Books Interviews Photography Publication Solo artist

Anthony Gerace :: Travel Diary

posted by Lo Parkin February 6, 2015

Featured previously, Anthony Gerace is a London based photographer hailing from Toronto. Summer 2014 saw Anthtony travel across America with a Hasselblad c/m 500 camera and a Yashica T4 to collect snapshots. Starting his journey in New York and driving to Box Elder County, Utah, to document Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and the community surrounding it.
I caught up with the up and coming photographer to find out more about his carefully framed and atmospheric documentary photographs for his latest publication that represents a travel diary.

Anthony explained;
“It was an exceptionally strange trip, done over the course of five weeks, with the intention of saying something positive about America through the Utahan landscape. The fact I found I couldn’t say those things made it even more interesting: it seemed that the majority of the places I went were fundamentally broken on a deep level, but the resilience and friendliness of the people in all of these places made them unlike anywhere I’d been.”
“The travel diary originated out of a desire to talk about what I’d experienced and the effect that it had, but going through the images, even though they’re for the most part photographs of garbage and decline, the luminousness of the landscape has transformed the images from something deeply pessimistic into, for me, something worthy of return.”
“I recently read an interview with Rick Alverson (director of The Comedy and The Builder) about his new movie, which seems to sum up what I found out there: “The desert is this mythological, bankrupt metaphor for transformation or revitalization, or the end of something and the end of the American West.” I feel like I found that end, and this book exists to document the process of finding it.”