EXIT MAGAZINE, A WORLDWIDE BENCHMARK IN THE PHOTOGRAPHY FIELD, HAS PUBLISHED ITS 50TH ISSUE, WHICH EXPLORES PHOTOGRAPHERS' VIEWS OF SOME CONTEMPORARY DISASTERS.

Chernobyl, Fukushima, Detroit, Prestige, Hiroshima, Lebanon, Palestine...are just a few of the names of now universal disaster. Disasters that have taken place in specific places, and that are lodged in our recent memory like black holes where the destruction and progress of the human being are suggestively blended together. Now then, what are the reasons behind man's irrepressible attraction to these images? Under what conditions can a view of destruction be considered art? Is there by chance anything in our society that cannot be considered a potential ruin?

This and other questions arise in EXIT's 50th issue, which examines disaster as an aesthetic category that transcends times and spaces and is directly related to that perverse gaze so characteristic of the human being, wherein the horror does not preclude our feeling attracted by the beauty of the pictures.

Through five themes (nature, decline, accident, progress and war), EXIT #50 proposes an experimental typological classification to replace the conventional stylistic or historical art analysis of the ruin that follows disaster. This catalogue is but a sketch.  As Brian Dillon writes, "Ruins are structures or spaces where past, present and future regress spectacularly, places where time, act and memory conspire to produce something that can very well be beautiful (or kitsch), but that essentially express a revealing chaos".


Editorial:
Photographing the End of the World. Rosa Olivares

Essay:
Flat Death. Brian Dillon

Artists: Eric Aupol - Jonás Bel - Raúl Belinchón - Laura Glusman -  Zeng Han - Guillaume Herbaut - Jan Kempenaers - Shai Kremer - Michael Light - Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre - Rania Matar - George Osodi - Mathieu Pernot - Andreas Seibert - Manuel Sendón - Jane & Louise Wilson.

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