Randi Malkin Steinberger: No Circus [Hardcover]

No Circusbrings together photographs by Los Angeles–based Randi Malkin Steinberger (born 1960) of buildings tented for termite fumigation around Los Angeles. After moving to the city in the early ‘90s, she encountered these shrouded structures and began to stop and photograph them, knowing that the tent might be undraped at any given moment.
Steinberger was intrigued by the way the colors and shapes of the tents showed off the forms below and highlighted the beauty of the poor plants on the outside, still flourishing, unaware that they were slowly being poisoned. Beyond the intended purpose of fumigation, these tents unwittingly allow us to stop and contemplate not only architectural form and the meaning of home, but also the Southern California lifestyle more broadly.What may have appeared to be the first signs of some cheerfully unhinged suburban dystopia, in fact, had a much more practical explanation: the tents were covering houses being fumigated. They are a familiar sight for Angelenos, Steinberger soon found, and over the course of a decade she came across hundreds of them driving around the city. In her new book, No Circus,she collects over 60 photographs capturing the houses temporarily shrouded in colorful tarpaulin.The photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger captured the incongruously cheerful fumigation tents that cover buildings being treated for termites in Los Angeles.[A] Ruschaean portrait of the particular strangeness of Los Angeles and its suburbs... The images fit snugly in the tradition of looking at the sun-stroked Southern California landscape as an alien terrain, the same surreal sweep that Bruce Davidson encountered when he shot palm trees growing in airport parking lots.At once material and imagined, fantastic and ordinary, Malkin Steinberger's No Circus opens the door to a world which is absurd in its anxiety, delightful in its dissolution, and, perhaps, already just next door.Steinberger’s phlÓ+