In her latest collection of photographs, Santa Fe–based photographer Joan Myers (born 1944) turns her lens to the American West, capturing both the myth and the reality, its shaping and appropriation by Hollywood and the ever-present but fracturing American dream. A larger-than-life statue of a cowboy stands on the same lot with a 1960s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. A man in Wrangler jeans and a cowboy hat sits for his portrait on a dais with a Hopi maiden and cows and deer made out of barbed wire in front of a curtain featuring a photograph of iconic cliffs and sky.
In deconstructing the pictures, cultural critic Lucy Lippard notes that they “seem to emerge from cracks in American culture. They show us a past that still affects, and reflects, our present, revealing unexpected insights into how the myths of the West were formed and how they relate to reality.”
In The Persephones, American poet Nathaniel Tarn (born 1928) and American photographer Joan Myers (born 1941) offer an elegant, collaborative retelling of Persephone’s abduction into the underworld. Many of Myers’ images were shot at the sites from which the myth originated. Edition of 500 copies.
Published by Damiani. Text by Joan Myers, Kathleen Stewart Howe.
Photographer Joan Myers (born 1944) is perhaps best known for her recent images of the forbidding Antarctic landscape. In this new publication, Myers turns her attention to volcanoes, photographing iconic sites from around the world: Volcano National Park on the island of Hawaii, Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Ecuador's Cotopaxi and Picincha, Mt. Erebus in Antarctica, Krakatoa in Indonesia, Mt. Etna and Pompeii are all included in this breathtaking volume. Myers' essay reads like an adventure story, exploring the connection between fire and ice while describing her thrilling treks to the ends of the Earth. "We like to imagine Earth as a ball," she writes, "a brightly-colored dime-store globe with countries and oceans drawn on its glossy surface. We forget that its surface slides, subducts and transforms, setting off earthquakes and volcanic eruptions … A stable earth, whatever we would like to think, is an illusion."
Joan Myers & Nathaniel Tarn: The Persephones
Joan Myers: Fire and Ice, Timescapes