Mark Luthringer

Click on images to enlarge

Artist Statement

Selections from Hancock Fabrics has Moved to the Target Center

With these images my aim is not architectural preservation. I am trying to preserve-in photographs-the sweet melancholy of these places brought out by neglect, decay, obsolescence, and unintended results. At the same time I intend to dissect the notion of nostalgia may be a simple amelioration of the past as we look back, it is also a morbid fascination with aging, death and the insignificance of our lives in geologic time. We seem to take strange comfort in thoughts of our own mortality.

The modernist (and by extension, utopian) overtones of some of this architecture make its decay and abandonment even more poignant to me. Utopian can function as a reverse nostalgia, and to look back at these sites with nostalgia completes a circle. We are living the future that some of this architecture alludes to and tried to embrace.

Making these pictures has helped me see that the history of a building is also the history of the ground where it stands, its neighborhood, its city, etc. as well as that of its builders, designer, owners, tenant, residents, etc. Like a time capsule left out in the open, a building can channel the period when it was born, but perhaps through aging, all observed, contemplated, or photographed.

This series of photographs are gold-toned, gelatin silver prints in 20" x 24" format.

Mark Luthringer lives and works in Oakland, California

website: www.markluthringer.com

back to Artists »