Softcover, 112 pages (99 color photographs), 21 cm x 19 cm. ISBN: 9781943679119.
Riviera: Photographs of Palm Springs
BY John Brian King
Riviera documents the eerie fragments of existence left behind in one city. John Brian King photographed Riviera from 2016 to 2018 in Palm Springs, California, and its surroundings; a full-time resident at the time, he used a cheap instant film camera to give his photographs a unique, washed-out, hazy aesthetic. King depicts a city that is frozen in a visually arresting state of decline, cataloguing the totems of an absurd civilization. “I wanted to photograph the Palm Springs that I lived in and interacted with every single day,” King writes, “the beautiful, the mundane, the ugly, the hot desolate nature of Coachella Valley. I wasn’t interested in the tourism-board view of Palm Springs, of martinis by the swimming pool and candy-colored, Instagram-ready desert art installations. I was interested in the debris – architectural and natural – left behind by generations of people who lived in or visited Palm Springs to escape, to exist, to die.”
John Brian King is a photographer, filmmaker, designer, and writer. His previous photography books — LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles, 1980-84 and Nude Reagan — were also published by Spurl Editions. His photography has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Buzzfeed, Lenscratch, Amadeus, Flavorwire, AnOther, WeHeart, L'Œil de la Photographie, Impose, KCET’s Artbound, and Yet Magazine.
“The images do something that many of the best photographs do; they make the familiar look strange and the strange look familiar. Palm Springs looks strange enough to begin with, and King makes it look stranger still. This is not the Palm Springs we know — in fact, it’s probably better than that. So much that is quintessentially Palm Springs, all the obvious stuff, remains well outside the frame.”
“[Riviera . . . ] features 99 color photographs of odd bits of cityscape and desolate pieces of landscape that feel like a far more honest visual assessment of the city than the glossy travel lens through which Palm Springs is so frequently rendered. It is rife with moments of sharp absurdity: the odd public monuments and majestic place names that don’t quite deliver on their glamorous promises. A keeper.”
Reviews & Features
Geoff Nicholson, Los Angeles Review of Books
Carolina A. Miranda, Los Angeles Times
The Eye of Photography / L'Œil de la Photographie
BuzzFeed Newsletter / Lisa Davidson, WeHeart
Willson Cummer, New Landscape Photography
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, Le Littéraire / Xavier Aragonès Blog
Belle Hutton, AnOther Magazine / Bildersturm
Uncertain Magazine / Spurl Editions Blog