Maybe it’s part of our own human arrogance, but there’s something fascinating about imagining the world with us no longer in it. Not a world where we never existed, but the world as it would go on if at this very moment, today, rapture-like, we all of a sudden disappeared. Not vacated and had time to clean-up what we thought shouldn’t be left behind, but just vanished with little warning.
With “Bankrupt”, acclaimed NYC-based photographer Phillip Toledano gives us perfect snapshots of something that equates our abolition about as closely as it can while we’re still hanging around. In another facet of his study of those sort of sterile, factory, monolithic modern offices he examined in his series “Cubelife”, here he looks at offices that are no longer because they went under. The interesting this is that, as is part of the risk of the modern Western economy, businesses now can almost literally disappear – bankrupt and shut down and finished in a day. These aren’t places where everyone was notified and packed up and left everything spotless for their predecessors. These are buildings where people quite literally grabbed what they cared about and then just disappeared.
The detritus speaks volumes. And raises questions – “why is there a single white gym sock on the office floor?”. With nobody remaining there to answer our queries, we’ll simply never get to know…
“As I started shooting bankrupt offices I found it to be more archaeology than photography. Everywhere I went I found signs of life, interrupted.”
Below is my favourite shot: the two errant pencils thrown into one of those awful, generic, cheap-ass flatboard ceilings found in faceless offices from coast to coast:
Toledano is super well known and much blogged about for his disturbing body-morphic series “Hope & Fear” (check out the “baby suit”…) but he’s also got some of the most innovative, interesting editorial work around. His entire site is definitely worth a full scope out, but here are just a few of my favourites:
Via SwissMiss
shape+colour 