Such Mean Estate

Description

The photographs that make up In Such Mean Estate have been appropriated from films about the apocalypse. Each film cited expresses cataclysmic destruction caused by human interference or negligence; from unstable weather to nuclear fallout and global poverty. Though the tone of each image ranges from disturbing and sombre to gory or camp, they often reach the same conclusion: that of total annihilation. A dissection of entertainment that is both fantastical and a harbinger of things to come.

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.

"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