George Byrne: Post Truth gathers George Byrne’s photographs of Los Angeles from the Post Truth series, made between 2015 and 2020. Published by Hatje Cantz in 2022, the book fixes its attention on the sprawling cityscape, hard-edged urbanism, and spatial leftovers produced by metropolitan growth. Byrne, an Australian artist who settled in Los Angeles in 2010, treats this dispersed terrain not as documentary evidence alone, but as raw material for a constructed image of the metropolis.
His method begins with observation and ends in recomposition. Photographs of the urban landscape are reassembled into spare collages of geometric fragments and carefully controlled color. Hard sunlight compresses depth, turning urban space into nearly painterly planes; pastel tones temper the abrasion of the built environment. The resulting pictures hover between record and invention. Their seductiveness is inseparable from a quiet instability: familiar places appear plausible, yet their spatial logic has been altered.
That tension gives the title its force. Rather than simply illustrating the political language of “post-truth,” Byrne tests photography’s own claim to describe what was there. Los Angeles becomes both subject and laboratory, a place where the spatial residue of contemporary development can be edited into an idealized surface. The work’s affinities range from Miami Beach Art Deco and Memphis design to David Hockney and Ed Ruscha, while its crisp, emphatic palette also acknowledges the image culture of Instagram. These references place the series at an instructive intersection of street observation, painting, design, and digitally conditioned seeing.
Across 144 pages, the hardcover presents more than sixty images, accompanied by a foreword from Byrne and a text by design writer Ian Volner. For collectors, its significance lies in this sustained account of a clearly bounded body of work: repetitions and variations in color, architecture, and manipulated space can be considered together rather than as isolated images. It is a focused study of how contemporary photography can transform ordinary urban matter without relinquishing its connection to the real.
