The Four Pillars
Eli Durst
Loose Joints
English
Hardcover, flexibound
144 pages
235 x 270 mm
2022
ISBN 9781912719397
Durst scrutinises aspirational American fantasies of happiness, self-improvement and individuality in a provocative critique of social rituals, groups and norms. The Four Pillars grew out of a relationship with a faith-based self-help group in Newtown, Connecticut, that Durst photographed over several years. Despite their ostensibly comfortable lives, these affluent suburbanites felt unfulfilled and directionless. They met weekly in church basements to discuss spiritual and secular strategies to find meaning and purpose, and to deconstruct the markers of success, progress and identity within middle-class American society.
Durst’s staged, inventive images build organically on this self-critical base structure by inventing scenarios that interrogate the relationship between the individual and the group, the norms we aspire to, and the social gravity that holds these two in alignment. Durst takes the details of these scenarios – mundane family portraits, team bonding exercises, pregnancy groups, school gyms, amateur theatre, county fairs – and amplifies their strangeness, through a lens that is at once factual, fictional, banal and absurd.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/the-four-pillars-eli-durst?_pos=1&_sid=4d1b824c8&_ss=r)
About the Artist
Eli Durst was born and raised in Austin, TX. After graduating from Wesleyan University in 2011, he worked at the renowned fine art printing studio Griffin Editions in Brooklyn while also serving as an assistant to street photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Eli received an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art and is the winner of the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2017 Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, and a 2019 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He currently lives in Austin, TX, where he teaches photography at the University of Texas. Eli’s first monograph, The Community, is available for order at morelbooks.com.
elidurst.com
(source: http://www.elidurst.com/biocontact)
About the Publisher
Loose Joints is an award-winning independent publishing house based in London, UK and Marseille, France, founded by Sarah Piegay Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014. They collaborate with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form. Loose Joints circulates new visual perspectives through a dedicated list seeking to elevate underrepresented voices in photographic discourse.
loosejoints.biz
(source: https://loosejoints.biz/pages/information)
