Eli Durst’s The Four Pillars takes as its starting point a faith-based self-help group in Newtown, Connecticut, which he photographed over several years. Its members, affluent suburbanites whose lives looked settled from the outside, felt unfulfilled and directionless, and met weekly in church basements to discuss spiritual and secular strategies for finding meaning and purpose, and to deconstruct the markers of success, progress and identity within middle-class American society.

Durst’s staged, inventive images build on this self-critical structure by inventing scenarios that interrogate the relationship between the individual and the group, the norms we aspire to, and the social gravity that holds the two in alignment. Family portraits, team-bonding exercises, pregnancy groups, school gyms, amateur theatre and county fairs: the raw material is ordinary, but the photographs amplify its strangeness, through a lens at once factual, fictional, banal and absurd. In this way Durst scrutinises aspirational American fantasies of happiness, self-improvement and individuality in a provocative critique of social rituals, groups and norms.

Eli Durst (b. 1989) is an American artist whose work explores the social forces and group dynamics that shape the suburban American experience. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and featured in Aperture, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue and The Atlantic, among others. His first monograph, The Community (Morel, 2020), received Special Mention for the Author’s Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2020.

Loose Joints published The Four Pillars in October 2022 as a flexi-bound faux-leather hardcover: 144 pages, 235 by 270 mm, with seventy tritone plates and a prose piece by Rick Moody. The book was covered by outlets including i-D, British Journal of Photography, Creative Review, Wallpaper and Lenscratch.