Introducing Matthew Casteel
American born, Matthew Casteel (M L Casteel) is an award-winning photographer and educator whose work focuses on the perils and triumphs of the human condition. Casteel’s first book, American Interiors, was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards: First Photobook Prize.
The late Michael Wolf selected American Interiors as his favourite photobook of 2018 for Photo-Eye and Bryan Schutmaat included it among his 2018 favourites for the Photobookstore.
Casteel attended the Hartford Art School International Limited Residency Photography Program and gained an MFA in Photography in 2015. His work has been featured in TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, CNN, and the Guardian, amongst other publications.
www.mlcasteel.com | @mlcasteel
About ‘American Interiors’
American Interiors depicts the psychological repercussions of war and military service through images of the interiors of cars owned by USA veterans.
Through working with veterans over a five-year period, Casteel became aware of the subtle indicators of past traumatic experience. He also recognized that the condition in which we live can often be a signifier of our well-being, and that even the state of car interiors can be seen as a manifestation of human interiors.
American Interiors explores the area between “the circumstantial and the evident” and the work resides in the space that separates the slickly produced military recruitment ads from the statistics about rates of veteran homelessness and suicide. Casteel balances the empathy he feels for those who have survived the military experience, with a deep sense of outrage towards America’s industrial military complex and the institutionalized violence of warfare.
Reviews
The book, which features essays Jörg Colberg and Ken MacLeish, has been widely reviewed.
In a ‘highly recommended’ review on the ASX website Brad Feuerhelm writes: “American Interiors feels at a quick glance like a foray into the typological studies of the Bechers that have morphed into a Google Dream version of a nightmare that Hunter S. Thompson would have if he were around to see what is happening in the present field of American culture.”
Sean O’Hagen, The Guardian:
“What is audacious about Casteel’s approach is that there are no portraits of veterans in the book. Instead, while working as a valet parker at a veteran’s hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, where he now lives, he began surreptitiously shooting the interiors of their cars. The result is a grimly powerful, extended metaphor for the neglect and decay that makes their daily lives at home a dogged extension of their lives at war.”
Loring Knoblauch, The Collector Daily:
“What I like about this project, and about Casteel’s execution, is that it takes a simple photographic subject and transforms it into a rich, multi-layered study of something outside the pictures themselves. He’s also been careful not to offer a visual parable that is too obvious or one-sided; there is indeed plenty of discouraging neglect in his pictures, but there are also moments of hope, which provide some counterweight to the dark conclusions we might try to draw. It is this open-endedness that will draw me back to this book in the future, as its images have more subtleties yet to discover.”
Read Coralie Kraft’s, LensCulture interview with M L Casteel.