Richard Ross

Waiting for the End of the World

April 6, 2006 - April 29, 2006

Richard Ross’s series, “Waiting for the End of the World,” documents shelters built by individuals or organizations wanting to protect themselves from man-made catastrophes. On one level his large scale color images are quirky and somewhat paranoid. But they also reflect a genuine fear transferred in a dramatic and pragmatic way from the simplest backyard holes in the ground in rural Texas, to elaborate compounds such as the Greenbriar Hotel in West Virginia, where a shelter was built to house the entire US Congress. His images include a series of tunnels under Beijing that can house 300,000 people complete with barbershops, retail stores, and shrines, and underground shelters in Switzerland where every citizen is required by law to have a shelter. A book on the project was published in 2004.