Detroit: Photographs of a post-war, pre-pop bored America

Photographers McDermott and McGough are collaborating and bringing together works for the first time since 1992. Their show - running through May 17 at the Nicholas Robinson Gallery in Chelsea - is titled Detroit and features photographs depicting the 1950s post-war, nuclear lifestyle.

They printed their works, shot on location at Henry Ford Museum, in the tri-color carbro process that, although extremely complex, produces vivid and vibrant colors.

Excerpt:

Detroit seeks to tackle themes of social repression in America of the late 1950s, and particularly the petit-bourgeois suburbia of the artists’ childhoods. The works encapsulate an America in its post-war, pre-pop moment. The subjects are trapped in ennui, lost in longing daydreams, and searching for connections with people and social environments that lie outside the framework of their own nuclear family - connections promised by the exciting possibilities afforded by the telephone, the television, and the gossip magazines that began to disseminate America’s fascination with celebrity. These photographs posit an American ‘still-life’ of ubiquitous small-town locations. The subjects display varying degrees of innocence, knowingness and longing, evoking feelings of alienation, isolation, and disconnection from hetero-normative normalcy.

Visit the gallery here.