Lifelong Ember
by Grade Solomon
portfolio shortlisted call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
Solomon’s "Lifelong Ember" narrates the half-lived and the half-imagined. In "Lifelong Ember", otherwise anonymous scenes are peopled by questions. The flipped car, bent light, and smoldering branches enchant the landscape with a curious shock and a blissful estrangement from reality. The events pictured appear re-staged but still unscripted. Reality is as carefully constructed as a childhood memory in Solomon’s work. Behind their elegant composition, these photographs are rife with collisions. There is nothing inevitable about the crash: the cause and consequence are out of frame, but the evidence remains. Solomon’s images excavate our emotional territories to make sense of the event. As we confront a world that is always already happening, we interact with "Lifelong Ember" with an investigative eye. But when we face Solomon’s at-the-seams style, we cast our gaze upwards and inwards. The visual axis spins counter-clockwise as we refuse to make use of history, forget about the future, and wonder what happened between here and there.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023