Tuesday, March 15, 2011

John Ganis: Deliberately Considered

I posted a review of John Ganis's recent show of photographs at Swords Into Plowshares Gallery depicting the aftermath of the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and western Michigan on the current events blog Deliberately Considered. (Click here to read it.) The show was pretty amazing in its cognitive dissonance between form and content, the allure of the refined aesthetic beauty of the images as photographs, on the one hand, and the revulsion of the recognition as to what they're about, on the other. The show contained dozens of incredible images, but this one directly below was my favorite. Check out the straw hat gaily festooned with flowers on the figure on the right. Also the stretch of shade canopies extending along the shoreline. Could have been any day at the beach, except for the hazmat suits and rubber galoshes. Plus a few other images from the exhibition. (All images courtesy of the artist.)

John Ganis, Clean Up Workers, Gulf Shores Park, Alabama, 2010, digital archival print.
BP Spill Booms, Louisiana, 2010, digital archival print.

BP Spill, National Sea Shore, Florida, 2010, digital archival print.
Grand Isle State Park, Louisiana, 2010, digital archival print.