Why lies He in such mean estateWhere ox and ass are feeding?Good Christian, fear for sinners hereThe silent Word is pleading.—Willam Chatterton Dix, What Child Is This?, 1865Disaster can be explosive and theatrical or quiet and ominous. The photographs that make up Such Mean Estate are images appropriated from films about apocalypse. However, rather than a survey of disaster movies, they create a narrative from specific frames whose contents range from high drama to the banal. When taken as a whole, the conjunctions and themes of the project create their own terms and exist within a framework that is not strictly defined by their source.These photographs also transform the cinema, which has grand scale and mass-cultural scope, into an object that is personal and intimate.
