Posts Tagged ‘Anaheim’
“Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities”*…
Readers will remember Lori Nix and her glorious photo collection”Unnatural History.” As it happens, Ms. Nix has been working for even longer on another series, one that centers on intricate dioramas that she constructs and shoots in her Brooklyn apartment.
From the description of the book that captures the work:
Over the past eight years, Lori Nix (born 1969) has created meticulously detailed model environments and then photographed them–locations within a fictional city that celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation. But her monuments of civilization are abandoned, in a state of ruin where nature has begun to repopulate the spaces. “I am fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse. In addition to my childhood experiences growing up with natural disasters in Kansas, I also watched disaster flicks in the 1970s. Each of these experiences has greatly influenced my photographic work.” Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer” and spends months building the complex spaces before photographing them. As critic Sidney Lawrence wrote in Art in America: “Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, [Nix’s tableaux] prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain”
Explore more of Nix’s post-apocalyptic metropolis (and find links to her other work) here.
* Marcus Terentius Varro
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As we don’t even try to keep ’em down on the farm, we might recall that it was on this date in 1861 that Anaheim, California got it first post office and its inaugural Postmaster, John Fischer. Four years earlier, a group of German immigrants, disillusioned with their lot as prospectors in Northern California, moved south to grow grapes; a group of 50 of them settled in what is now Anaheim and founded the town.
Within a few decades the grapes were long gone. Anaheim developed first into an industrial center, producing electronics, aircraft parts and canned fruit, then into a travel destination: it is, of course, the site of the Disneyland Resort, the collection of theme parks and hotels that opened in 1955, Angel Stadium, Honda Center, and the Anaheim Convention Center, the largest convention center on the West Coast.
Then
What goes around…
George Packer described in the New York Times what happens to the clothes that one drops with charity…
If you’ve ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you’ve dressed an African. All over Africa, people are wearing what Americans once wore and no longer want. Visit the continent and you’ll find faded remnants of secondhand clothing in the strangest of places. The ”Let’s Help Make Philadelphia the Fashion Capital of the World” T-shirt on a Malawian laborer. The white bathrobe on a Liberian rebel boy with his wig and automatic rifle. And the muddy orange sweatshirt on the skeleton of a small child, lying on its side in a Rwandan classroom that has become a genocide memorial. A long chain of charity and commerce binds the world’s richest and poorest people in accidental intimacy. It’s a curious feature of the global age that hardly anyone on either end knows it.
Mother Jones and the International Reporting Project collected a stunning gallery that helps those on this end of the chain better appreciate the other.
The circumstantially-ironic commentary of the photos is just a bonus…
"Iowa: Nothing to do since 1772" shirt worn by University of Liberia student
More wonderful pix– all shot in November, 2010 in Liberia, West Africa, “where former warlords tend rice paddies and American t-shirts are sold in heaps under the hot African sun”– at Mother Jones‘ “Where Do Goodwill Clothes Go?”
As we appreciate the long reach of the global market, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that Walt Disney announced plans for Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Construction was begun on July 21st of that year, and the park opened a year-and-a-day later.
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