Ysanthem

“Ysanthem” is an ongoing series of photographs made at sites of historical preservation since 2021. These sites include indoor and open-air museums, reenactment spaces, and areas of historical significance throughout the Midwestern United States and beyond. More specifically, the project is a pursuit of the unique, uncanny boundary between the realities and fictions that are produced within photographs.

Concentrated attention is placed on the deepest corners of these spaces, their inhabitants, and the relationship between reality and historical portrayal. What does it mean when the world a photographer finds worth investigating is a facsimile, and its inhabitants are mostly actors? How is historical portrayal at odds with the immediacy of a photograph?

In “Melancholy Objects” (1977), Susan Sontag writes about the side-effects of photography as a tool of preservation: “...the cumulative de-creation of the past (in the very act of preserving it), the fabrication of a new, parallel reality that makes the past immediate”. She argues that the reality made accessible by a photograph does not constitute the reality that was captured by the photographer (rather, that the photograph is surreal), and that the distance between the two is extended as time marches on.

“Ysanthem” investigates this distance in an unfamiliar manner, using the camera not to document, but to shape, blur or otherwise construct a narrative that brings all the aforementioned uncertainties to the forefront.

Adam Turner is part of »Guest Room: Shana Lopes & Aspen Mays«.