Never before in human history have so many people been so interconnected and so dependent on one another. In science and art, at work and play, we increasingly experience collective life. The Olympic Games, the giant Airbus, CERN, MRI, the Trident submarine, Wikipedia, the Academy Awards, the International Space Station, Viagra, laptops and smartphones and much more…
Although photography has always embraced investigations into the self, looking towards the existential question and individual poetics (what curator John Szarkowski called “mirrors”), it can also be said that many of the world's greatest photographers deal with the real world (the “Szarkowski windows” “). Their work may revolve around the functional aspects of society and culture (home life, pleasure and leisure, travel, religion, workplace, production and consumption); or revolves around its dysfunctional aspects (alienation, crime, pollution, social crisis and war). Edward Burtynsky's oil fields, Raimond Wouda's high school, Reiner Riedler's families in their free time, Lauren Greenfield's ostentatious displays of wealth – these are just some of the many topics covered by the exhibition. Of course, each category features the work of different artists. Whatever their particular focus, photographers have chosen to depict, reveal, examine, critique, and otherwise reflect upon our hypermodern and technologically complex “beehive,” to adopt Tom Wolfe's apt metaphor.
Overall, this exhibition takes stock of the material and spiritual culture of our civilization, which ranges from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and from civilization's great collective successes and its ruinous collective failures, expressing thoughts and feelings in the richly nuanced language of photography. And although he is characterized by real-world photography, he embraces different ways of approaching it, from the "straight" document to the staging.
It should be emphasized that this is definitely not an educational exhibition; the images, not the words, tell the story of civilization – that is, the photographs do not illustrate a thesis – they are the thesis.
Civilization: The Way We Live Now focuses on shared human experience. We may never have been on a Dreamliner or attended the Academy Awards or met Paris Hilton, but we know all about them whether we want to or not. Most of us have never even met an Al Qaeda agent, but we all need to safely remove our shoes. In his book Civilization (2011), historian Niall Ferguson observes: “These days most people around the world dress more or less the same: the same jeans, the same sneakers, the same T-shirts… It is one of the greatest paradoxes in modern history that a system designed to offer an infinite choice to the individual ended up homogenizing humanity. This strange paradox is at the heart of Civilization: The Way We Live Now.
The exhibition after the exhibition in China and Korea now arrives at:
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand from 4 April to 4 July 2020.
cover image: Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China, 2005 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Flowers Gallery, London / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto
