Over the past decade, the United States has experienced such a number of traumatic events that it is hard to remember them all. Police violence, street riots, fires, floods, covid-19, have created dozens of micro-crises that have grafted onto other larger and more chronic crises, such as addiction to opioid drugs, the uncontrolled spread of firearms, disappearance of the old industrial sectors. All of this happened in a climate of increasingly violent polarization of politics, the media and society, which prevented the country from elaborating a shared account of its recent history. In this context it seems impossible to see a possible way out.
This is why the work of those who stubbornly try to create that kind of story is important. Among these people is Philip Montgomery, a 34-year-old photographer born in California, who has documented all the traumatic events of the past decade. Last December Aperture published his book, American mirror (American mirror). Montgomery’s shots have the advantage of tracing each of those traumas to the real places where they occurred and to the people who lived them. And, by lining up facts apparently distant from each other, they show that all the mini-crises of recent years are actually part of the same decline.
The black and white, and the many shades of gray that are in between, help to create this tragic choral story, and establish an evident continuity with other moments of conflict and division, especially those of the sixties.
We see an African American family watching from the doorstep, between fear and resignation, the protests against the police for the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. We see a submerged piano in a living room after the passage. Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas in 2017. A family is evicted just before Christmas in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2015. Cheering Republicans about to crown Donald Trump as the party’s candidate at the 2016 Cleveland convention. A doctor from a New York hospital preparing for the night shift at the worst time of the covid-19 pandemic. A family mourning a child who just died of an overdose in the basement of their home in Miamisburg, Ohio, in 2017. A car charred by the fire that destroyed the city of Paradise, California in 2018. A man showing a photo of his sister, who died fighting in Iraq at the age of 22.
Working on this project, Montgomery was arrested and hit by pepper spray and rubber bullets during protests against the police, fell into the water while trying to get closer to the places most affected by the floods, entered hospitals along with paramedics who was following. As Patrick Radden Keefe writes in the book’s afterword “his photos have an immediacy and intimacy that can be obtained by coming dangerously close to the subjects of the photo, whether in a riot or in a room”.
(Alessio Marchionna)