I am sitting in the passenger seat of a pick-up truck. Between me and the man driving leans the long barrel of a shotgun. Around us, the grass has turned yellow in the dry heat. Scattered in the fields, the bunkers stick their heads out of the ground, their spacious bellies underground. I am alive and you are dead, I think as I drive past the world’s largest survival community.
– Journal entry. 4 September 2022. Edgemont, South Dakota.
The Fall presents a series of photographs that look at popular myths surrounding the apocalypse and less credible, associated theories. From La Palma in the Canary Islands, to the United States and the Greek island of Patmos, where the Book of Revelation was written, I investigate how society is preparing to face potentially catastrophic events, environmentally triggered or otherwise.
Chance meetings with strange men looking for their mother’s lost wedding ring in the middle of a desert, survivalists, preppers, religious cults and bunker-dwellers. Each encounter resulted in a series of photographic portraits accompanied by a personal doomsday narrative informed by interviews, field recordings and a hand-written journal.
Feeding on the popular genre of the photographic road trip propagated by a majority of male photographers, I drive alone into the American West, with fear and awe, down the road of the apocalypse. The Fall builds on my background in journalism and fine art, combining documentary photography and fiction to reflect on society’s collective fears – imagined and real, rational and irrational.
