A series observing the anxieties and paranoia of modern life by cinematographer and photographer Ross Gerhold. Based in Richmond, Virginia, Gerhold captures both the societal decay and the terrestrial beauty of daily life while reflecting on the current emotional state of the world today. While subsisting on blissful ignorance, clinging to any reassurance that everything will work out, Gerhold forces us to confront the impending sense of doom that defines our times:
“The project is a documentation of daily surroundings mostly shot in Virginia and the greater United States. It explores aspects of loneliness, precise or doomed architecture, and an underlying layer of loss of family within a failing society. Each image and diptych represents vacancy alongside community, often in search of familial ties in the liminal environments I experience in between work and life events. Softly lit scenes juxtaposed with harsh documentary style images reflect the brutal highs and lows of a modern day mind, the activity or lack- there-of. It’s a matter of viewing these scenes as a visitor, with a disassociation to their presenting environment. As with mental health disassociations, the work’s pages are filled with vacant and severed-from-reality scenes, a quiet and calm dystopia that we all inhabit. I hope to show the beauty in this disconnection from the natural that we all suffer, if not for the world, then maybe for myself.”
