From the Bottom of a Well
By Shawn Records
64 pages, 35 color illustrations
Perfect-bound, softcover, 8 x 7.25 inches
By Shawn Records
64 pages, 35 color illustrations
Perfect-bound, softcover, 8 x 7.25 inches
Shawn Records’ beautifully complex photographs are woven together here in From the Bottom of a Well, a poetic and tragically humorous account of a Chinese government-sponsored
trip for a select group of American fine-art photographers.
For two weeks, they traveled by bus with a government escort
to pre-determined locations, including wetlands, oil fields,
coal museums, and re-enactments of Mongolian village life.
Wrapped up in a web of politics, propaganda, environmental
whitewashing, and good-old romanticism, this work plucks
at the tension between the photographer’s passive role
as recorder of sanitized “facts,” and the impulse to subvert
that role. Taking his title from the Chinese saying, zuijing guantian (like looking at the sky from the bottom of a well), Records recognizes his own limited capacity to know his subjects in a meaningful
way. Instead, he accepts the veneer of his own understanding
while demonstrating a keen ability to scrape wit, beauty,
and empathy from the surface of things.
Release date: October 1, 2011
Release date: October 1, 2011