Please welcome renowned photographer Eli Durst to the shop to celebrate his third monograph, THE CHILDREN'S MELODY, out this fall from Gnomic Book. Not only is Eli a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, but he is also that rare thing: a true local, born and raised in Hyde Park.

Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

Austin Classical Guitar's Youth Orchestra will also be giving a performance.

About the book

There’s a concept in communist China called zhuxuanlu, which refers to a central melody of Chinese life. While some level of independence or deviation is acceptable, everyone should exist within certain morally and politically acceptable parameters, in a kind of productive harmony.

In THE CHILDREN'S MELODY, Eli Durst explores the very serious absurdities of collective identity formation, through photographs made in environments including cotillion groups, dance practices, ROTC training, and school performances.

When read together, these images defamiliarize everyday life, questioning the relationship between the individual and the institution, between the margins and the center. In sequence, they lay bare how invisible cultural forces shape us into who we become. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, which is itself a reformulation of Sartre: “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?"

About the artist

Eli Durst is a photographer based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at UT's College of Fine Arts. Eli received an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art and is the winner of the 2016 Aperture Portfolio Prize, a 2017 Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, a 2019 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. Eli is the author of two monographs, The Community and The Four Pillars. Eli’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and Texas Monthly, among others.

Eli will be joined by Alex Klein, Head Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin. Prior to joining The Contemporary, Klein served as the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania. Recent curatorial efforts include Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses and Jiab Prachakul: Sweet Solitude.