LAKESIDE by Shane Rocheleau, Gnomic Book

9.4 × 11 in
160 pages
Hardcover
Gnomic Book, 2021
First edition of 500

Lakeside is a neighborhood in Central Virginia where urban sprawl and modern culture threaten to encroach upon a traditionally conservative, blue collar way-of-life. Lakeside is also the title of Shane Rocheleau’s latest monograph, his 3rd with publisher Gnomic Book. Rocheleau began this work weeks after the 2016 presidential election and completed photographing just weeks before the insurrection at the US Capitol. Faced with the darkness of the American predicament, Rocheleau makes an attempt to bridge the divide by looking, as if bearing witness can help close this loop of human connection. Through a series of photographs of this town and its inhabitants, chaptered with consequential design, we are taken on a symbolic journey through the cyclical and sometimes dark nature of all living things.

Shane Rocheleau's most ambitious monograph to date, Lakeside tackles the historical contradictions of white supremacy as they are manifested in present-day suburban Virginia.

“Lakeside, Virginia is a psychic landscape, a representation of countless spaces initially built to feign the ‘American Exceptionalism’ writ to redact America’s contentious reality,” Rocheleau says. “Lakeside is also a place with 11,000 people doing the best they can—ugly and beautiful things alike—while drowning in the reality that dreaming gets far less than its promise.”