Inferno
Unlike classical monuments and world-wonders, the focus of Times Square’s spectacle is simply that: the Spectacle. Foregoing all physical manifestations of human or divine magnificence, Times Square is a space of digital ephemera, a canyon of light between towers of glimmering simulacra: a shrine to 21st century capitalism. Inferno, however, quite literally focuses on the isolated human experience of this digital wonderland. With the constellation of epileptic spectacle melted into an abstract haze of light, the subject becomes decoupled from the multitude of contexts that dominate other visual studies of Times Square. The images concentrate instead on the locus of the subject’s experience: in the candid expressions of the human body, in its shameless reverence, its joy, and even its discomfort. In their expressions there is a familiar sense of mystique where, lost in the transfixing movement of an emerging history, we are nonetheless compelled to reflect upon our past—even as we are simultaneously enamored by its trajectory.
