This book is my record of the stories that took place from the summer of 2022 to the early spring of 2023. This was me taking a break from school during my study abroad in Germany, and these photos helped me to remember the happy and indecisive times of finding mysel!. I have been on the road in Berlin, Hirschaid, Frankfurt, Cologne and Italy, thanks to my friends Long, Junye, Selin, Andreas and Dagmar, as well as my friends in China, for giving me answers when I was lost. Hope this book can bring calmness and strength to those who are struggling and confused.
The Westmorland County Agricultural Society ‘WCAS’ was established in 1799, and for over 200 years has survived world wars, recessions and the Great British weather to establish itself as one of Britain’s oldest livestock agricultural events. Located on the fringes of the Lake District, Westmorland County Show has showcased rural life to the masses. The project aims to highlight the contrasts found at an event where farming communities, tourists, competitors, VIPs and shoppers explore the land in their unique ways. Through grainy black and white 35mm film, the intention was to blur the suggested timeframe by playing with the unusual sights, outfits and activities found when livestock and different communities interact in a field.
Chasing the ghost, the traces of oblivion, and the echoes of what was and no longer is, the book “Omen” is a revision and reframing of the fraction of the photographic archive of the Farm Security Administration (1935-1944) hosted at the New York Public Library. That program—perhaps there is no need to add—was one of the milestones of modern documentary photography, instrumental on the constructing an hegemonic narrative; one mainly about triumph against adversity, division, and catastrophe in the recent history of the United States.
But by stressing the gaze over that monumental set of images, and scrutinizing at the corners of the pictures, at the backgrounds and details—in the secondary characters, in what should not be there, that which appears by chance, accident or error— it is possible to discover a different narrative, one that is thicker, murkier, more troubled, complex, contemporary and contradictory. Both a shatter and an apex: a premonition of the genealogical continuity of the many (tumultuous, visible and invisible, thunderous and silent) systemic violence that make up the face of American society.
A book that serves as a mirror of the distressing reality of the United States in our days, and, a the same time, as a device for reflection on the way historical and documentary photography is read and understood, taking the editorial eye to its ultimate consequences.
Photographs by Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, Jack Delano
Excavations at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library
Concept and selection by León Muñoz Santini, Jorge Panchoaga Edition by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio
