In Lost Coast, Curran Hatleberg presents an episodic narrative about Eureka, California. Intimate portraits of town and people function like a collection of short stories, building to an understanding of place. The pictures live between extremes, between the grand and the granular, between the breathtaking natural landscape and the grim realities of industrial decline.
The resulting portraits of everyday life contain stirring moments of intimacy, each frame its own micro narrative about life in the town. The pictures could be documents or dreams, but they all center on the strange beauty of an overlooked American life. An oversized golden foil stamp was selected for the cover of the book with the knowledge that it would fleck and become embedded in the fibers of the book cloth the more it was held, referencing both California's nickname and the region's distorted promises.
Curran Hatleberg received his MFA from Yale University. He has had numerous exhibitions, notably at Higher Pictures and Fraenkel Gallery. Hatleberg is the recipient of a Magnum Emergency Fund and an Aaron Siskind Grant. Hatleberg's work can be found, among others, in the collections of SF MOMA and the Center for Contemporary Photography.
