2024
Review of Almost Heroic by Blake Andres (IG)
David Myers, Almost Heroic (Nearest Truth, 2023)
This softbound book collects Myers’ b/w photos taken in and around the Olympic stadium in Athens, originally built and used for the 2004 summer games. Judging by these photos from 2023, it’s since fallen into disrepair and neglect. Although not clearly stated in the book, I’m guessing the work was made during a Nearest Truth photobook workshop, a nice immediate project which could be executed close at hand within a limited time window. As a book it’s well constructed, with broad uncoated pages, Swiss binding, and bonus loose leaf inkjet photo. The design (by @simonbray) is varied and interesting.
As for the photos, they take on the bleak character of their subject. The stadium grounds is a lonely, drab place of stains, utility towers, and weeds. Following the tradition of Lewis Baltz or Frank Gohlke, Myers conveys its emptiness and desolation in matter-of-fact style. Big gravel swaths, spindly trees, a hubcap. That sort of thing. Myers tries to liven the place up with silhouetted birds in flight. But it still looks lifeless and uninviting, unless of course you are a photographer. For me the pictures recall the nondescript description of Candlestick Point or Los Angeles Spring. Like those monographs, Almost Heroic reflects a paradise lost. Oh well, the glory days have passed but perhaps a few souvenir pix might be found. I have not seen Athens stadium but I’ve visited other sites caught in a similar cycle. The weirdly out of place tower in Montreal, the funky disruption of Seattle Center and Space Needle, the bygone Olympic bones of Salt Lake City, Barcelona, and Vancouver, all left behind like athletic mine tailings. After the party ends the hungover cities get to pick up the pieces. What do you do with a giant stadium or parking lot? Condo/retail development? Big box outlet? Tourist viewpoint? Photobook workshop? Instagram book review?
Review of Almost Heroic by David O’Mara (IG)
Almost Heroic by David Myers, Nearest Truth Editions, 2023. Myers photographs document the Athens Olympic stadium of 2004, now falling into disrepair. The photographs show no evidence of the sporting spectacle and human triumph, what we are left with is an underwhelming landscape, a contemporary ruin in the ancient city of the Acropolis. There is no sensationalism in these images, as you find with so many proponents of the urban decay genre, there’s something much more subtle happening. It’s interesting that we see nothing of the architectural monuments, just the dust and debris, a few fences that are neither stopping people going in or out. It also feels like the site of an ancient civilizations that sacrificed itself in an act of symbolic wealth destruction by Potlatch economics.The images remind me of Lewis Baltz, but also Steve McQueens film for the Venice Biennale in 2009.
Two photographs selected for juried exhibition, Seen Better Times, Multiple Exposures Gallery, Alexandria, VA. March, 2024.
Getting ready to drop-off two images juried into the group show at MEG (Seen Better Times, March 12 - April 7, 2024). Images are from work in Greece ( approximately 20x24 and 24x20, respectively).
Juried in as member of the Multiple Exposures Gallery, Alexandria, VA