Greg Kahn
The Sleep of Reason
The window on the high-speed train to Naples, Italy, frames an idyllic picture – rolling hills, sun-covered vineyards, and fertile farmland. But beneath the fertile soil of this region lies something insidious, an amalgam of industrial, hospital and nuclear waste that is spiking cancer rates and spreading alarm across Southern Italy.
The setting is Campania, Italy, and the Naples coastline, former playground of Roman emperors.
The region’s natural beauty has been spoiled by the trash on its streets. Piles of garbage line the highways, farmland, and playgrounds. Heaps of waste under overpasses, filled with industrial by-products, are torched in large fires with billowing poisonous black smoke, a practice perfected by organized crime. Now, after decades of these practices, the consequences are emerging – reports of tumors, scientific studies suggesting links, testimony of mob turncoats pointing to millions of tons of dumping. Everyone is scared, inhabiting what feels likes a living graveyard.
Bio
Greg Kahn (b. 1981) is an American documentary photographer. Kahn grew up in a small coastal town in Rhode Island, and attended The George Washington University in Washington D.C. In August of 2012, Kahn co-founded GRAIN Images with his wife Lexey, and colleague Tristan Spinski.
Kahn’s work concentrates on issues that shape personal and cultural identity. His clients include NationalGeographic.com, The New York Times, Nike, stern, The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post Magazine. In 2011, Kahn was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the foreclosure crisis in Florida and in 2014, with The Sleep Of Reason, he was shortlisted for the Emerging Photographer Fund.
Be there no joy at all in this grim, forsaken, place? Not one person willing to stand up, look reality in the face and to laugh out loud even about the absurdities of this life? Or to smile in the hope that life still holds at least a touch of meaning and promise? Not one?
Much of life is grim and hard, but the grim and hard photograph has become such a stereotype that grim and hard all alone with no counter-balance has lost much of its impact. To me, anyway.
Really good pictures, by the way. Well composed. Powerful moments caught.
……..misery guts stuff sure runns rampant in the emerging photographer funds shortlist.
I feel exhausted having viewed this piece. Now I want to bang my head against a wall. Grimm plus plus.