Overview

"Why lies He in such mean estate Where ox and ass are feeding? Good Christian, fear: for sinners here The silent Word is pleading. -Willam Chatterton Dix, ""What Child Is This?"", 1865 Disaster can be explosive and theatrical or quiet and ominous. The photographs that make upSuch Mean Estateare images appropriated from films about apocalypse. However, rather than a survey of disaster movies, they create a narrative from specific frames whose contents range from high drama to the banal. When taken as a whole, the conjunctions and themes of the project create their own terms and exist within a framework that is not strictly defined by their source. These photographs also transform the cinema, which has grand scale and mass-cultural scope, into an object that is personal and intimate. The pictures, a somewhat irreverent homage to these films, are a dissection of entertainment that is fantastic but also functions as a warning and-possibly-a harbinger of things to come. The films cited in this body of work are about the cataclysmic destruction caused by human interference or negligence. The agents of such destruction vary in form: unstable weather and atmosphere; global poverty; nuclear fallout; and chemical or disease-induced pestilence including, in extreme cases, zombie hordes. Though the tones of such films range from somber and disturbing, to gory, to campy and humorous, they often reach the same conclusion of extreme or total annihilation."

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9781576877364

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Reviews

Both the images and the text combine to create a unique experience not only in how we think about the end of times, but how welookat it, too. - Electric Literature

Both the images and the text combine to create a unique experience not only in how we think about the end of times, but how we look at it, too. -Electric Literature In movies, the world dies again and again, and Spencer's photographs frame this obsession like a slightly out-of-focus, shared nightmare that repeatedly considers what horrors may or may not happen. -Hyperallergic As Seen In -re: photographica

Both the images and the text combine to create a unique experience not only in how we think about the end of times, but how welookat it, too. -Electric Literature In movies, the world dies again and again, and Spencer s photographs framethis obsessionlike a slightly out-of-focus, shared nightmare that repeatedly considerswhat horrors may or may not happen. -- Hyperallergic

Both the images and the text combine to create a unique experience not only in how we think about the end of times, but how welookat it, too. -Electric Literature In movies, the world dies again and again, and Spencer s photographs framethis obsessionlike a slightly out-of-focus, shared nightmare that repeatedly considerswhat horrors may or may not happen. - Hyperallergic

Author Information

Ryan Spencer is an artist, producer and photography book editor based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado and received his MFA in photography from Pratt University. His series of Polaroids, Romance & Adventure, which chronicled the history of The World Trade Center in popular film was exhibited at Dust Gallery in Las Vegas, Nevada and featured in NY Arts magazine in 2006. He was recently a producer and technical director for the theatrical presentation American Power, featuring photographer Mitch Epstein and musician Erik Friedlander, which premiered at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2011 and made its U.S. premier at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2013. He is also a contributing writer and photographer for BOMB Magazine. Such Mean Estate is Ryan Spencer's first monograph and first publication with powerHouse Books. Leslie Jamisonis the author ofThe Empathy Exams, aNew York Timesbestselling essay collection, and the novel,The Gin Closet, a finalist for theLos Angeles TimesFirst Fiction Award. Her work has appeared inHarper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer,and theNew York Times, where she is a regular columnist for theSunday Book Review. She is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale about addiction narratives.

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