The Reversal

In The Reversal, Jennifer Boles engages the archive – and foregoes making new images in favour of repurposing existing ones. Photographs of the reversal of the Chicago River at the turn of the nineteenth century unfurl to an appropriately machine-like rhythm. The result is a haunting, black-and-white evocation of the efforts of anonymous men whose collective labour – and, often, lives – went into this capital-driven reorganisation of nature.