Estimated Release Date: Spring 2023

ISBN 978-1-7339499-8-9 

Few Weeks in May (Portrait of American Psyche) is an unusual album. It’s a serial portrait that uses images and text, both original and appropriated, to weave two parallel satirical narratives. One narrative follows two American photographers and academics on their quest to a mining town in Zambia. Like two white ostriches, they land in Africa to tell a story of the landscape tainted with lead. The deeper they dig through the layers of colonial legacy, the more their savior complex and naïvetés come to surface. The text is part journal, part research, part discovery, and it ultimately exposes their failure to understand and document. The other narrative follows a woman who works in a chain store in Cleveland, OH. Her stream-of-consciousness social media posts range from ostentatious reflections describing mundane events, to heated discussions regarding current political and social issues. Choosing between sushi and taco for lunch becomes an existential dilemma and is sandwiched between calls for violence against political opponents...Images that accompany the text fuse photographic techniques, genres, and formal conventions: from faded salt prints to fashion-like color slides, appropriations, and drawings.

Text by Donald Mengay