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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-timeworn-beauty-of-asmara-eritrea?mbid=rss

Photo Booth

The Timeworn Beauty of Asmara, Eritrea

By Gideon Jacobs

  December 17, 2016

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“Photographer,” 2015.
Credit Eli Durst

Much of what we create—clothing, furniture, buildings—is plotted with
an eye toward an imagined future. More often than not, we imagine that
future incorrectly. Eli Durst’s photographs frequently capture traces
of a yesterday now sliding toward obsolescence. His work made in
America tends to focus on elements of our culture that seem on the
path to extinction—fellowship halls, Boy Scouts, small towns and
smaller businesses. Durst frames these scenes with sincerity and
without judgment, and it’s never quite clear whether his subjects are
aware of the sea change that may be coming their way.

It makes sense, then, that in Durst’s first major project shot outside
the U.S. he was drawn to Asmara, Eritrea, a rich but worn time capsule
of a city. Italian colonizers long ago filled the city with
fantastical modernist and futurist architecture. Now the surreal urban
landscape houses the visual tropes of modern African life within an
aesthetic imported from early-twentieth-century Europe, all of it
presided over by the country’s repressive single-party government.
Durst’s plan was to focus on Asmara’s unique cityscape, but, upon
arriving, he discovered that the past’s hold was weakening in
unexpected ways. “Several of the buildings that I had read about in
architectural surveys had been closed for years, and an entire war
memorial at a major intersection was just gone,” he told me. “When I
asked a pedestrian what had happened to the monument, I was told that
I shouldn’t ask such questions.” The authorities’ erasure of
historical remnants is inscrutable and unpredictable. So Durst
focussed on the people he met, using Asmara’s buildings as “markers of
the past” that can “obscure the contemporary realities of life in one
of the world’s poorest countries.”

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The result is “In Asmara,” a body of work that has been awarded the
2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Every photograph in the series contains
signs of both vibrancy and decay. When Durst photographs breakfast,
the table is warped but the coffee is fresh. When he shoots a
dilapidated cinema, we assume that the theatre has long been out of
order, only to notice an audience member lurking in the shadows; the
image was, in fact, taken during a showing of the “G.I. Joe” sequel.
As a whole, the series is an assured, understated study of
juxtaposition in a city defined by its cultural incongruities. “In
Asmara” is a profile of everyday Eritreans but also of the city
itself, filled with bustling life and fading fragments.

Gideon Jacobs, the former creative director of Magnum Photos, lives
and writes in Brooklyn.