"Durst's second book, " The Four Pillars," was made largely during the COVID pandemic. Its ambiguously staged scenes, many involving a New Age self-help group that Durst had been following since the church-basement days, leaned into the strained artificiality of the period. Taking the pictures in "The Children's Melody" felt like "a return to the world," in all its baffling complexity, Durst told me."
"The project crystallized after Durst took a picture of a boisterous group of second graders singing. The resulting image depicts a loose choreography-several children hold their ringed arms in front of them, fingertips touching-but the over-all impression is one of gleeful, expressive chaos. Children look to the left, to the right; they sing with their eyes closed; they stare fixedly at one another; they are quite obviously daydreaming."
"It's an image about the attempt to corral individuals into a collective, the task given to our teachers and coaches and troop leaders. In Durst's work, it's always only partly successful. As the book progresses, some of the children in the photographs are older and more in control of their outward expression, but scraps of strangeness or incongruity always peek through."
Durst produced a second book during the COVID pandemic that features ambiguously staged scenes and imagery drawn from a New Age self-help group, reflecting the period's strained artificiality. A later project, The Children's Melody, emerged as a visual return to real-world complexity after a photograph of singing second graders. The key image shows a loose choreography of ringed arms and fingertip touches, yet conveys gleeful, expressive chaos as children look and sing in different directions. The work examines efforts to corral individuals into collectives, often only partly successful, with older children showing more control while oddities persist.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]