versions of this image paired with threatening titles about opioids staring out at me from bookstore windows and propped up on tables in airports and train stations. Previous art history scholarship on the visual culture of journalism has fittingly focused largely on magazines, which feature images on nearly every page.3<\/a><\/sup> Magazines tend to be geared toward a wide audience and are ephemeral, \u201ctypically perused for a week or a month and tossed out when the next issue arrives,\u201d in the words of Emily Hage.4<\/a><\/sup> Books are designed to be more permanent and can potentially become a feature of household decor, their spines seen on home bookshelves for years following their purchase. This is not to say that buying a book is an aesthetic decision, but that book design does the rhetorical work of visual culture by inflecting the book\u2019s narrative and metanarrative. My aim here is to evaluate how book design has responded to and perpetuated our understanding of the opioid crisis as a problem of white, rural America in decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photographs on these covers borrow stylistically from the \u201cNew Topographics\u201d photographers Robert Adams (b. 1937) and Steven Shore (b. 1947), and their predecessors, namely Walker Evans (1903\u20131975), in the service of telling a particular story about the rising rates of opioid overdose in many rural parts of the country by using the exhausted American landscape as a metaphor. This is a marketing formula that began with Sam Quinones\u2019s Dreamland: The True Tale of America\u2019s Opiate Epidemic<\/em> (Bloomsbury, 2015) and J. D. Vance\u2019s Hillbilly Elegy<\/em> (Harper, 2016), the latter focusing heavily on the author\u2019s opioid-addicted mother. Both of these books were used as market comps for future books on the subject, so that a formula calcified for how to sell this subject to readers.5<\/a><\/sup> We see views of landscapes and small towns in Chris McGreal\u2019s American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts<\/em> (Public Affairs, 2018), John McMillian\u2019s American Epidemic: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Opioid Crisis<\/em> (New Press, 2019), Eric Eyre\u2019s Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic<\/em> (Scribner, 2021), and at least five other nonfiction books published since 2016.6<\/a><\/sup> The images are mostly by photojournalists in the authors\u2019 networks or sourced from image banks by book designers. My interest is not so much in the design and marketing processes of publishers as in why these images are an intelligible and enduring metaphor for the epidemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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