Book of the Day > Brendan Lott: Safer At Home
● Purchase ● Staying home day and night with a desire to remain creative during the quarantine, Lott began shooting photographs from his DTLA loft of the residential building across the street. He became entranced with peeking into the private lives of others during the pandemic, capturing their behavior and activities in candid moments. These images are not portraits and he avoids showing complete faces. They are moments in time; a time of great uncertainty and fear. The final images simply reveal a knee, an edge of the face or just a headless body with the face obscured by architecture, plants, furniture or props. Metaphorically, Lott challenges the notion of the face being the site of our individuality, thus these faceless bodies articulate the evacuation of individual selves in the age of digital information.
Lott entitles the series Safer at Home, referencing the nurturing environment that we create for ourselves with personal tastes revealed in the décor, arrangement of furniture, accessories and lighting. However, there is an ominous feeling within each of these images. As noted by critic Daniel Coffeen, “What we learn from seeing these images is that there is no longer any safety at home for we are all evacuated, turned inside out, atomized within the network, all these isolated nodes gravitating towards the same center. The line that would separate a screen from a window has been erased. We no longer peer through windows; we view screens. The image is no longer over there or up on the screen, in theaters, or even on TVs. The image is right here. It's everywhere. It's us.”