santiago mostyn

ok, i can hardly believe this project is even real:

the miss rockaway armada:
"we are floating down the mississippi river on a raft we built from trash. the catch is that we don’t know much about boats or rivers, and we don’t have any money. we know we are blowing crazy hot air, but if the idea makes your eyes glow like coals then you understand what we’re doing. for the last 4 months we’ve been meeting, making phone calls, holding benefits, drawing blueprints and building like crazy. we collected scrap wood from all over the city and hammered it together piece by piece. we had benefit parties and socked away brown rice and dented cans. We organized mostly out of new york because that’s where we live, but we have folks from the west coast as well as the midwest."

zia sent me a link to this crazy artist's collaborative not only because it's exactly the kind of thing that would get zia excited, but because santiago mostyn documented the project with some really beautiful photographs. his images reference some truly important photographers compositionally - sally mann and jock sturges color work comes to mind - but themeatically they remind me of nan goldin or dare i say stephen shore, and alec soth is all over these images. by the looks of it, these pictures were taken with a large format camera which i note mostly because he must have had to lug it around on a raft made entirely out of trash (no small feat).