Bio
Matthew Besinger is a photographer living in New York City and based in Tucson, Arizona. His projects take place during periods of heightened reality: self-consuming holidays, the upheaval of disaster, fringes of growth, and in moments of public and domestic fantasy. His first book, Dead Desert Night, is a nighttime survey of the surreal expansion that has undone the Sonoran Desert from the border with Mexico to central Arizona. The project was in production for five years. Required techniques were so odd and protracted (no lights, slow emulsions, subjects only revealed by time-lapse) that his basic photographic knowledge "evaporated" during that time. Growing up on the edge of Chicago left an indelible imprint: to the East were the city and suburbs; to the West, a gulf of farmland overlaid with an endless web of backroads. Fascinated with the histories of those areas- and especially by points where man and nature intersect- Besinger turned into a wanderer, roaming margins and boundaries, searching for folkways and personal mythologies. He studied Poetry under Boyer Rickel and Steve Orlen at the University of Arizona, who taught of space and reader exploration, notions he brings to his photographs (what's *not there as much as what is). He is currently at work on a photobook of American Holidays, documenting the collective anxiety for escape and cultural invention from which we generate imaginary worlds.