Philip-Lorca diCorcia is one of the greatest photographers of his generation. His series East of Eden was his response to the George Bush era’s wonderful banking crisis, which of course we now call the Great Recession. ( To date no one has gone to jail for the collapse of the USA and the world economy )
Think about it…
Iolanda, 2011 Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
On East of Eden, a series he started in 2008.
“That was obviously a traumatic year for alot of people,” he said. “I felt I needed to respond to the situation, to what was the culmination of George Bush’s era. So this idea of the Fall, this ejection from Eden, is what inspired the pictures, a sense that everybody’s optimism and fever to have a great life had been completely overturned. And to some degree, as in the Biblical story, it was knowledge that did it.”
“Suddenly people realised that they don’t get everything for free; that you can’t have a mortgage that you don’t have to pay back; that you can’t constantly leverage your life on your credit card. And we’d been led into two wars that were disastrous failures and misguided to begin with. I just took that as a jumping-off point for the imagery.”
via Jobey, Liz. “The Lost Eden.” Financial Times Magazine. (August 31, 2013): 24-27 [ill.]
The Photographs of Philip-Lorca diCorcia
