A digicam could be an empathy machine, Eli Durst ’11 says. Time and once more, coaching his lens on the broader world has compelled him to rethink his assumptions—about locations, about communities, concerning the human beings who form them.
“When you encounter real people who embody a community or an identity, your biases collide [with] the reality that these are individuals who are not completely defined by their associations,” says Durst, a Texas-based tremendous artwork photographer and studio artwork affiliate professor of apply on the University of Texas at Austin. “It complicates your understanding of the world when you interact with people rather than just imagine them.”
For greater than a decade, Durst has introduced his Nikon D850 into a few of the most mundane corners of American life and returned with pictures like those under. In black-and-white pictures that bridge the visible languages of documentary and conceptual images, he seeks to rework extraordinary moments into enigmatic works that touch upon the character of neighborhood and connection, how we take up values and ideologies, and different heady themes. And even after being named to the 2025 class of Guggenheim Fellows, Durst stays dedicated to images for a similar purpose that it hooked him as an undergraduate: The craft virtually calls for discovery.
“If I try to predetermine or engineer a project, it becomes much less interesting, because I end up exactly where I thought I’d be,” he says. “You have to learn from the pictures. You have to follow them where they lead you.”
“Cheer Pyramid,” The Children’s Melody, 2024. While Durst grew up drawn to individuals who defied social conference, recently he’s turn into captivated by those that style identities from archetypes. “What does it do to someone to be the cheerleader right at the top of the pyramid,” he says, “or to be the high school quarterback, the pressure of having to live with those expectations?” He contacted an Austin-area cheer workforce to {photograph} their rehearsal, a recurring theme within the pictures comprising The Children’s Melody. Routine practices are filled with attention-grabbing, imperfect moments that don’t seem in public performances, Durst says. Here, the workforce’s show of focus, labor, and precarity throughout a stunt undercut the concept of the cheerleader as an apotheosis of easy grace. “A lot of work goes into supporting and proliferating these ideas about who we are—in cheer, but also just as Americans.” He factors to the lighting rig seen within the mirror. “[That’s] a major no-no usually, but I thought, why not? Why not show the fact that this [image] is constructed, that I’m trying to tell you what I think about this space, or these people, or this community?”
Upon arriving at Wesleyan, Durst briefly pursued a movie main earlier than switching to American research and enrolling in each images class on provide on the University. The disciplines complemented each other, Durst says: Still pictures offered a technique for higher understanding what constitutes American cultural identification. “[Photographs] represent the world with such clarity and detail that they become excellent tools to talk about the people, ideas, ideologies, spaces, communities—all the things that make up different aspects of the American experience.”
After commencement, Durst moved to New York City, labored below avenue photographer Joel Meyerowitz, earned an MFA in images from the Yale School of Art, and, in 2018, returned to his native Austin to show. And whereas he follows strict editorial tips in his journalistic output for publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker, his tremendous artwork images—introduced in collections like The Community and The Four Pillars—is way completely different. “A lot of what I’m doing,” he says, “is trying to create fictional worlds out of the real world.”
The actual locations the place Durst shoots are sometimes unremarkable: bingo halls, church basements, neighborhood theaters, and all order of dusty, fluorescent-lit areas. The occasions he captures—Irish step dance rehearsals, workplace staff throughout team-building workouts—are normally harmless. But by means of strobes and backlighting, a monochromatic coloration palette, and different instruments and stylistic selections, Durst’s sensibilities imbue these events with new ambiguity. The pictures that materialize turn into issues present outdoors of time and house, alien even to the topics who fill the body. “They’re almost always taken aback by how different the pictures are [from] their experience.”
Creating that form of distance, Durst says, invitations viewers to think about new sides of acquainted scenes: a Boy Scout elevating his hand in pledge, as an example, turns into an investigation of what’s gained and misplaced when people give up themselves to one thing bigger. “Hopefully, there’s an unmoored quality, a sense of not being able to get your bearings. This looks familiar, but it’s also strange.”
“Boy Scout Salute,” The Community, 2015. Beginning in graduate faculty, Durst sought out teams that convene in bingo halls, rec facilities, and different unglamorous areas to discover a unifying query: What are individuals on the lookout for? The Boy Scouts’ iconography and psychosocial bonds to American identification made them an apparent candidate. He emailed troops throughout Connecticut and, in the end, discovered an obliging troop that met in a church basement. After initially guiding scouts by means of reenactments of scenes from Norman Rockwell work, he captured this straightforward picture of a scout making a pledge, utilizing sturdy shadows and dramatic, directional lighting to layer ambivalence onto an in any other case anodyne occasion. “It all becomes a lot more ominous based on the technical and stylistic decisions of how I’m photographing it,” Durst says. “In real life, it was much more of a fun, everyday Boy Scout meeting.”
