Pre-order Campaign Launches for Daniel Mirer's New Book Indifferent West
Motel Rio Grande, New Mexico by Daniel Mirer
Daniel Mirer’s early pre-order campaign and book launch is now live for his photographic research project, Indifferent West, created in collaboration with Snap Collective!
Reserve your official copy of Mirer’s latest publication, which showcases the complete collection of photographs from his ongoing Indifferent West series. Featuring more than 120 stunning photographs taken over 30 years during Mirer’s periodic road trips through the American Southwest, the book is enriched by compelling texts, including an extensive interview with the Daniel Mirer by Winke Wiegersma, curator of Digital Programmes at FOAM and a long-time collaborator with Elliott Gallery.
Through Mirer’s photographs, this remarkable book explores themes of Desert Semiotics, Cutout Cowboys, The Apocalyptic Sublime, Hyperreal Landscapes, and Mirages or Simulacra Deserts, among others. It also intersects with pressing social topics, including tourism, indigeneity, settler colonialism, and the politics of water.
The official book signing and launch will coincide with Daniel Mirer’s solo exhibition at Our Gallery, scheduled for September 2025.
"Indifferent West" – My project as a whole: I have always been fascinated by deserts. I see them as teeming with activity. My eye is always drawn to the tension between the abstract beauty and the concrete simplicity of the Western landscape. I don't see the American desert as a sandy sea or an abandoned wasteland but as communicating loudly with lines and shapes in space, accentuating its graphic nature.
The American West is deeply inscribed in our national unconscious. It is portrayed and re-portrayed in countless movies, commercials, TV shows, and books. It is hard not to see in the West what we have always already seen about it. Much of the photography that historically focuses on the West has explored its formal qualities or documented its inhabitants, its development, or similarly useful subjects and topics.
However, my photographic project, "Indifferent West," offers a combination of these approaches to the West and its desert landscapes. My primary combination is to use the aesthetic—the formal topographical exploration, in vivid color—to draw the viewer into considering contemporary social and environmental concerns, such as the never-ending struggle over water in an arid landscape. I use irony and pathos, found in the topography itself, to draw attention to the stubbornness of the land and its indifference to our human attempts to change it. My project is an unending exploration of the American West.
- Daniel Mirer
To pre-order Daniel Mirer’s new book, click the button or scan the QR code below.
Stay tuned for more information on the official Book Launch and Exhibition at Elliott Gallery!