Growing up, I felt a strong sense of community whenever I went to the local movie theaters in Clearwater, Florida. Going to the movies shaped my weekends back then. The theater was also a place where one could escape for a while and forget about the angst of childhood. I remember reading S.E. Hinton's popular coming-of-age novel The Outsiders soon after I turned 11. The first line really resonated with me: "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."
I have spent the past 40-plus years photographing American movie houses that, like my own hometown theater, were built before the advent of the multiplex cinema. This body of work is from my ongoing documentary photography project, Please Remain Standing. A few years in, I shifted focus to celebrate the endurance of the American movie theater, not memorialize its demise. In the same spirit, I hope my work will create awareness and encourage the preservation of these architectural gems.
Collectively, the photographs are a personal anthem, a visual cry for the earlier movie theaters to please remain standing and to maintain their relevance within our communities. Through their survival, one of the greatest American pastimes will continue to bring people together.
I grew up in Largo, Florida, four miles from Clearwater. After the Largo closed, my family's weekend entertainment moved to Clearwater, the next town over, which had two movie theaters — the quirky Carib and the much fancier Capitol. The Carib, up the street from the Capitol, is where I saw dozens of films growing up. At night the sidewalk glowed from the large neon cursive letters spelling out the theater's name. The Carib became my go-to as a teenager, and it would be the first movie theater I photographed.
Having decided to be a photojournalist, I enrolled at Daytona Beach Community College, now Daytona State College, which offered a two-year degree in professional photography. During my first year, a teacher gave the class an assignment to "paint with light," a technique that involves creating an image in a darkened space with a long exposure as the photographer moves a source of illumination across the area. I arranged with the manager to arrive before the Saturday matinee, and kept my camera's shutter open for six to ten minutes at a time, methodically sweeping a clamp light across the auditorium with the help of my boyfriend.
I made three frames, only one of which came out perfectly. Visible in that photograph is one side of the auditorium, decorated with huge Egyptian-style figures and symbols running the length of the wall. Those looming figures had terrified me as a child, but as a teenager I was intrigued by the aesthetic mismatch between the tropical exterior and the Egyptianesque interior. Less than three years after I shot my assignment, the Carib was demolished. I was devastated to see how easily an architectural pillar of the community could be destroyed.
In 1988, I moved to Illinois to earn a master's degree in photography at Southern Illinois University. By that time, I had already been photographing movie theaters for six years, so when a professor asked what I would be working on, I hesitated only briefly before declaring, "The documentation of vintage movie theaters." What had been a pastime became a serious project that has continued well beyond the three-year graduate program.
Going out to the movies is one of the few activities that unite strangers from different backgrounds and social classes. Aside from transporting us out of our day-to-day mind-set, the experience creates a momentary sense of belonging to a broader group, beyond our family or circle of friends. As Kristina Smith, owner of the Callicoon Theater in Callicoon, New York, told me in 2019, "We are becoming so isolated from each other that we can no longer tolerate our differences. In a theater, you have to sit next to a neighbor, sharing the same space. I think it's good for the soul."
Having completed my goal of photographing theaters in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, I cannot imagine stopping. There is always another theater to document, another story to capture. After more than four decades and visiting more than 1,200 theaters, I have heard numerous oral histories, which have greatly heightened my appreciation of these architectural treasures that were once the cornerstones of their communities. As long as I still feel that thrill when pulling up to a theater for the first time, I plan to keep going. "Just one more," I tell myself, like so many photographers do.