Shards of America

A shard is a fragment of broken pottery, often used by archaeologists to reconstruct objects from past civilizations. In Shards of America, Canadian photographer Phil Bergerson has gathered richly detailed images from neglected corners of American's towns and small cities, and created a fascinating mosaic. Businesses, religious sects, and community groups announce their presence, offer their services, and pitch their messages, while commercial signs, graffiti, posters, and public notices blanket the surfaces of buildings and public spaces. Paintings and movie posters, dime-store novels and daily newspapers, figurines and mannequins, decals and stenciled graffiti, and children's letters and drawings are laid out as artifacts of a greater whole. Patriotism, consumerism, censorship, nostalgia for a simpler past coupled with a desire for a less complicated present...touching on all these themes, Bergerson's quietly ironic but empathetic tone encourages the reader to imagine how our own ordinary worldmight appear to viewers in a hundred or more years' time.