Weekend Portfolio: Lorena Lohr
Images and Text by Lorena Lohr
For a decade, the British-Canadian photographer Lorena Lohr has been traveling the American Southwest by bus and train, documenting the fleeting landscapes and the distinct character of the region’s built environment. Taking in everything from motels and bars to parking lots and patches of waste ground, her photographs capture unexpected and often uncanny aspects of the commonplace and mundane in the places she visits. Without ironic detachment or comment, Lohr identifies beauty and individuality in overlooked or neglected spaces that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Though she does not limit herself to any particular subject, Lohr’s wider body of work is characterised by recurring motifs: electrical wiring, colourful drinks and details of the bodywork of automobiles are just some of the hallmarks that stretch across her series and artist’s books. Language, as glimpsed in commercial signage, is another leitmotif of her photographs: generic phrases that evoke an exoticism at odds with their surroundings feature heavily, both contributing to the visual richness of her compositions and hinting at hope, longing, and isolation.
Working with 35mm colour film and a variety of inexpensive cameras, Lohr stays true to the DIY spirit that characterises much of what she chooses to photograph. To these ends, she has created a number of limited edition artist’s books, the most recent of which are Texas Blue (2018), Bar Room Paintings (2019), and Blue Springs (2018), the last published with Rough Trade Books. Tonight Lounge, a comprehensive monograph of Lohr’s work in America over the last ten years, has recently been published by Cob Gallery, London.
Lohr’s work does not expressly seek to romanticise or glamourise, instead documenting the incidental layers of narrative that build up over time in the places she visits. Her photographs celebrate the idiosyncratic traces of people’s involvement in a given area, adding up to a form of alternative portraiture.
More of Lorena Lohr’s work can be found on her website.
