NYAB Event - David Zimmerman "Last Refuge"

David Zimmerman "Last Refuge"

This event has ended.
At Sous Les Etoiles Gallery
Media: Photography

The interaction between space and identity is a strong concern of the photographer David Zimmerman. With acuteness and talent, he explores the territories made by contiguity, infinity and exclusion where the human being is vulnerable.

With Last Refuge, David Zimmerman brings us in New Mexico’s vast desert, where a community of people, who by choice or by circumstance, live in a place with no electricity or water. These people are not outcasts or drifters however – on the contrary; they are quite happy to live on the fringe, as far as possible from the mainstream. Their homes are primitive shelters fashioned from good intentions, scraps, and eventually clothing. As the weight of the roofs eventually collapsed on homes, people moved on.

“There is a hidden beauty in many things, and the pile of abandoned clothing attracted me at first by its palette and form and its odd 2-dimensionality – having been beaten for decades by the relentless desert climate“ said the photographer.Clothing is the primary protection for human beings, and when nothing else is left; it stands as their last land and home. In a surgical close-up and focus on garments, with the density, the contrast, and the sharpness of all details, his work appears to be a true archeology of the human soul. Even though the clothes are damaged or forgotten, the remnants depict an individual challenge, an individual journey questioning our own identity and how to accept and overcome a fluctuating reality.

Zimmerman’s series reveals the balance between a wandering and sedentary life. Here lives the desire to escape, an ability to settle and the strength to move forward.