Ryan Debolski, LIKE

LIKE

Ryan Debolski

Publisher
Gnomic Book
Year
2020
ISBN
978-0-9985180-6-0
Specifications
Hardcover
First edition
Made during a Fulbright Fellowship year in Oman
Includes essay by Jason Koxvold titled 'Raw Material: Capital and Exploitation at the Neoliberal Frontier'
Selected by Aperture for Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards

Ryan Debolski made this work during a year in Oman as part of his Fulbright Fellowship in the mid-twenty-tens. LIKE explores the physical and digital relationships of the migrant workers who build the infrastructure of Oman, a rapidly modernising country rich in oil and natural gas. These men, predominantly from East Africa and the Indian subcontinent, communicate using widely available, low-cost smartphones that help them cope with the social isolation they face while living in camps for years. As quickly as new friends are made, others disappear without a trace, never to be heard from again: workers are deported for various reasons, or shuffled around to different camps throughout the region. The book includes an essay by Jason Koxvold titled 'Raw Material: Capital and Exploitation at the Neoliberal Frontier', which lays out the work in the context of the history of representation of labour in art. In its sequencing, the book holds the men's faces alongside fragments of their digital correspondence, knitting together the physical and the digital into a single, melancholy thread.

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