Shannon Lee Castleman

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in Southeast Asia inventiveness combined with local traditions and the need to make a living have created many different types of street peddlers and itinerant occupations in most cities and towns. In recent years Southeast Asians have become more mobile with new forms of transportation, businesses have become stationary and more corporatized, now the future now looks bleak for the peripatetic entrepreneurs. For generations these small business owners have been able support their families with their mobile trades and now they are being banned from operating in many Southeast Asian cities. This project aims to help to preserve and document many of these vanishing characters that were once found on every corner through out the region.

Archival Pigment Prints, 40 x 50 inches

Hanoi về đêm is record of the profound transformation the city continues to undergo following the turbulence of Vietnam's twentieth-century history. The capital's spaces and its traditional social structures coexist, sometimes uneasily, with the signs of greater economic prosperity and an increasing consumer culture.

Part of a wider exploration of the fate of mobile businesses in Southeast Asia, these photographs explore the flip-side of Hanoi as a site of frenetic commercial activity and throw into relief the vestiges of its Colonial structures. The images reveal the process of the city's nightly hibernation as the people, vehicles, and goods, which populate every inch of its streets during the business day, begin recede in the late evening.  Pavements are washed, left abandoned and unfamiliar, and the city itself appears as a deserted stage on which urban debris forms still-lifes testifying to the day's earlier performances.

Archival Pigment Prints, 30 x 40 inches

http://www.migrantecologies.org/ 
 

This selection of images is part of a larger body of work produced for the Migrant Ecologies Project. In this project we utilized DNA timber tracking technology to trace the journey of a 1950’s teak bed that was found in a Singapore junk store, back to Muna Island, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, where the original teak trees may have grown. The work originally created for an exhibition entitled “Jalan Jati” which is Indonesian for “Teak Road”.  Jalan Jati is situated in a macro-scale, global context of deforestation and illegal logging.

The “Tree Wounds” series began during my first visit to Muna when I first noticed enormous wounds on many of the older teak trees in the conservation forest. Muna’s Conservation forests are older teak plantations that have been awarded “konservasi” or “conservation” forest status—not because of bio-diversity (which was devastated by timber planting in the 19th and 20th centuries) but because former plantations maintain the water table for the island. I was told that since felling teak in “Konservasi” forests is illegal, impoverished villagers who pass by large teak trees over a period of months will give a tree one cut with an axe after another ... until finally the tree falls or dies and no-one is to blame. 

A few months later I returned to the island with a large sheet of black velvet and wandered the edges of the forests taking portraits of all the wounded trees I encountered.

Archival Pigment Prints, 40 x 50 inches

In a synchronized event that took place at 5:30 p.m. on November 25th, 2009 on Calle Principal in the neighborhood of Santo Sotos in Camagüey, Cuba, eight families agreed to have video cameras placed on their balconies, to film and be filmed by each other.

After the filming ended participating residents, and the volunteers that helped set up the cameras, shared a meal together.

The project was commissioned and produced in conjunction with the International Video Art Festival of Camagüey. It was originally exhibited at Galería Julián Morales de la UNEAC Camagüey. 

In a synchronized event that took place in Singapore on a Sunday afternoon at 4:10pm, 2008 I set up 16 video cameras in flats that were directly opposite one another, thus breaking down an invisible barrier between residents, the empty space between them. Jurong West Street 81 addressed the unthinkable and unexpected: it allowed Housing Development Board (HDB) residents to view and be viewed, with tacit recognition and permission; it is an artwork about neighbors discovering neighbors, looking at each other from across a void.

After the filming of the project was complete all the participating residents were invited to share a meal together in the void deck of one of the buildings. 

For the installation the videos were shown on 16 individual on monitors arranged in corresponding pairs. Each video was edited down to 13 minutes. The editing was synchronized so that when put together you would hear the audio recorded inside the flat along with what was filmed of them by the adjacent neighbor. 

The monitors were placed on pedestals, which ranged in height and corresponded with the floor of the flat. 

In 2004 I accepted a position to teach photography in the Middle East.  Two years later I moved from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to Singapore. Since then I have traveled to more than 20 countries. I have taken countless photographs all from the prospective of being an outsider.  During one of my first trips back to the USA I realized the way I looked at my own country had changed.  The distance and variety of experiences during my travels had made me feel like an outsider in my own homeland. During my subsequent visits home I have tried to capture the moments when I feel like a stranger in my own country. This is a long-term project. My travels have given me a unique distance and fresh perspective on the county I once called home. 

Archival Pigment Prints, 20 x 30 inches

Relevant Case Notes was inspired by an experience I had soon after moving to San Francisco, which impelled me to investigate the number of homeless deaths that occur, almost daily, on the city's sidewalks. Using a report put together by the medical examiner concerning homeless deaths in San Francisco from 1997-1999, I began photographing the actual sights where people’s bodies were found. The deeper I went into this project the more layers I have uncovered. While this project does address some of the isolation and politics surrounding death in an urban society it also begins to create a different kind of map of the city of San Francisco. By providing factual information from institutional documents that correspond to individual case numbers included on each image, I hopefully allow the viewer to have a dual experience with each image. Everyday we walk through the streets completely unaware of what has happened beneath our feet. By informing my viewer about these particular stories, what before they may have seen only as an innocuous section of concrete, then becomes the last story in someone’s life.