A dismantling of historical systems through Shawn Bush's portrait of American culture

Text by Claudia Bigongiari

All Images © Shawn Bush

Between Gods and Animals is Shawn Bush second monograph launched by the Greek publishing house Void in October 2021. Red fabric covered, this project is about and against the white male American supremacy and virility and overbuilt systems of Western culture, a regime of violence and gender inequality which saw its beginning with Colonialism.

Shawn Bush grew up in Detroit, MI, where he started approaching the photographic field as a teen going skateboarding every day and bringing a mini video camera to film stunts, at one point the videos shifted into images where he could develop more control and creativity.
Skateboarding has always been one of the most comfortable scenarios where the photographer could take portraits of people, while others were: returning to his hometown and hanging out with his childhood friends or finding different types of people and arranging in-person meetings. He mentions how men were generally very excited about being depicted as heroic figures with a bright flash beaming into their faces.

The project Between Gods and Animals took over ten years to establish an insight about the Western American culture where masculinity and whitenesses have always held some privilege, while are now afraid to loose their position of power within the society.
It mixes different levels of working and photographing, collected over the years, color portraits of white male communities, black and white large format pictures of buildings and constructions, and last, archival images from 1920 to 1970 propaganda’s photographers. It mixes and confuses times: “from the start, I was concerned with how Western systems propagate, replicate and regenerate, but I found it hard to show that with one image or without context to the past.”

Shawn Bush comes from a rural and conservative community that feels like “a time capsule when the archival images were made”, he takes images avoiding any markers of history and technology, where the overlapping of times isn’t only a testimony of the perpetuating of traditions and myths over masculinity but also a suggestion of continuous transformation and changing.
The intention of creating a book out of this project was clear from the beginning, hundreds of images were pulled for consideration to arrive at seventy-one photographs selected, “there are occasions when an image or space repeat, though those images are meant to reflect on and expand the time recorded in a single photograph. The image selection goal was to create a loose narrative that could bridge the recent past to the present, suggesting contemporary issues are anything but modern.”

From the outside the aesthetic of the book is tensive and powerful, red cloth, open spine hard cover, the title stitched with white (intentional?) thread. It reminds the American culture during a particular period which was “the Trump presidency, the start of the Make America Great Again movement, and subsequent MAGA goods that were omnipresent during his reign” Bush explains. The red and book’s fashion is the same of MAGA hats which had “a forceful and artless feel, emblematic of many problems involving power, whiteness, and masculinity, exposing the influence of colonial history on the present”. Between Gods and Animals caneasily look like a classical book containing myths and traditional histories, something that Bush tried to escape with the series, moving to other directions than strict eternal systems. Though, at his youth Shawn was fascinated by Greek culture and mythologies, “when making many of the colour photographs for the book, I returned to several of these myths and used them as inspiration.”

Before working with Void, Bush made something like ten designs of the book, the publishing house honoured everyone of his attempts into the final solution which conveys within a physical object the narrative of Between Animals and Gods. He ends with: “My interest as an artist and publisher is to create deceptively simple books, without being overly designed, that allow the work and special material/color choices to become important communicators, hopefully as much as the visual material itself.”