23 Oktober - 5 november
An exhibition featuring work in progress by Bruno Stevens
Closing event: Last chance to see the exhibition
Wednesday 4/11, 6-10pm
Nocturne and walk through the exhibition with the photographer and a special projection of Obama's election night in Chicago pictures, exactly one year later.
De Zaal
Nonnemeersstraat 26 - 9000 Gent, Belgium
Fifty years after Robert Frank’s historical photo-essay, who are the Americans of today? How has 50 years of civil rights struggle affected grass-root U.S.A.?
As I turned fifty years old this year, I became curious to find out how the people of America have changed –or not- during my lifetime. As a little boy of the sixties, I remember the shock of JFK’s assassination, Jimi Hendrix on the radio, Martin Luther King’s and Robert Kennedy’s tragic deaths a couple of months apart in the spring of 1968, sounds and images of the Vietnam war, John Wayne and Walt Disney, and on a certain midsummer night, a dreamlike whitish backlit silhouette taking just a small step and capturing an entire world’s imagination and hope.
‘Hope’, is arguably a fading notion both in America and in the world in the face of the American policies of this last decade, yet it was the main slogan behind Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign.
As Robert Frank once did, I rented a small car and hit the road, driving around smalltown America without any precise itinerary, echoes of Kerouac in my mind, Elvis and Otis on the radio…
Like a metaphor of a certain southern image of America, one day I woke up in ‘War’, West Virginia, had lunch in a small town called ‘Justice’ and visited a roadside dog and gun market in Kentucky.
Foreclosed houses, resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, religious bigotry, ignorance of the world’s reality all seem to paint a grim portrait of America, only to be contradicted by the formidable vitality and optimism of the people of this great nation.
America is at a crossroad in its relatively short history, it can choose to remain captive of the most reactionary components of its society, or open up to the ideas and values of its progressive half …
Somebody with a small camera, fifty years from now, will perhaps rent a car and give us the answer …
Bruno Stevens, 2009.
As I turned fifty years old this year, I became curious to find out how the people of America have changed –or not- during my lifetime. As a little boy of the sixties, I remember the shock of JFK’s assassination, Jimi Hendrix on the radio, Martin Luther King’s and Robert Kennedy’s tragic deaths a couple of months apart in the spring of 1968, sounds and images of the Vietnam war, John Wayne and Walt Disney, and on a certain midsummer night, a dreamlike whitish backlit silhouette taking just a small step and capturing an entire world’s imagination and hope.
‘Hope’, is arguably a fading notion both in America and in the world in the face of the American policies of this last decade, yet it was the main slogan behind Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign.
As Robert Frank once did, I rented a small car and hit the road, driving around smalltown America without any precise itinerary, echoes of Kerouac in my mind, Elvis and Otis on the radio…
Like a metaphor of a certain southern image of America, one day I woke up in ‘War’, West Virginia, had lunch in a small town called ‘Justice’ and visited a roadside dog and gun market in Kentucky.
Foreclosed houses, resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, religious bigotry, ignorance of the world’s reality all seem to paint a grim portrait of America, only to be contradicted by the formidable vitality and optimism of the people of this great nation.
America is at a crossroad in its relatively short history, it can choose to remain captive of the most reactionary components of its society, or open up to the ideas and values of its progressive half …
Somebody with a small camera, fifty years from now, will perhaps rent a car and give us the answer …
Bruno Stevens, 2009.
React!