In late May 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, Tulsa-based photographer Joseph Rushmore traveled to Minneapolis with his camera. After the June 2020 Trump rally in Tulsa, he drove to Portland's Black Lives Matter protests in July, sleeping in his car, shooting photos at night, and enduring physical assault alongside protestors and other journalists. And just this year, he stood right in the middle of the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He wasn't on assignment for any of these events—he just made the decision to go, and his photographs of the time exist in a space between documentation and art that he's still trying to map.
Rushmore has been photographing protests for years, from the Oklahoma teacher walkout to Standing Rock, where he says he learned a lot about the ethics of documenting a community. He built "Commentary on the Apocalypse," his first solo show, to live inside the rough, exposed brick and industrial grit of the Center for Public Secrets, where it will remain on view through August 1. (You can hear Rushmore talk about the exhibit, in conversation with his frequent collaborator Liz Blood, at the Center on July 24 at 5:30pm.) He described some of the pieces as not quite sure of themselves, or on the way to what they want to be, or otherwise in progress, imperfect, getting there.
A native of Ada, Oklahoma, Rushmore the artist tends to speak about himself in a similar manner. He's comfortable discussing his questions and doubts and worries, with little need to pump anything up (least of all his own choices) or project art-professional confidence. These times can be chaotic, broken inside, somewhere between reality and nightmare—and because he allows his work to communicate that too, he's one of the most essential, incisive, emotionally rigorous photographers working today.
Rushmore spoke with me on location at the CFPS. He wore a t-shirt that showed a cartoon of a cowboy boot kicking a swastika, underneath the words "Our Kind of Country," which got nicely to the point.
Alicia Chesser: Can you tell me about how this work and this show came about?
Joe Rushmore: Sometime in the summer of 2020 was the first time I started really having trouble figuring out how to document the things I was seeing. I didn't have words to describe what it's like to see the police in Minneapolis abandon their precinct, and then to watch it burn. And then the next night it was something crazier and crazier. What I was seeing was very grounded in reality—watching the precinct burn was a very real and tangible thing that I completely understood—but I could not quite understand how to describe it.
I got to Portland on July 25th or so. We'd had the Trump rally here by then. By that point, the uprisings had been going on for almost two months. Portland was just an incredibly surreal experience, as opposed to this thing of "we're going to burn this place down because a murderer came from here." I think it was just as called for. I don't take issue with any tactic used to fight the state. It felt right to me, but it was so real and so indescribable at the same time. And so I started looking at how to make photographs that were a little more ... I mean, it was like a nightmare acid trip circus every night.