Book Tip: The End is Near, Here

The belief in the “land of unlimited possibilities” has long been in question. The great American dream has been dreamed out; the country, torn apart by social and political opposites, seems to have reached its end. A look at the photographs in this new photo book does not bode well for the future. And yet, the German photographer’s frenetic images help us to understand the current state of the USA.

Born in East Berlin in 1958, Michael Dressel grew up under the GDR dictatorship. He experienced two years in prison, following an attempted escape from the Republic, and has been living in the USA, now, for close to forty years. Even so, and despite a successful career as a sound editor in the Hollywood film industry, he still has the perspective of an outsider. With his background, it is not surprising that Dressel’s pictures may appear as though taken from a horror film, with the constellation of protagonists arranged like in a movie. They show excerpts of an incensed reality. The black and white motifs provide glimpses of a society that is obviously no longer functioning, with its mixture of extreme nationalism, political polarisation, religious fanaticism, gun fetishism, sex for sale, apparently omnipresent poverty, and moral decay. The portraits are unsparing. The few landscapes interspersed in the sequence of images are equally terrifying and bleak. The result is an overall picture that seems to have been taken from a “special place in hell”, as claimed by the title of the accompanying essay by F. Scott Hess. Dressel spent the past ten years collecting the individual pieces that make up this kaleidoscope of horrors - primarily in Los Angeles, Hollywood, New York City and Las Vegas.

The pictures aim to provoke. The strange constellations demand explanations; yet Dressel is not an epic storyteller. His stories are extremely short. He reflects on the state of the country: “I call the form of capitalism we have here now ‘post-competitive cannibalism,’ which is not working for a vast part of the population. That creates a lot of anger, which is channelled by unscrupulous politicians, preachers, media types, and other parasites. The forces that keep the system going don’t offer meaningful improvement for the lives of ordinary people, so they exploit cultural issues to divide the populace and stay in control. That has turned the country into a completely dysfunctional shit show full of hateful nastiness and grotesque stupidity,” the photographer summarises harshly. He also sees no hope of improvement in the future. “I feel strongly that the country has arrived at a turning point, and I’m full of dread about what that turn will look like.”

Whether his photographs should be seen as prophetic or, hopefully, apotropaic is up to the viewer; but it certainly makes sense to take a closer look.