Rebecca Lewis: South Park
Büro für Fotos, Cologne
8 September - 21 October 2000
Highway Nine goes through the state of Colorado. It stretches along the foot of the Rocky Mountains and bisects the valley of South Park - a magical, neglected nowhere in the middle of the western United States. In the fall of 1999, on assignment from the magazine The Face, London-based photographer REBECCA LEWIS spent five days in the place that lent its name to that cult cartoon created by two guys from Denver.
Of the typically American, one-horse towns you find in the region--such as Alma and Fairplay--one of the cartoonists said, "A very specific kind of person lives in South Park. In many ways, you don't get more isolated than these people get. Unless you actually live in the area, there's not a single, solitary reason for you to be there."These oddly assorted remnants of the Gold Rush, towns that own up to their outsider status, where your next-door neighbor might be a bear or a wolf, are still each imbued with much local color.
Rebecca Lewis got to know a few of the inhabitants; personalities to whom the characters in South Park owe many thanks. Her investigation, "What is South Park" begins where a new world began: a car trip away from the big city to a valley in the Rocky Mountains where buildings--some abandoned--wrestle with the wilderness and echoes of wilder times, where cars and vending machines punctuate zones larded with signs and symbols, where the inhabitants have either just arrived or lived here for an eternity. There is reticence and restraint in the faces of these men, but they also possess a capacity for stubbornness and comical high-spirits. Most folks who live in a place like South Park have crazy-quilt histories, sewn of parts that have little to do with each other, yet Lewis's photographs provide us with clues to solve the often-tragic puzzles of their lives.
The exhibition at Büro für Fotos shows fifteen works from Rebecca Lewis's South Park series.
Rebecca Lewis was born in 1970 on the Isles of Scilly and studied from 1995-98 at the London College of Printing, graduating with honors and a BA in photography. Her work on the London Mod scene, some of which was shown in her first exhibition at Büro für Fotos (6 March - 10 April 1999), earned her runner-up prize of the Observer Hodge Award. She lives and works in London.
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