phillip toledano: america the gift shop.

Chalk up another amazing project to the work of New York-based photographer Phillip Toledano. From the eerie solitude of his photographic series “Bankrupt” to one of the most beautiful projects I’ve ever seen – his exquisite “Days With My Father” – I literally never know what Toledano will come up with next. For his latest project, just in time for the upcoming American election, he’s come up with a brilliant but frightening installation looking back on the last 8 years of American history.

In his new online exhibition “America The Gift Shop”, Toledano shifts from the personal to the political. Taking solid aim at the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, the rise of the head-in-the-sand American retail mentality, and commodification of media, he’s stocked his store with succinct, pointed, and no holds barred “souvenirs” from recent American politics and its involvement with the world.

From a funhouse inflatable Guantanamo Bay detention cell (pictured above) to an Abu Ghraib bobblehead to a Dick Cheney document-shredding snow globe, his items take the clichéd and stereotypical tchotchkes and twist them into multi-layered statements; on the North American society of consumption and on the political and moral wrongs that still haven’t been righted around the world. I also feel like it’s a statement on the circus-mentality of so much American media; frosting the news of the world and upping it’s drama for entertainment purposes. Just like all of these mementos, their brilliance lies in how at first you feel entertained by the juxtaposition of the item with what it’s representing, but then when you think about what it actually means you’re only left feeling disturbed. And stunned at how all of these has gone on, lots of it to our collective knowledge, and yet still it hasn’t been stopped and its perpetrators haven’t been punished.

One of my favourites is the chocolate bar “Choc and Awe”. While the name is a play on the disgusting arrogance the American military displayed when naming it’s Iraqi invasion operation “Shock and Awe”, once unwrapped the chocolate inside brilliantly displays one of the greatest George W. fumbles of all time: his historically premature assumption in May, 2003 that the Iraqi invasion was “Mission Accomplished”.

Make no mistake though, despite the saavy of the messaging and the inherent tinge of humour in how it’s being relayed, these are serious statements indeed. Deadly serious. When it comes to the two crochet dolls – “Ibrahim the Eviscerated” and “Abdul the Amputee” (described with the classic marketing-teaser to “collect all 23,000”) – it becomes pointedly clear very quickly that we are, in fact, talking about human lives. 23,000 lives… and casualties of a war that most people in the world believe never should have started in the first place.

Major thanks to Phil for the info.

phillip toledano: days with my father.

It takes a real artist to know when something is special enough to simply be documented, and not necessarily explored or extrapolated on. To give something room to breathe and hold it’s own based only on the fact that you’ve found the strength to share it. I don’t take it lightly when artists take their most personal moments and reveal them to me, trusting that hopefully the cycle of creator and receiver will nurture us both. There’s something delicate and tenuous in the act of letting your story go in the desire that it will mean as much to a stranger as it does to you.

That’s why my gratitude and love goes out to a favourite photographer of mine, and one I’ve posted about before, Phillip Toledano. In his latest project he’s taken photography, memoir, chronicle, and diary and evolved them together into a beautifully honest photographic journey. In “Days With My Father”, he tells the story of living with his father’s dementia following his mother’s sudden death.

Toledano writes simply and thoughtfully about his father’s condition, in ways both light-hearted and heart-breaking. Its loveliness is borne of its grace and truth; he’s not layering drama or trying to make anything seem like what it’s not. He’s sharing without adding any extra gild or lacquer, and sometimes that’s the hardest path of all.

My favourite of the series, the one that made me look inside myself the most, is the photo below. In the story with it, Toledano writes “I have so many memories of him listening to opera, sketching, sculpting. Although he doesn’t paint anymore, he still sees. He still has the artistic impulse. He was admiring the sunset, saying that he could make a ‘whole series’ of paintings around those wonderful colours… The urge is still there, even if the physical ability is not.”

The thought of this really cut to my core. And I wonder know what it would be like to have the will to write but not able to type. Or to know that inside myself I was holding so many wonderful words and could no longer remember how to open my hands and set them down.

Having read the whole story, I feel stillness and solitude. The kind of mini-metamorphosis you rise from after you’ve just had an experience that’s led to realization. My parents are still younger, but one day they will be old. One day I will be old. I see myself taking part in a loop, both familiar and alien, of childhood and manhood, of life and death, and of the parent becoming the child. I see myself on both sides of Toledano’s story. Maybe it’s also because I’m the son to a father, and perhaps one day I will have my own son. I wonder if my parents will ever need me in this way, and if I were to grow old will someone be there to give me as much love as Phillip Toledano gives his Dad.

Via Tim Yu @ Cool Hunting

phillip toledano: “bankrupt”.

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