THE CYRILLA STROTHERS PROJECT
Words: Charlie White
Reprinted from Res Magazine
Jan/Feb 2005
Magazine contains pictures
For the past six years my studio practice has focused on the
investigation of social dynamics and the confusion of self and authentic
meaning within the contemporary visual landscape. Photography has been
a means to construct fictional scenes that reveal social tensions,
crises of self-perception and self-representation, and the role that
visual culture plays in both.
As I continue to pursue studio work that derives from a subjective
response to these issues, I want concurrently to create another body of
work that, for the the first time, involves a more documentary approach
to the themes that have interested me so consistently for the last
several years. This series, The Cyrilla Strothers Project, is an
exploration of a real persona and place using a combination of different
documentary strategies. It will involve working with a primary subject,
a 16-year-old high school student named Cyrilla Strothers, in and around
her home in the southern California city of Moreno Valley, for one
starting September 7, 2004. Cyrilla's world offers me an opportunity to
research, in much greater depth and breadth, a real version of an
existence I have continually aimed to create in my prior work.
Moreno Valley, where Cyrilla lives was incorporated in 1984, and is an
entirely planned community of big box retailers, family dining chains,
and cookie-cutter housing. It is a place in which nothing is more than
25 years old. Cyriclla was born into an understands the world in this
way. She is prototypical of what the future of many sprawl-based
Americans' lives will be.
I approached Cyrilla, her family and close friends like my students, and
introduced them to photography beyond the snapshot.
The question for me is what is lost in such a world, a world that goes
far beyond the suburban to a place where the is no center at all, and
where television is the only world, really, outside the family home?
Rather than assuming any didactic point-of-view, my goal is to
understand and reveal the human lives that unfold in places such as
Moreno Valley. By focusing in painstaking detail on a year in the life
of Cyrilla Stronthers - a member of the first general of children to
have their entire lives in Moreno Valley, my project aims to both
further prior investigations and bring greater nuance to them, revealing
the world of Moreno Valley in both its otherness and its matter-of-fact
ordinariness.