Eli Durst’s ”The Community” hovers a haunting line between what is real, what is imagined, and what falls somewhere in between.

Photographers often consider themselves storytellers. Amongst many photographers of his generation, the work of Eli Durst proposes a new definition of narrative and the documentary photograph; one more sprawling and supple and interpretive without the self-imposed ethic of ‘objectivity, without pious obligations to fact. The work slithers through loopholes of fact and fiction, and with disarming sleight of hand and stealth presence, accumulating evidence and masking visible purpose.

Looking at a photograph from The Community can feel as if walking into the wrong apartment, suspended in a social fabric without clear definition (nor even the certainty that one is still in the general present). The work disorients while seeming very, very familiar. Durst is a folklorist of our self-absorbed, flattened, culture; the eternal middle-brow.

Durst’s solo exhibition of The Community is on view at Foley Gallery through April 4th.

Stephen Frailey in conversation with Eli Durst