There was something in the air, electric and unspoken—a low, humming tension, like a whisper from the abyss warning that everything teetered on the edge. Like the Divine spirit, ancient and knowing, pressing against my chest, telling me we had to build something real, something of worth, before the whole damn thing came crashing down. I felt like Lot, running from a city that had already sealed its fate, afraid that one glance over my shoulder would turn me to stone.
I started Liminal Spaces in 2017, a fever dream of images meant to dissect the weight of a life-altering decision—the pull of the road ahead, the ghost of what was left behind. But as the project took on a life of its own, the landscape revealed something deeper. The places I wandered weren’t just backdrops; they were omens, reflecting the slow erosion of an American mythology unraveling before my lens. The figures that emerged became echoes of Janus, the Roman god of doorways and dualities—one face looking to the past, the other to an uncertain future, caught in the ideological struggle of a nation unsure of what it wants to become.
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A dual national of the USA and Canada, Juan Carlos Correa considers himself 100% Yankee. He chooses the American SW as his home because of its metaphorical significance for our American Manifest Destiny and the plight of the middle class, where we are constantly stuck on a promise of a paradise just over yonder. The primary goal within his work is to emulate the great American authors, such as Kerouac, Steinbeck, O’Neil, and Miller. It is a new language for the post-humanist generation, the narcissists, who are paralyzed by the beauty of their reflection.
Armed with his mirrorless camera, Correa captures the spirit of our nation’s current epoch in all its disordered anxieties, depicting characters trapped in a dichotomy of hanging on to a fading past and rushing to an uncertain future. He considers himself a philosopher as much as a cinematographer/ photographer. He is a storyteller, propelling myths through his mise-en-scène.
Correa obtained his undergraduate degree in cinematic studies from the University of New Mexico and has completed his MFA in photography through the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.