During the final month in and around his childhood home, Christopher Lowell photographs a distinct portrait of the American South; a landscape as true as it is mythical. In Lowell’s interpretation, singular moments are made infinite. Bodies leap off roofs and fall from trees, suspended in permanent flight. The smoke from a cigarette and the sparks from a firecracker burn forever. In other pictures, the momentum of an action outpaces the shutter itself, encouraging the viewer to process the image the way one does a memory; coloring in details with emotions instead of information. The intentional absence of contextual clues frees the black & white imagery from any particular moment in time. There’s no evidence of technology, no hints from a subject’s clothes (in fact, there’s very little clothing at all). The result is an Edenic collection of photographs: simultaneously fleeting and everlasting, tactile and ethereal, grounded in reality yet floating above it. Communicated through 68 beautifully rendered, spot-varnished, duotone plates, Thirty-One Days invites us to experience “a single month for most, but a lifetime for those of us who are butterflies.”