This summer time, with funding from the Guggenheim Fellowship, Durst embarks on his subsequent challenge: photographing giant evangelical Christian congregations, or what are steadily known as megachurches. For Durst, the topic traces consonant traces of inquiry. “Christianity is one of the major shapers of American life,” he says. “If you want to think about ideas, ideologies, and conceptions of who we are and how we should live, it’s such an important source.”
Part of the challenge’s attraction, he says, is the novel problem of working at such a scale—particularly, how can he {photograph} teams that may quantity greater than 2,000 individuals and do it with inventive resonance? “My work is always a huge compromise, where what I want to do collides with reality: I can’t do that, but I just discovered this other thing,” he says. “You have to have ideas, and you have to have a structure, but you have to be willing to abandon them completely.”
“Crying Couple,” The Four Pillars, 2019. Can documenting one thing synthetic produce true which means? The query and its implications for artwork and illustration occupy Durst’s thoughts each time he finds vacation greeting playing cards in his mailbox. “No one thinks the photographer just found these people in matching plaid outfits, but it doesn’t mean the image is fake,” he says. “The way it’s constructed is what actually tells you about the people [in it].” To discover that theme additional, Durst invited two appearing college students to his photograph studio and issued a easy directive: Make yourselves cry. Pulling from these emotional reserves produced a brand new, elusive swirl of feelings. “We constantly deceive ourselves,” Durst says, “but even if you understand that what you’re doing is a deception in some way, it can still be meaningful or valuable.”“Mask,” The Community, 2018. “If you look at this picture and you have no idea what’s going on,” Durst says, “that’s a success.” Absent context, it’s one thing creepy: a weird efficiency, a non-public viewers, a locked-away place. In actuality, Durst captured considered one of his buddies educating an improv class for the residents of a retirement house in Brooklyn, New York. “A photograph describes the surface of the world—that’s all it does. So, if you can describe something in incredible detail and it just becomes stranger, that, to me, is a successful photograph.”“Brushed Hair,” The Children’s Melody, 2022. While on project for The New York Times for a sequence on Gen Z communities, Durst linked with a pupil Methodist group on the University of Texas at Austin. “You think about colleges specifically as spaces of real experimentation and countercultural momentum, [but] I was really interested in the idea that these are people who go to school, and their faith is such an important part of their collegiate experience.” While attending considered one of their non secular companies, Durst discovered himself positioned behind a pupil with ramrod posture and waves rippling in completely brushed hair: an upright, devoted pupil. “Again, thinking about the different archetypes that people fit into, this person is a student who is not out partying at keggers but is actually at church with their hair brushed,” Durst says. “There was something so sweet and interesting [about her] that challenged ideas and stereotypes of young people, in a way.”“Measurement,” The Four Pillars, 2020. As a photographer centered on capturing strangers in small areas, Durst navigated down different avenues through the lockdown phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I was trying to figure out ways of getting at these [same] themes and ideas in different ways, and I had to work with people I knew,” he says. Photographing his cousin’s toddler daughter spurred reflections on how benchmarks and percentiles lead people to measure themselves towards one another. “In a purely medical sense, doctors are just trying to make sure your baby is healthy,” says Durst, who welcomed his second little one in 2024. “But I think in a symbolic sense, there’s this idea that there’s an acceptable way to be: ‘You need to be this tall’. . . It’s this idea that we’re constantly measuring people, judging them, and asking them to conform to a certain ideal.”“Zeus,” The Four Pillars, 2020. If the pictures in The Community study the commonalities threading collectively precise communities, Durst says The Four Pillars represents a closely fictionalized counterpart. “It’s about the limiting ideas we inherit and how we try to shed those pressures.” After assembly the photograph’s topic by means of a Craigslist casting name, Durst captured him off-stage at an outside neighborhood theater manufacturing, donning a low-budget Halloween costume and subverting concepts of male magnificence and perfection rooted in classical lore. “You hear this all the time: ‘He looks like a Greek god,’” Durst says. “We have these unrealistic standards that are all sort of fictional—the body type of a Greek god is obviously a cultural creation—but they become real because they’re real to us. Ideologies become real within our bodies.”“Masks,” The Children’s Melody, 2022.While capturing a college play through which kids put on masks of wrinkled, aged faces whereas performing Mexican folklórico dances, Durst emerged with this picture, echoing the duality of comedy and tragedy masks and exploring how the masks we put on—uniforms, clothes—typically disclose greater than they conceal. “Masks are deeply revealing of who we are, what we want for ourselves, and how we wish to be seen,” Durst says.
