fictional demographic

During my third year of my undergraduate degree in autumn of 2017, I was part of a group show titled “Pavlov’s Dogs” at Downtown Albuquerque's Harwood Arts Center. At the time I had been using my camera in two primary contexts. The first, professionally as part of my work for the University of New Mexico's Marketing Department, shooting for the brand I'd helped refresh and leading The Lobo Life marketing campaign which was becoming a student organization at that time. The second was photographing my friends at parties we'd throw. The venues ranged from dorms to houses to the middle of nowhere in New Mexico's high desert. That second avenue was producing increasingly interesting images, and with this show on the horizon I was eager to find a way to make these playful photos into some sort of "serious" body of work to display in the show.

That was the first and last use of the word "serious" in the process of creating the satirical "Fictional Demographic" Magazine, acting as if the group show was actually an release party celebrating the Magazine's November 2017 Special Issue: The Youth Now. The show included a wall covered in prints of "past issues", large scale prints of the current issue cover, and a dozens of the complete 62pg plus cover magazine available for purchase, all staged in the entry alcove posing as my childhood sitting room. Pictured below, the past issue wall and I shot by my brother Ben on his film camera.

the magazine

The magazine itself is 62 pages of content digging deep through photographs and faux-journalistic writing into a partially imagined (partially true) community of college kids engineering their own party scene in the New Mexico desert. The photographs feature my friends at the parties we'd throw and attend, casting them as the main characters who serve to drive the fabricated story. In every sense it's meant to be a lighthearted satirical play, poking fun at the fine art world I was dipping my toes into with the show, and at National Geographic which I'd grown up adoring and was dismayed to see going down some questionable roads given the recent purchase by billionaire Robert Murdock that marked the end of 127 years of nonprofit science journalism. It was a joy to design and imagine my work in the pages of the magazine I'd worshipped as a kid, but of course such silly, unscientific reporting could only exist in a world where the once-creditable publication was nose diving into climate-change denying distraction stories. The resulting work is a smorgasbord of not-so-untrue stories that defined the less academic, but no-less-artistic, times at university. Special thanks to my friends who willingly let me ruin any possible futures as politicians, and my advanced photography professor Meg Gould for her guidance, patience, proofreading, and sense of humor throughout. Scroll through the entire magazine using the navigation arrows below.

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the exhibition

As a boy, our living room coffee table was a library in wait for two young curious boys, and National Geographics were the primary literature on offer. Those magazines inspired much of my wanderlust and planted seeds that have since grown into my passions for photography, writing, reading, and a fascination with the natural world. For the exhibition, I claimed the entryway alcove to create a nook reminiscent of our family living room growing up, complete with magazines to read, furniture to sit, and a rug to tie the room together. On the walls were the past issues, the current issue cover, and at similarly life-size scale, a photo of my photo professor Meg Gould posing as a Pavlovian figure of sorts as the culmination of an in-joke that had led to the group show title.

the "past issues"

Thinking of the walls of Time Magazine in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I was committed to filling an entire wall of the gallery with "past issues" of the imagined magazine. I paired random photographs from my archive with whatever random work of NatGeo-esque titles and phrases, sometimes just resulting to jokes or references I knew my friends featured in the magazine would appreciate it, sometimes imaging my work being of some use in articles tacking topics more scientific than this "current issue".