As we turn the pages of Sunshine Terrace, the first thing that strikes us is a strange, slightly off-centre domesticity.
It is the red eyes of a garage door, a crooked tree growing over gravel beds arranged like a mosaic, abandoned shopping trolleys or a strange triangular decoration that seems to depict an imaginary map impossible to decipher. These are the signs we must interpret in a residential neighbourhood deliberately stripped of human presence, whose inhabitants remain beyond our reach, although we recognise the inevitable traces of their existence: stucco and asphalt surfaces, metal fences, car bodies and intrusions of vegetation.
Turning her camera towards her own neighbourhood, between the vastness of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, Emily Shur takes on the role of a photographer who explores the streets on foot, concentrating her gaze on familiar surroundings. There she precisely frames surfaces, colours and light, finding genuine pleasure in composition, where forms converse with one another with quiet humour. Sunshine Terrace is a portrait of a place seen from a slightly oblique perspective, a gaze that departs from convention and delights in discovering the small details and peculiarities encountered on walks in which chance plays a fundamental role.
Emily Shur is an acclaimed photographer specialising in fine art, editorial and advertising photography, currently based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, National Geographic and Time Magazine. In 2017 she published her first monograph, Super Extra Natural.
Her photographs have been exhibited at institutions including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Hirshhorn Museum, the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Her work is also held in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sunshine Terrace is her first publication with Deadbeat Club.