What strikes me most about Eli Durst’s work, especially
revisiting it on Aperture’s website, is how little I learned about Asmara, the
general subject of his work. The wall text informs us that Durst went to Africa
after meeting refugees from Asmara while working in an immigration center in
Texas. From the pictures, I can tell you that Asmara is not a terribly modern
place and it might have some class issues. But I guess that is something you
can say about a lot of places.
This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy Durst’s work. In the
interest of full disclosure, I recently curated him into a group show. I would
like to put forth that the key to understanding Durst’s work and its place in contemporary
photography is how little you learn from such straight-forward black and white
pictures, images that look like the documentary photographs we all know of
Bresson, Evans or Frank. The subtle avant-garde step in Durst’s work is that as
a document, the pictures border on useless and at best, they tell us things
that most people already know.
Instead of providing a greater understanding of Asmara, the
pictures form or suggest a relationship between the people in the photographs
and the photographer. From the level of comfort and casualness of the subjects
in the pictures, clearly they appear to be friends of Durst. The shabby hipness
of their appearance and the settings paints the picture of some distant bohemian
scene in Africa abounding in unknown art and popular music, that Americans only
know a visit long ago, when they fell in with the people, and life unfolded
like a Hemingway novel, with strangers who become fast friends with whom one
eats well, drinks too much and generally have experiences. Which is a lot of
life to get from pictures that have a still technical eloquence and seem like products
of the skilled eye of a large format photographer.
Taking straightforward pictures that speak to the
photographer’s experience in a place instead of trying to communicate
historical or political information about a place clearly puts the work in a
post Frank tradition of making pictures. But the loose associations from image
to image hinge more on the randomness with which most of us currently digest
images. Combining this stylistically with the expertise of a commercial
photographer places Eli Durst’s black and white pictures of a far-off place
soundly in the world of forward-looking contemporary photography.
Through Feb 2nd
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