Mall, Edition of 15 chromogenic print, 40 x 57 inches
July 7 – 21, 2012
BAU-XI PHOTO
Lori Nix captures a city that no longer exists in her series The City. There is no human present in these photographs. Buildings that have seen better days, like churches and theatres, are now abandoned by the people who once cared for them – even treasured them. Their roofs are leaking; their walls are falling in. Their beauty is scarred but still not completely ruined.
Many of the places in these images, like the Neo-Romanesque Church, are now filled with rubbish and left to slow decline by the elements. The four horses in Fountain follow the composition of the Versailles’ Apollo Fountain, but now they are inside without the magic of the water. The library (Circulation desk) in a rotunda is now open only to birds as it longer has a roof while the books are still on the selves. Surely once people populated and admired those places.
What’s happened to this city? Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude comes to my mind when I look at the image titled Mall. In the background of the photograph the shops with the occasional mannequins are still visible and it is easy to imagine the upscale stores with expensive clothes and pretty ladies looking longingly at them. Their old glamour still hangs in the air but only ghosts visit them now. Originally it must have been a forest that people cleared to build the city and now the original vegetation is taking back the ground as in Marques’ novel. Instead of life and laughter stillness and silence dominate the place. I don’t feel any catastrophic present here, just a deep solitude. People, for some reason, left this place behind. It radiates the painful nostalgia of good old times gone. Melancholy rules forever.
Emese Krunák-Hajagos