Netflix mainly represents the USA and its citizens in the Hollywood style, with glamorous families living in wealthy areas and driving oversized cars. This stereotype is depicted the best in the Kardashian Show. However, these TV broadcasts of the upper-class lifestyle seem to be a cover-up of the grim reality many inhabitants of the country live in. The Massachussets based photographer Justin Kimball shows us the other side of the polished carpet in his new book, Who By Fire. We get a glimpse of the ordinary people and the un-majestic landscapes. Even though we might feel social and personal distress, the book reveals signs of hope.

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The cryptic title, Who By Fire, comes from a Byzantine liturgical poem about the day of judgement and the possibility of redemption. "It is about who's making the decisions and what the forces around us are, and at what point do we turn ourselves over to these kinds of external powers? The idea behind the title is that life can be outside our control and how we respond to that."

The images in Who By Fire reveal an inherent sadness, decline, and poverty in the United States. There are images of neglected houses and poorly dressed people, who all seem utterly introverted and intensely lonely. "I tried to capture the idea that in our current cultural and political moment many of us appear isolated, whether by ourselves or in a crowd. People seem to be in their heads, somehow unable to make a connection. This concept was an important part of the photographic and editing process. The places and things where one can see decline used to be exceptions but are now more common. For me, the idea was to create a document about place and certainly about community, not just local, not just American, but also ubiquitous and even global."

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Concerned

The photography of Justin Kimball could be inscribed in the tradition of the concerned photographer, caring about social issues, but at the same time interested in visual storytelling, street photography, and landscape photography. Different approaches are smoothly blended in his way of seeing and recording the world. "I'm always wrestling with the poetic and the political, the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Who By Fire was meant to be an extension of my last book Elegy, which was more political. I also photographed closer to my hometown and put people at the centre; I looked at marks and signs in the landscape as evidence of our historical situation. I was looking for traces of things that were left behind. By this, I set the stage for photographs of the people living there rather than just the landscape."
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Behind the curtain

Kimball made photographs in four states: Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio, the first three close to where he lived. "Covid hit, and I decided to stay closer to home. Originally, I intended to move westward, but gradually I felt like I was dealing with something more like home in some crazy way. It looks like everything is sort of broken in the book, and there are places where people are struggling, but some places I photographed are at the edges of prosperity. My town is relatively middle class, the neighbourhood I live in is a bit more economically mixed. Here I can cross the street and photograph a neighbour near a river. That shifted my thinking about the project and through necessity of the situation the direction of the project shifted slightly."
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It's like seeing behind the curtain, in a way.

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The photographed states do not stand on their own; they are exemplary for the whole of the United States regarding socio-political development. "I feel it's global, and these states could be seen as examples. I've lived all over the country and feel that there's a similar situation almost anywhere you go. When people in the States look at my pictures, they are surprised. But I think that all you need to do is open your eyes while driving through the place where you live. It's like seeing behind the curtain, in a way."
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Engaging

An essential part of photographing people is engaging with them, having talks and sometimes coming back. Justin Kimball's way of working is not the shoot-and-go method, rather he engages with people. "The country is divided, and people are angry on both sides. Since I've been photographing the same places for about ten years now, I have seen a shift. People were more open and kinder than they had been in the past. Even though I'm an outsider they were more willing to engage with me, maybe because of Covid. Part of my process is meeting people and talking to them. It's not evident in my pictures, but I often return to re-photograph people or places twice or three times. Sometimes I meet people I never photograph; I just end up sitting on their porch, having a beer and talking."

Asking questions  

Documentary photography seems to deal with the outer world only, but as many photographers nowadays admit, it tells a story as well about the photographer himself. This also applies to Justin Kimball. His exploration of the world also appears to be an exploration of his inner self and his place in the world. "Strangely, for me at least, photography is a weird combination of people's stories and my own story. It's hard for me to get away from that. I've been photographing since I was eleven, and I'm 61, so it's a lot of my life seeing the world through this instrument. Even as a kid, it was about trying to make sense of something that scared me, that I didn't understand. The camera gave me purpose, it gave me a way to both engage with the world and reflect on my own place in it."

