Wolfgang Tillmans' Abstract Pictures. American Suburb X, January, 2016.
It is, however, either irresponsible or naïve to posit that the idea “freedom” exists independent of ideology and power. On a more immediate level, who, in the legacy of two Bush administrations, could hear the word “freedom” without the baggage of dogmatism?
Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes. American Suburb X, October 2015.
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s, Seascapes is a meditation on time examined through repetition and constancy, 220 black and white images of the still ocean, beautiful and transcendentally boring.
Raymond Pettibon, The Art of Black Flag. American Suburb X, June, 2015.
Pettibon’s drawings say: sure, I’ll suck dick for cigarettes. Sure, I’m like that baby in the womb – I just wanna die in peace. Sure, I shoot up with my toes cuz I don’t have any arms, no problem.
Wim Wenders, Written in the West. American Suburb X, July, 2015.
The size and garishness of American advertisement, each one a little ironic monument to American consumerism in a landscape defined by scarcity, are as foreign as the desert landscape to the travelling German.
Interview with Bruce Davidson. American Suburb X, April 2015.
Because everything you do is political, you can’t avoid it. It’s not only political; it’s innocent, there has to be a kind of meaning and understanding of that, too. I wouldn’t say to myself, I’m going to be sensitized today, I just went down there to document and capture what was really going on. And those photographs still come alive.
Katy Grannan's Lonesome Valley. American Suburb X, March, 2015.
The Nine shows a black and white landscape of motels, auto shops, concrete, weeds and humans in between, a layer of dust on everything. Graffiti under a bridge marks Ninth Street as “Juggalo Street”. The effect of the merciless sun is highlighted in black and white, and Grannan’s large-format camera stretches the horizons, creating expansive, desolate landscapes.
Appetite for Destruction, The New Inquiry. September 2014.
Football systematizes technology, brute force, and drama into an event capable of creating beauty, boredom, spectacle, and catharsis.
Jim Goldberg, Rich and Poor. American Suburb X, December, 2014.
The man, large and bald with a big hairy stomach and one hand, holds his son, a small boy in dirty, grey underwear, who stands on the bed in front of him. They’re surrounded by plain, cracking walls, a suitcase, a bare mattress, a messy dresser and on the door a sticker bearing the word ‘EMPTY.” On the previous page the boy’s mother had written, “My son, David, always seems to take an amused, philosophical approach to life. He is the kind of son every mother wishes she had.” Under this image, the boy’s father has written, “I love David. But he is too fragile for a rough father like me.”
Carlo Mollino: Polaroids. American Suburb X, November, 2014.
The eros in Mollino’s work assumes a melancholy, poisonous aspect with the understanding of the circumstances of its production: part of an aging bachelor’s desire to perfect the decoration of his house. There is something of satyriasis, or Don Juanism, the male equivalent of nymphomania, in Mollino’s work, as if they were undertaken compulsively, and perhaps without joy, as part of a doomed project to reach an unattainable ideal: the tragic desire to keep thousands of women in an empty house.
Francesca Woodman, Works from the Sammlung Verbund. American Suburb X, December, 2014.
There is a fascination with the bones underneath the skin, as evinced in the photograph where a leaf peeled of its soft tissue echoes the contours of woodman’s own spine and ribcage. Another image shows a female, possibly Woodman, hanging by her fingertips from the top of the doorway’s lintel.
Paul Kwiatkowski, And Every Day Was Overcast. American Suburb X, November, 2013.
A sort of romantic ethnography by way of biography, And Every Day Was Overcast, is writer and photographer Paul Kwiatkowski’s debut work, what he calls an illustrated novel. In it Kwiatkowski plays the role of informing native for the town of Loxahatchee; his tone is equal parts weary traveler and, implicitly, that of a survivor and exile.