The End is Near, Here
Michael Dressell, Hartmann Books, £35

HELL has reserved a ringside seat for Michael Dressel. 

He seeks out places that most of never see, and he always has his camera with him to photograph the damned as they struggle through their daily lives.

His camera captures provocative images in Europe, Africa and Asia, but these do not show the disturbing chaotic power of the 21st century US hellscape in which we are drifting towards our destruction. 

He also has a keen sense of irony. There is no need for captions. This album is a self-explanatory narrative, of a journey into the abyss, to quote the title of Jack London’s famous 1903 novel, The People of the Abyss.

Michael Dressel first worked as a sound editor in the Hollywood film industry for several decades, “at a time,” he says, “before Hollywood became as ugly and corporate as the rest of this Walmart nation.”

The film industry builds artificial fake worlds in which an army of professionals work together to create a credible fiction. Dressel’s photographs are the opposite, a reflection of real dramas on the street. His photographs are an antidote to the artificiality he helped create on screen, a counterbalance to his job in the “distraction industry.”

When you see only one or two of Dressel’s photos, you might think that they are happy coincidences because the photographer was in the right place at the right time — but he has managed to do this countless times. When he is out walking, he always has his camera with him and his eyes open. Years of experience allow him to anticipate developing situations. 

The incredible detail he reveals gives his images a resonance, a multilayered meaning that makes them so remarkable. However, Dressel says that the most important skill he has taken from the world of film is the ability to cut mercilessly. 

He says: “Sometimes I wait when I see someone approaching and something or someone interesting is already in my field of vision. It’s important to position yourself correctly for a shot … Recognising in advance the outlines from certain angles and an object (subject) moving through them creates the expressive power of an image. What the meaning could be is initially only a hunch, a feeling that turns out to be right or wrong or sometimes even unexpected.”

Michael Dressel was born in the GDR in 1958 and studied set design at the art school in Weissensee, although he was not happy in the GDR and eventually managed to leave. However, something of the ideological impact of the GDR seems to have rubbed off in his photography, which is characterised by a sharpened social conscience and deep humanity. 

Despite having now lived in Los Angeles for 38 years, his view of the US is still that of an outsider, with an ability to see and feel things that have become invisible to a native. However, over these decades he has noticed how society has changed radically: “I call the form of capitalism we have now ‘post-competitive cannibalism,’ which a large part of the population cannot cope with,” he says.

“It generates a lot of anger, which is channelled by unscrupulous politicians, preachers, media people and other parasites. The forces that keep the system running offer no significant improvement to the lives of ordinary people, so they exploit cultural issues to divide the population and maintain control. This has turned the country into a completely dysfunctional shit show full of hateful nastiness and grotesque stupidity.”

His images are right up to date, with their references to Donald Trump, evangelical extremism, addiction, gun culture and much more. But they are more than simply social comment, each one has an iconic quality all of its own. It is impossible to single out any single image, every one becomes seared on your retina.

Dressel’s images capture so much detail that it is almost too much to bear. He literally rubs our noses in this flip-side of paradise. Every wrinkle on the faces, every hair on a man’s chin and each blade of grass forces us to see what we would perhaps prefer not to.

In this, the world’s wealthiest country, so many citizens are outcasts, degraded and abandoned. Dressel’s interwoven landscapes of desolation, often strewn with the detritus of human habitation, symbolise the possible future of this nation. 

A single shot captures the moment that expresses the dire situation in which Dressel sees the US at this crucial point in its history. His landscapes also paint a vision of where the US could be heading. The myths of freedom, of unlimited opportunity and dreams of fabulous wealth come to an end in his post-apocalyptic landscapes.

He says: “For me, the American landscape of the West shows the harshness and mercilessness of the universe. Sometimes you might as well be on Mars, and in a way you are. The landscapes present the discarded remains of human presence. For me, these places show the state of this country as much as the faces of the people I meet. The people, the society and even the landscape feel downright exhausted.”

“What jumps out at me everywhere is poverty and decay, extreme nationalism, an omnipresent pseudo-Christian religion that elsewhere would be considered a moronic cult, gun madness combined with aggressive paranoia and general moral decay. Not a happy combination. I have a strong feeling that the country has reached a tipping point and I am afraid of what that will bring.”