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I get to know something about the world and myself that I didn't know before.

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Kimball is not a documentary photographer in the sense that he conceptualizes a project intellectually. There is always an internal emotional response to his own work as well, guiding him along the way. "During the process of photographing, I start looking at the pictures, and they tell me where to go and what to do next. This way, the project becomes a discovery for me rather than a fixed plan. The themes and preoccupations in my work become the connecting thread. This way, I get to know something about the world and myself that I didn't know before. I spend a lot of time looking and asking myself hard questions, always thinking, ‘Why am I in the places I'm in?’ "
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Storytelling palette

The book contains different categories of photographs, ranging from landscape photography to environmental portraits, down to kinds of street photography, a wide range of storytelling palettes is used to create a meaningful narrative. "The blending of different categories is purposeful. I started as a street photographer with a small camera. Since then, I've gone through every iteration of the camera to change how I photograph up to the very slow 8x10 inch. Photographing people has always been at the centre of what I did. That shifted about 15 years ago when I made the series Pieces of String in abandoned homes. I wanted to take pictures about people without showing them; instead, I was looking for evidence of what was gone. When I returned to the world to photograph the landscape and the environment, I brought that idea with me and started treating yards and buildings the same way I treated the interior of those people's houses. Later, I started bringing people back into the pictures. I was looking for a mimetic relationship of things by taking an individual as an example of the collective."

Subdued colours

The pictures show affinity with photographers like Joel Sternfield and Alec Soth, among others. Justin Kimball feels connected to many American photographers, but recently has been mostly inspired by painting. "The structure and colour palette of my pictures refer to collage artists like Kurt Schwitters. His work is closely connected to the positioning of objects, how they work in relationship to each other and what is created by putting them together. Even though his works are more abstract, the structure of these new pictures became much flatter and more formal than my older work.”

I want my pictures to feel a little dreamy, sometimes even beautiful.

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The colours of the photographs are mainly subdued without the shining brightness that modern American life usually radiates. "It's a struggle, because in the States the landscape is littered with brightly coloured plastic shit everywhere. I try to keep that stuff out of the pictures. I want my pictures to feel a little dreamy, sometimes even beautiful. It's a way of bringing people into the work through colours that makes them feel a little relaxed, and then they can deal with the subject matter in a more intimate way."
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There is an unspoken cultural promise or religious belief that things will be okay.

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Hopeful

Even though people in the photographs of Who By Fire look introverted, there are also photos where they are peacefully gardening, growing their own vegetables, and taking care of their environment. These images seem to contradict the message of hopelessness in the book. "I'm not a religious person, but there's religion in the book. Many people are hoping and waiting for something like redemption. Some of the gardeners are bending down and even kneeling. There is a cultural belief that America is still the land of opportunity, the land of hope, an idea of being reborn and being saved. There is an unspoken cultural promise or religious belief that things will be okay. This book shows it and at the same time questions it."

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Justin Kimball was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1961.  He earned a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an M.F.A in Photography from the Yale University School of Art. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographers Fellowship, a Kittredge Educational Grant from Harvard University and the Project Development Grant from Center in Santa Fe NM, he is the author of the monographs Where We Find Ourselves, Center for American Places, Pieces of String and Elegy Radius Books.

His work can be found in over 40 museum collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the National Gallery of Art, the George Eastman Museum, the SF MoMA and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Kimball’s images have been included in such publications as DoubleTake, Harper’s, PDN, Photo Metro, Photograph and Picture magazines.

Kimball has taught photography for more than twenty years and is currently a Professor of Art at Amherst College. He is represented by Carroll and Sons in Boston Massachusetts.

www.justinkimballphotography.com

@justin__kimball

@Radius.books

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Who By Fire / Radius Books

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