For over a decade, the British-Canadian photographer Lorena Lohr has been travelling America by bus and train, documenting the fleeting landscapes and the distinct character of the country’s diverse built environments, placing specific focus on the Southwest. Taking in everything from motels and bars to parking lots and patches of waste ground, her photographs capture unexpected and often uncanny aspects of the commonplace and mundane in the places she visits. Without ironic detachment or comment, Lohr identifies beauty and individuality in overlooked or neglected spaces that would otherwise go unnoticed. Her photographs celebrate the idiosyncratic traces of people’s involvement in a given area, adding up to a form of alternative portraiture.
Working with 35mm colour film, Lohr stays true to the DIY spirit that characterises much of what she chooses to photograph. To these ends, she has created a number of limited edition artist’s books, the most recent of which are Crystal Sands (2022), Bar Room Paintings (2019), Texas Blue (2018) and Blue Springs (2018), the last published by Rough Trade Books. She is also the co-founder of Scenic Views, a different kind of interiors magazine focusing on everyday, overlooked and forgotten interiors (2019 - present), now on its 4th issue.
Tonight Lounge, a comprehensive monograph of Lohr’s work over ten years, was published by Cob Gallery, London in 2019, along with an accompanying exhibition.
