In 2018, the Dutch photographer Tony Dočekal began volunteering for months at a time with an organisation that helps the homeless and those living on the margins of society in the US west. She took this picture of Lyric, then nine years old, in a town called El País in Arizona. Lyric was living with her family in a school bus at a motorhome site. In the years since they first met, Dočekal has become friends with Lyric, and kept up with her off-grid life. Her story is one thread that runs through Dočekal’s extraordinary debut monograph of her US pictures, which she calls The Color of Money and Trees.
Her pictures look for clues to survival in places that sell myths of freedom. Some of these clues are signposted: the words on one makeshift fence declare “peace, love, violence”, while elsewhere there is the promise “spend a night not a fortune”. The work, Dočekal suggests, “explores the tension between material success and deeper fulfilment, asking if true prosperity lies in community and self-awareness rather than wealth and possessions”.
Her book’s title references the hope presented by greenbacks and greenwoods, though both are in desperately short supply here. Money is represented by a pile of sweaty dollar bills on a bed sheet; nature, meanwhile, exists as the occasional defiant cactus or a tequila lime. Still, the pictures intuit a liberation in these extremes, a sense shared by the photographer herself. Dočekal includes the occasional poetic note with her images: “She has a house plant but not a house” she will write, or “I’m scared of getting lost” or “Far into the desert where cell reception is flaky… I don’t talk to God, but I speak with strangers and sometimes even with the dust.”
