Friends, Enemies and Strangers
Oliver Wasow
Texts by Rabih Alameddine and Matthew Weinstein
Friends, Enemies and Strangers is a book about the beauty and power Wasow finds in the people he knows, his desire to believe in the decency of those he doesn’t know, and his despair at the lack of humanity in people in positions of power. Using images he’s taken in his studio and found in flea markets and on the Internet, Wasow employs an array of post-production techniques to create a cast of characters that prompts us to reconsider not only the parameters of photographic portraiture but what we can know of human nature. The book includes an essay by Matthew Weinstein and a story by Rabih Alameddine.
“One of our shrewdest image makers and takers, Oliver Wasow pits the sentimental against the sinister, nature against human nature, and private lives against public ones. He’s the intrepid surveyor of our shifting needs be seen, watching from that sweet spot where our love of and uneasiness around photography coexist.” —Marvin Heiferman
“Photos are lies, Wasow keeps saying. The lie is that a photo is a memory reified. In fact, it is a memory in a holding pattern and its next step is oblivion, or such extreme recontextualization that its original purpose vanishes and it is now something completely else, reincarnated…. Wasow’s book of portraits of friends, family and political enemies exists not as a gesture of photographic nihilism, but one of questioning what a portrait is.” —Matthew Weinstein
Hardcover
10 x 8 inches
142 Pages
