Bird in Flight Prize ’18 finalist: Past The Pond, Setting Fires

Dylan Hausthor, USA

Small-town gossip, elementary humanity, relationships to the land, and spectacle inspire the stories in my work. The characters and landscapes in these images are documents of the instability found in storytelling–told by an even more precarious narrator. I hope these images act as gossip in their own right: cross pollinating and alive.

The often disregarded underbelly of a post-fact world seems to be the simultaneous beauty and danger of fiction. I began making images as an act of hybridity: weavings of myth filled with tangents and nuances, treading the lines of editorialism, spectacle, and an examination of the absurd stories found in nature. I’m interested in pushing past questions of validity of evident field recordings and into a much more human sense of reality: faulted, broken, and real.