Independence Day

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Independence Day
© 2018 Greg Curtis, Kim Calder, Ariel Evans
Insert Blanc Press

An asteroid, volcano, tsunami or alien army draws near and the camera cuts away to pan across groups of people looking towards catastrophe. Intermittently montaged amidst the progressing apocalypse, each clip lasts for a few seconds. All peoples in the world–that is the movies’ extras–look up and expect to die; this is all the movie demands its audience to know. These extras work partly like an index finger: they direct us to look at something. They proceed to tell us how to look [unblinkingly] and how to feel [scared, adrenaline-charged].

Greg Curtis pulled stills from such fifteen-or-so-year-old disaster movies. His/this book’s photographs slice still images out of these moving films, to focus on these extras, spectators-of-their-own-deaths. The camera rested on their faces for less than a second in the movies, but Greg’s still slices allow more sustained looks. Main characters embrace each other and their deaths (heroically), but extras run away from ground zero or stare upwards. Extras gaze at the cataclysm with their bodies angled upwards, like your own body when you watch a movie screen. As you look at these extras in the movies, your body echoes theirs in pose. Also you are grouped like them, each of you one of many other bodies.

–Ariel Evans