AMERICAN LANDSCAPES: CHARACTER STUDY
'American Landscapes: Character Study', is an ongoing photo series with actor Eleanor Epstein, framing American archetypes in contemporary Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is a city in crisis. As the infrastructure falls apart, as the icons implode, and as ecological and class violence penetrate every neighborhood, it’s hard to see any of this unraveling as anything but years of “American exceptionalism” (i.e., climate and labor exploitation, selective ideas of who deserves success) collapsing in on itself. This is the direction the United States has been hurtling towards for decades, and it’s final destination is here.
This series places typical American "characters"; icons that have been cemented over time (office workers, cheerleaders, wealthy housewives, rambunctious kids), and sets them in contemporary Los Angeles: barren warehouse districts, recent fire zones, jammed freeways, the car wash, to explore the tension between the values imbued into American iconography and a city in crisis.
Through these juxtapositions, we sought to make sense of life today in the United States: the farce and the tragedy; the horror film and the romance, the cognitive dissonance of the worlds we inhabit day in and day out.