Perpetual Care refers to a service offered by cemeteries providing long-term upkeep of one’s gravestone and plot. In his new photography monograph, Clay Maxwell Jordan inverts this phrase and applies it ironically to an American society that has failed to protect its citizens.
Jordan’s photographs those on the periphery whose predicament is exacerbated by the dubious philosophies of the rugged individual mythos of the Wild West and the pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality espoused by certain politicians. Poetic and enigmatic in equal measure, Perpetual Care touches on aspects of the religious, existential, and social in modern America.
Clay Maxwell Jordan is a photographer who has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. He is a 2019 MacDowell fellow and currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Perpetual Care is his second monograph with Fall Line Press; his first release, Nothing’s Coming Soon, was published in 2019.