Paul Shambroom is a Minneapolis-based photo artist who, over a period of four years, attended hundreds of town council meetings across the United States. Photographing the participants with a large-format panoramic camera, as staged tableaux, his dramatic pictures resemble epic history paintings they describe the humble practice of local government on a grand scale. A celebration of small-town America, these accessible pictures have already been lauded by the critics ("Extraordinary"-the "New York Times," "Powerful"-"ArtForum," "Marvelous and beautiful"-"Art Review") and collected by institutions such as the Whitney and MOMA New York. The minutes of each featured meeting are reproduced in full (runs over 40 pages at the back of the book and printed on Bible paper).

Shambroom gives us a glimpse of the largely unseen machinery that quietly but persistently determines the way we live. In Shambrooms pictures, the simple, actual event is revealed as a marvellous and beautiful enactment of the highest democratic ideals of equality, dialogue and representation. They are pictures not just of rituals, but of the real-life practice of self and community empowerment.

Diane Mullin in ArtReview (October 2003)

‘Teasing the latent surreality from these seemingly transparent scenes, Shambroom reminds us that reality, documentation, and especially political representation are, to varying degrees, constructed. … Meetings reveals a powerful critical perspective…’ Jordan Kantor in ArtForum (November 2002)

Between 1999 and 2003, Paul Shambroom attended hundreds of town council meetings across the United States. Photographing the participants with a large format panoramic camera, his tableaux describe the humble practice of local government on an epic scale echoing traditional portraits of the powerful, from European court to American history paintings, and the many representations of the Last Supper. They are also explorations of small town America, inspired by the road trips of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. With the full minutes of each meeting included, this is a revealing documentary record of the practice of local democracy at the beginning of the 21st Century, and the strongest work yet of an important photographic artist.

Paul Shambroom is an artist whose photographs have been exhibited in and collected by such major institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, among other publications. He has received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. He lives in Minneapolis.