McGrath, Andrew. 2018. "Waning Industry/Home." in California Urbex and Labor, created by Andrew McGrath. In Visualizing Toxic Subjects Digital Exhibit, curated by James Adams and Kim Fortun. Center for Ethnography. March 2018.
Andrew McGrath, "Created Image: Waning Industry/Home", contributed by Andrew McGrath, Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 24 November 2018, accessed 25 April 2024. http://www.centerforethnography.org/content/created-image-waning-industryhome
Critical Commentary
This image is an example of taking advantage of the framing available in the environment in order to imply both narrative and affect. Here, shooting from inside an abandoned farmhouse in Chino, CA, I point my camera towards and through the window with ripped screen to a still operating farm across the way. It is meant to assert the tactility of loss and the visceral sense of isolation that Late Industrialism fosters, both at work and in the damage to perserverence in the intimate lives of those victimized by neoliberalism. As such, I want to imply that toxicity is also potent in the absence of contact, where instead memory, loss, and abandonment become the vectors of contamination.