Fine art photography and country music share some concerns: both use gritty melancholy, technical finesse and blissful nostalgia to evoke a halcyon past, both deploy a mythos of the white working class, and both are caught in a crisis of confidence. Daniel Shea is probing these myths and this crisis. His interest in Midwestern ruins came from documentary photo projects he did in 2009-10, one on mountaintop-removal coal-mining and the other on coal-fired power plants. But traditional reportage didn’t serve the imaginative dimension that initially drew him in so, during a residency at Columbia College, Shea created “Blisner, Ill.,” a book about a fictional failed coal town in southern Illinois, which combines false and true documents and documentation of the region. The final exhibition included sculptural elements as well as photos. Shea’s next mockumentary investigation is based on the idea of being “native” in the industrial Midwest. danielpshea.com.
Daniel Shea
