Joseph Mills: Inner City

Joseph Mills: Inner City at the Cohen Amador Gallery in New York City. "... the first solo exhibition of Joseph Mills’ distinctive photographic work in New York City. Inspired by wanderings around the marginalized streets of Washington D.C., Mills’ range of work varies from street based photography to highly skilled photomontages of esotericism. Though diverse, an inquiry into the unknowable links Mills’ methods, simultaneously offering his photographic subjects up for investigation while revealing Mills’ own artistic search and vision of reality.
Though temporally distant from the Surrealist movement of the first half of the twentieth century, Mills’ work stems from a similar fascination with chance, subjectivity and the subconscious. In true surrealist style, Mills’ street photography transforms the seemingly quotidian into a dreamscape of life’s minutiae. Unlike the somewhat ethnographic approach of many surrealist photographers, Mills’ does not distance himself from this world, but rather involves himself deeply in its mysterious and wonderful insanity. A masticated piece of gum stuck on the end of a woman’s curled index finger, the ferociously long nails of a woman passing on the street, these become the elements of a familiar, yet mysterious, dreamscape. Often photographing from oblique angles, holding the camera low by his hip, and without the assistance of the viewfinder, Mills plays with chance, limiting his control of the image, and dispelling the general notion of the photographer as omniscient spectator by situating himself in league with the viewer, as the end result is not entirely known even to him. Mills heightens the impact of his surreal world by printing this series on expired photo paper giving the finished print an almost otherworldly glow. Because of this final chance procedure, each print is different and unique and a further testament to Mills’ own subservience to the process." Also... a few More works by Joseph Mills.