- Kyle Thompson
- FANCY A SWIM? Welcome to Kyle Thompson’s Ghost Town.
I am so sick of disaster porn I almost didn’t go to formerly Chicagoan, current Portlander Kyle Thompson‘s new photography show, Ghost Town, up now through February 28 at One Grand Gallery (1000 SE Burnside). Thompson’s photographs—self-portraits in flooded, decaying environments—are gorgeous, very weird, and so saturated with green it almost looks like something’s wrong with his camera’s color-balance. And yet, at the same time, they’ve got a commercial slickness to them; like a hyper-saturated magazine spread, they’re really easy to like.
My problem with disaster porn has a lot to do with context. It’s like the visual art equivalent of a Buzzfeed listicle, with the same ridiculous clickbait-y titling, which flattens the images by shouting out, “10 HAUNTING PHOTOS OF ABANDONED BUILDINGS IN DETROIT YOU NEED TO SEE,” when they might more accurately read “10 Haunting Photos of Mold-Ridden Buildings in a City Whose Infrastructure Isn’t Your Problem.” Looking at disaster porn is kind of like hanging out with a friend you don’t even like that much anymore, but whose personal life is so full of drama that you can’t help but enjoy their company in a perverse, schadenfreude-heavy way. It’s enjoyable because it’s not your problem. There’s a word for intense scrutiny from a safe distance: We call that gawking.
So whenever someone tells me they’re working on a project that aestheticizes the death of a faraway city, I’m immediately skeptical. My first instinct is to wonder if there’s any disaster available where they currently live.
- Kyle Thompson
- AAUUUUUUGHHHHH, CLIMATE CHANGE IS THE WORST: Can you spot the issue of the Mercury in this photo?
So how does Thompson’s work fit into and subvert the conventions of disaster porn? Well, it deviates from it by about two degrees—but those degrees matter. First of all, many of Thompson’s environments are constructed. He’s not an interloper with a camera—he’s a fabulist. This is where the candy-colored palette comes from, and that perfect living room couch disappearing into three feet of water. Occasionally, this fantastical quality can feel a little like an easy grab, the superficial ZOMG! factor that makes for compelling Tumblr art, but doesn’t go much deeper.
But this is where Thompson’s work really gets interesting. Unlike a metric ton of decaying former theaters, his work includes the natural environment—some of the flooded spaces in Ghost Town are fictions, but some are real. I’m not really interested all that much in the images’ magical realist bent, or in Thompson’s self-portraiture—I can’t look at an image of a body disappearing into its surroundings without immediately thinking of Francesca Woodman‘s work, and no photograph, however well composed, can survive that kind of comparison. Instead, I’m drawn to the photographs’ particular lushness, their color. Here is a homegrown alternative to a ruined city. In my favorite image in the show, an abandoned house sinks deeper and deeper into a bright green brackish pool. Behind it, there’s an endless field of evergreens disappearing into fog. There is no one inside the frame, and yet it is very much alive.