By Phillip Buehler
Located in New York, NY
40"40" photograph, edition of 5, signed and editioned on reverse
framed in natural wood shadowbox frame
This photograph is from a series entitled, “(UN)THINKABLE,” the culmination of 25 years of Phillip Buehler’s work photographing remnants of the Cold War throughout the United States and Europe. Buehler has visited NATO airbases, Cape Canaveral, the Airplane Graveyard, missile bunkers and silos (even within New York City’s borders) among many other sites that are historic, and yet hidden, forbidden, and forgotten. Photographs from this series will be featured in a solo exhibition this September at the Front Room Gallery.
For anyone growing up during the Cold War the sense of dread of the world’s annihilation was all to concrete. It was evidenced in films like “Dr. Strangelove” and “The Day After.” Everyone knew the U.S. had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 5 times over, and assumed something similar about the Russians. For those not old enough to remember this built in fear, don’t worry (worry) it is reawakening. We don’t need another Cuban Missile Crisis to push us to the brink, the renewed tension with the Russians, and now North Korea’s recent entry in the nuclear weapons club is more than enough to unnerve anyone who is watching these conflicts unfold. Phillip Buehler is watching closely. Through this comprehensive series Buehler’s photos show many aspects of this non-war war. In Buehler’s aerial photographs from a military airplane storage yard in Arizona the repetition of the same model of bomber aircraft are so abstractly pattern-based that the overall effect beginnings to feel like a Middle Eastern tapestry...
Category
2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography
MaterialsArchival Pigment
