Review of Suddenly, Where We Are Now by Molly Dilworth
      Lightly Illegal: A Letter from the Most Elegant Public Bathroom in Southeast Portland
      The Fillip Review, Spring 09



"While admittedly having trespassed to get some of her photos,
the photographer Zoe Crosher is involved with a riskier set of
questions involving mythologies, manifest destiny, and the ways
in which we collectively suspend disbelief. In her Transgressing
The Pacific (2008) series, Crosher photographs sites in Los Angeles
at the edge of the Pacific Ocean where people have gone beyond the
physical border of the country, into the sea, and their death. These
photographic depictions are drawn from the lives of fictional characters -
such as the site where Roger Wade drowned in the 1973 Rahmond Chandler's 
novel The Long Goodbye - as well as the lives of real people - such as the
site of Natalie Wood's disappearance off Catalina Island. Crosher captures
only the empty landscape where the disappearance occurred. These are not
reenactments; the subjects are present only in their absence. Crosher's
photographs violate a fiction we become complicit in when we watch a movie
or particiate in pop culture. By looking at actors through a quotidian lens, 
Crosher introduces uncertainty into America's collective fantasy, undermining
the myth of the "Golden State." The philosophy of America is historically
tied to theland and the constant expansion of territory decreed, according to
the founding fathers, by Providence and known as Manifest Destiny. Crosher's
photographs unravel the mythical structure of the American Dream by depicting
the physical and psychological rift that occurs when endless expansion meets
an uncrossable border." - Molly Dilworth