Eli Durst
The Community
Jan 5 - 28, 2023
The fundamental concept guiding my work is the idea that every photograph is both a perfect document and a complete fiction. I seek to blur the line between documentary tradition and conceptual practice, taking subjects that are often represented in a documentary style and infusing them with an ambiguity and strangeness that asks the viewer to reconsider their understanding of reality and its relationship to the truth. I use black-and-white photographs to construct an alternate reality that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own, thereby defamiliarizing the everyday and commonplace.
In this body of work, titled The Community, what began as an initial desire to photograph the insides of church basements quickly expanded into a much broader series examining the fundamental search for community in America. The activities depicted range from Boy Scout meetings to New Age spiritual practices to corporate team building exercises and were all made in and around the types of multipurpose community spaces that are ubiquitous throughout the United States. These meeting places are utilitarian and functional, meant not to be glamorous but practical. While these spaces are largely interchangeable, there’s a specificity to their genericness, a familiarity in their universality.
As I began photographing different types of activities, I realized that I was less interested in faithfully documenting the realities of these different groups and more interested in the strangeness and confusion that resulted from juxtaposing images from completely separate times and places. I was intrigued by the figurative space that exists between the photographs, the moment when one one activity bleeds into another, creating a symbolic space of communal introspection. Put simply, these photographs are about the search for purpose and meaning in a world that both demands and resists interpretation.
Eli Durst (American, b. 1989, he/him/his) studied American literature and history at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Upon graduation, he moved to New York City where he worked in the photography industry for three years, assisting street photographer Joel Meyerowitz and training as a professional fine art printer. Durst then attended graduate school, earning his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and receiving the Richard Benson Prize for Excellence in Photography upon graduating. Durst received the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize for his series In Asmara, which examines the postcolonial legacy of Eritrea’s capital city, and a 2017 Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant. In 2019, Durst received a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artist Fellowship in the field of photography. His first monograph, The Community, was published by Mörel Books in May 2020 and received Special Mention at the Rencontre d’Arles Author Book Award. His second monograph, The Four Pillars, was published by Loose Joints in 2022.
Durst lives and works in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas College of Fine Arts. Durst also makes commissioned editorial work, with his images appearing in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue, VICE, and Wallpaper Magazine.