Woodwards Ruin ~ Julian Frank

Woodwards Ruin • click on photo to embiggen itI love surprises and this one showed up in yesterday's email. It was from Julian Frank, aka Lee Bacchus and Brian Graham - partners in photographic crime, so to speak. Under the collective nom-de-photograph of Julian Frank they are producing, of all things, postcards of Vancouver, Canada. They're creating the photographs using and 8×10 view camera and color negative film - men, or is that a "man", after my own heart, photography-wise.

About the project, Lee Bacchus wrote; "About my landscape. It is one part of a partly finished, partly thought-out project on the visible and invisible within the city. While trying to eschew a purely aesthetic surface (eye candy, to put it simply), I'm trying to "think" through the form here and not over-determine it beforehand. It is open-ended, so that it can suggest and address all that a site like this can: history, memory, progress (or lack thereof) and a kind of upheaval in the geological consciousness (the surface) and unconscious (underground).

I do feel this shot is slightly over-aestheticized (the dusky sky is there as a kind of symbolic end-note, but it still exudes a kind of "beauty"), but unwrapping meaning from the "picturesque" is difficult."

Comments

[Sean]

Bacchus states that he is 'trying to eschew a purely aesthetic surface.' As a method of approaching the creation of work this is fine; the problem is that it is an 'image' and is mainly judged as such.

Recently I have again begun to examine the integral Polaroid as an object rather than the location of an image - by either fogging the film or photographing a while surface and then subjecting each to excessive physical handling - yet when I return to these (as i am doing presently, scanning a number of such interventions) I find myself still drawn to their visual properties.

"As an aside, arguements regarding a conflcit between the beauty (for want of a better word - and I am sure there will be a better word!) and the subject depicted is often discussed in regards to the work of Salgado. A number of posts concerning this very issue are located at http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com, from which the following is taken from to give a flavour:

Among the themes I plan to address here is the place of beauty in photography and especially in the practice of photographers who depict hardship and suffering. This topic comes up regularly in criticism of, say Sebastiao Salgado or James Nachtwey, two photographers whose work I admire, both of whom, despite what I consider the significant differences in their work, are accused of "beautifying" or "aestheticizing" the suffering caused by war, famine, forced dislocation, and other large-scale political undertakings."

Best, Sean.