Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Emmett.






Emmett. Photographs by Ron Jude. The Ice Plant, 2010. 80 pp., 40 colour and 9 black & white illustrations, 6¾x9½".

The book 'Emmet', with work by American photographer Ron Jude, "brings new life to a selection of his own early photographs, made in the early 1980s in central Idaho.

Enhanced by special-effects filters and cheap telephoto lenses, the pictures include hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, a forest across changing seasons, midnight horror films on TV and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from the artist's past.

Edited here nearly 30 years after its making, this experimental body of work acquires unexpected nuance and humor, and has the serendipitous qualities of a dream-memories reorganized into a fictionalized narrative, imagery suffused with both an unsettling melancholy and the glow of youthful reverie.

Related conceptually to and residing thematically between his two previous books - 'Alpine Star' and 'Other Nature' - 'Emmett' achieves an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motörhead and Jean-Paul Sartre."


Quote from publisher's description.

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