Joseph Rushmore (b. 1984) was born in Tulsa and raised in Ada, OK. He began making photographs in 1999 as a teenager trying to document his personal life and the rural landscape around him. For the next fifteen years he continued to quietly make photographs while working a series of manual labor jobs before dedicating fully to documentary photography in 2016. His photographs document societal collapse in America and examine religion, extremism and political upheaval. He winds a frightening path through a world enveloped in plague and a country tumbling through a reckoning of its own history via stochastic terror and violence. This work operates within the rules of our confusing information saturated world, the narrative fractured and lost, the images are depictions of nightmares, revelations and haunted beauty, photographs of political extremism, religious zealots, uprisings, insurrections and daily life in middle America.
He has been published in The New Yorker, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Intercept, Los Angeles times and others. He has published two hand made books of photography; X (cut throat) and Year of the Cockroach. In 2021 he received a scholarship to the Magnum Long Term Mentorship with Matt Black and Susan Meiselas and in 2023 he was a finalist winner of the Aftermath Grant. He has been exhibited at the Oklahoma Contemporary, Center for Public Secrets and Cameron Studios.