AMC2 Issue 13: The Greatest Show on Earth

Designed and edited by Kalev Erickson

Year: 2018
Edition: First edition of 250
Pages: 44 + A3 poster
Dimensions: 29 x 36m + 40 x 32cm poster
Format: Softcover

The circus, during the height of its popularity, attracted huge numbers of people. These audiences were transported into an extraordinary world of pure entertainment and fantasy. There remain very few people who can still recall that experience firsthand, and yet most of us have a perception of what the circus was all about.

On the 250th anniversary of what is widely regarded as the advent of the modern circus, this exhibition doesn’t aim to provide an accurate historical representation but instead celebrates the essential ingredients involved in creating any truly spectacular show beneath the ‘big top’.

The images here are drawn together from assorted collections within the Archive of Modern Conflict and include the obligatory clowns, jugglers, magicians, acrobats, freaks, performing animals, and ringmasters. Always present is the notion of the spectacle and the relentless drive for the evermore fantastic, simultaneously willing success and failure in the name of progress and entertainment. The dance between agony and ecstasy makes compelling viewing and the audience ultimately lives vicariously through the players. It is, perhaps, that same insatiable appetite that drew crowds to watch the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert during the 1950s, or rockets launched for the moon a decade later. This is the same force that has enabled many of mankind’s greatest achievements and, conversely, fuelled its most destructive tendencies, as collectively we risk life and limb.