Mikel Bastida: Anarene

Mikel Bastida: Anarene is a cinematic meditation on how settings and physical realities are shaped by fictional and popular narratives.

In the spirit of referencing the ghost town in Archer County, Texas, depicted in Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel The Last Picture Show, the author traveled the country in search of images and stories that cinema has left behind. The photographs show us America beaten by history: a land devoured by its own myth, landscapes that become a chronicle of the power of cinema, images that tell us of places that are not important for what they are, but for what they represented. Anarene presents a territory filled with lost and forgotten people and objects, their stories survive, marginalized, suspended in a time and space that has been taken away from them. United States used as a background in the stories, this volume highlights these fragments found in the ruins of fiction.

The Spanish photographer Mikel Bastida (born 1982) makes staged photographs inspired by cinema and history. In this latest book of photographs, he constructs a new vision of the United States through cinematic references.