Place Photographers Research

http://www.anthonygoicolea.com/NewAnthonySite/shelter_series/ice_storm.htm

"'Sheltered Life' is a series of digitally constructed photographs that depicts fairytale-like, timeless places inhabited by contemporary characters. All of the landscapes are punctuated with alternative makeshift living spaces that are made up of, as well as incorporated into, the surrounding environment. Many of the figures in the photos are reduced in size and are almost swallowed by their surroundings. The characters are often masked, hooded, or seen from the back in order to preserve their identity. They operate as a single unit, living in situations that simultaneously reference backyard play dates and hippie communes, as well as detainment camps and disaster relief areas. Their living arrangements and concealed identities cement their status as outcasts or refugees from society. The composed wooded scenes depicted in many of the photos are bisected into two halves and are often times seen as a cross-section of themselves. In images like “Ice Storm” or “Dead Tree Forest” the bottom half of the photo is relegated to a violent underworld of roots, dirt, rock and earth which are stratified into a multi-layered platform or stage on which scenes are acted out. The shelters that inhabit the photos range in form from tree houses, lean-to’s and caves, to cardboard forts or dilapidated barns. Their playfulness undermines the sort of desperate haphazard construction and deeper desire to migrate or live on the outside of communities. The sense of foreboding tinged with playful fantasy characteristics of many of the photographs is mimicked in a suite of complex figurative drawings on Mylar. Androgynous figures an indeterminate age float on top of and through each other in a layered composition separated by planes of semi-opaque vellum paper. The ghostlike figures are caught in free-floating, awkward, transitional states: sometimes their images are doubled; sometimes they seem like as much animal as human. As the figures migrate through the forest in small packs, they fade in and out of each other in a series of tentative lines that read like traces of pervious drawings and refer to memory and transition." 

This image creates a sense of isolation.  This group of people out in the middle of no where together, creates a bonding experience.  They have nothing else around them to entertain them and must use each other to keep busy.  I think his intention about this space was to show closeness in isolation, and also possibly a sense of comfort in an uncomfortable space.  I think this image is effective because, being from Michigan, I have seen weather like this and have gone up north with friends when it's cold and snowy.  It gives me a feeling of friendship and warmth even in an unpleasant, cold place.