“Photographing places particularly hard hit by the transition from an industrial and agrarian economy to an economy of unfettered consumption on the margins of mainstream society is a story I feel compelled to tell.”
The way Parks presents his subjects, with so much affection and clarity, we feel that we love them, and this brings home the realities of fear and injustice in a new and powerful manner.
The night has its own visual rules, its own color wheel, and its own ethereal presence. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream.
This exhibition highlights “third spaces”: components of an area’s social infrastructure, communal spaces outside of home and work such as taverns, church picnics, diners, restaurants, and movie theaters—sites where we might gather, if we could agree.
These observations and the pictures taken from them don’t speak in specifics, but when you are in a place where people, over time, have been able to imprint parts of themselves on the built environment, you can feel the city speaking to you in some way, though the language is only partly translatable or transferable.
The rediscovery of an old film by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler inspired me to watch the view every morning with anticipation. Sometimes the old, dirty windows in the office further embellished the buildings with new and ethereal qualities of light. Each day, the weather and changing seasons brought a new discovery to what I was witnessing.
A meditation on hate-based violence.
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