The Fourth Estate

Jeremiah Ariaz

Statement:

The Fourth Estate features newspaper offices across my home state of Kansas (USA). The photographs celebrate the civic function, labor, and technology at the heart of local journalism, while also documenting an industry under threat, as are the ideals of democracy the industry upholds.

The U.S. is losing an average of two newspapers a week; a quarter of the nation’s papers have closed in the last 15 years. Kansas lies at the precipice of the nation’s news desert, at its most arid across the Western half of the country.

Since 2022 I have photographed over 100 newspaper offices. These images are both an ode and an elegy, a collective portrait of my home state in the geographic center of the nation, and a representation of community newspapers across the United States.

About the artist:

Jeremiah Ariaz received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His photographs examine the constructs of American identity within personal, community, and political contexts.

Ariazis a recipient of numerous awards and grants, including an ATLAS grant, the Michael P. Smith Award for Documentary Photography from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the 2018 South Arts Finalist Prize and he was named the 2018 Louisiana State Fellow. His photographs have been featured in publications including Oxford American, The Paris Review and The New York Times. His writing has been published in the the Flint Hills Field Journal, Southern Cultures and The Washington Post.

His photographs have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including venues such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX), Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA), Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, GA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Jacksonville, FL), the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (Durham, NC), Zeitgeist Gallery (Nashville, TN), Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art (Manhattan, KS), the Acadiana Center For The Arts (Lafayette, LA), Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN), B Gallery (Rome, Italy), Photographic Gallery (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico) The Foreign Correspondents’ Club (Hong Kong, China).

A monograph of his photographs, Louisiana Trail Riders (2018) is available from UL Press. His most recent publication, The Kansas Mirror: The Fourth Estate in the Heart of America (2023 )features newspaper offices in Kansas.

Dates:

October 5 - 26, 2024. Opening October 5, 5-8pm.