Landmark (Daylight Books, Spring 2015) by artists and collaborators J.W. Fisher and J.T. Leonard is a photographic body of work generated over the last five years to explore the contemporary post-industrial landscape of three quintessential American cities – Pontiac and Detroit, Michigan and Toledo, Ohio. All three of these cities are located in the “Rust Belt,” a phrase coined in the 1980s to describe economic decline, population loss, and urban decay in America’s once powerful industrial sector. Recently, the region has shown signs of recovery with an influx of new businesses, and young professionals in search of new opportunities.
Rather than give us straightforward documentary images that speak of shrinking cities or abandonment, Fisher and Leonard transform space in unexpected ways, by focusing on intervention in the landscape, exchanges shared with individuals and communities, as well as revolving picture ideas as metaphor. Landmark stakes no claim to validate the beauty in the ruins of the post-industrial landscape as seen in so much contemporary photography today, especially in depictions of disasters of epic proportions such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Instead, it attempts to capture, photographically speaking, a theatre of the everyday.
In his Introduction, entitled “Our Life Grasping at Straws,” Blake Stimson, author and Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, Illinois singles out an image in the book that for him encapsulates the real-world fix people in these cities find themselves in, as they attempt to reassemble their lives: “Perhaps the picture that rings the truest for the life we find ourselves in today is ‘Haircut and Vocal Lesson,’ with its up-to-the-minute mix of allusions to squats, artist’s studios, entrepreneurial incubators, and anarchist dreams of local, person-to-person economies.”
Fisher and Leonard write about Landmark: “Early on in the book project, we had a conversation with a fellow artist about urgency, rigor, and expectations for pictures such as these at a moment in time (the early 21st century) in which the locations we worked in are often steeped in a glorification of ruin and reclamation … Landmark may allude to questions of identity, nationhood, and the undetermined fate of some postindustrial cities uniquely ‘American.’ However, as much as the work is site specific and aims to contribute to a conversation about photographic representation, these pictures are metaphors, symbols, literal gestures …”
Joel Wellington Fisher lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He received a B.A. in English from the University of New Hampshire in 1997, and a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. From 2006-2007 Fisher worked and studied with Heidi Specker at the Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst in Lepzig, Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship. Fisher was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, head of photography at the City College of New York (CUNY), and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Lewis & Clark College in Portland.
Justin Thomas Leonard lives and works in Maryland. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2009. Leonard has shown work nationally in both group and solo exhibitions. In 2013 he was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Fellowship, and in the summer of 2014 was selected to participate in Review Santa Fe by Center Programs.
Work from Fisher and Leonard’s collaborative project entitled Landmark has been shown in group and two person exhibitions at Wassaic Projects’ Return to Rattlesnake Mountain, The Day on Fire: Apocalypse in Contemporary Art at Slocumb Art Gallery, and AD/HD at KNOWMOREGAMES and P-R-I-M-E-T-I-M-E Galleries in Brooklyn, and solo exhibitions at KIOSK Gallery in Kansas City and Eddington Katz Projects in Indianapolis, IN. Photographs from Landmark have been published in Capricious Magazine (Masculine Issue #14), SF Jazz by TBW Books, and an exhibition catalog, The Day on Fire: Apocalypse in Contemporary Art.
BOOK
Landmark
by J.W. Fisher and J.T. Leonard
Publisher: Daylight
Hardcover
11.25 X 10.5 IN.
92 Pgs, 44 Color
$45.00 US
ISBN: 9780989798174
http://daylightbooks.org
http://www.joelwfisher.com
https://www.tumblr.com/search/justin%20thomas%20leonard
