The American photographer Holly Andres specializes in series informed by personal experience. With The Fall of Spring Hill, she revisits an event from childhood with her customary cinematographic style of narration.
This new series is a melodrama one follows from beginning to end. It was inspired by a distant childhood memory that Andres recreates here with a cast of convincing characters. As children play on a tall wooden structure, their mothers can be seen preparing a meal in a nearby church kitchen. When a child falls and hurts herself, the mothers descend on the playground to punish not the child, but the structure itself. Armed with axes and baseball bats, they march across the field determined to reduce the thing to a pile of sticks.
Known for her peculiar treatment of colors (here mostly warm, desaturated and in contrast with the attitude of her models), Andres examines the complexity of childhood and the role of women through 12 medium-format photographs. Added to these figures of contemporary morality is a multitude of symbols: weapons, candy-pink cupcakes, a broken cup, a bowl filled with some strange reddish mixture. The Fall of Spring Hill represents a personal world with a magnetic yet disturbing atmosphere, relating a memory that is at once entertaining and, through the emotions of its characters, unsettling.
Jonas Cuénin
Holly Andres, The Fall of Spring Hill
Robert Mann Gallery
210 11th Ave
New York, NY 10001
212 989 7600
