Photography and text by Andree Ljutica

The perfect illustration of suburban America’s emotional response to the pandemic.

A HIGHWIRE ACT IN WEST FLORIDA was about looking into my quarantine environment to find slices of life that felt emblematic of escape and freedom, and to perhaps locate the emotional tone of the current situation. Having been contained to a small space – in this case, my mother-in-law’s house in Florida – there came an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. Not only did our immediate environment begin to feel hemmed in, but so too did the world at large. Travel restrictions made European family feel impossibly distant, and local state lines became more than the loose geographic suggestions they once were. Our identities became suffused with time itself, as each day we became more of this period in history.

The highwire act, which took place in a large field near an artificial lake, just outside the mall, appeared to be the perfect illustration of the observed emotional response of suburban America to the pandemic. At the same time, it also represented the peculiarity of the American condition to resist any stifling of civil liberties or entertainment freedoms in the face of a global crisis. Captured with a cheap and available point-and-shoot, the black and white or limited color palette of the project contextualizes the space of American kitsch, (in this case, a fairground) with an emotionality related to wonder, and a sense of containment familiar to the quarantine.

Through form, the series explicitly tells the story of people observing a highwire act, but reveals a truer fascination with escape and even resistance in the process. Visual tension is created through the graphic depiction of the fairgrounds, further classifying the sterility and strictness of the pervading context of Covid. While on one hand the images show people careening through a vacant sky encumbered only by far away clouds, they also show people entrapped within car cars, sunroofs and observing behind glass. Together, this interplay of images aptly describes a current American cultural atmosphere of anticipation, resistance and profound boredom.