In Redheaded Peckerwood Christian Patterson is working out something that hasn’t been done much before, if ever: a kind of subjective documentary photography of the historical past. That requires that the individual pictures be true, as close as possible to the physical details as historically established, while remaining ambiguous and unsettling — because each of them is only an aspect of the story, and because in each of them something is wrong. The accumulation of them, meanwhile, is what thrusts the viewer into the emotional center of the story, in a way you could call novelistic. While each individual photograph pulses, sometimes alarmingly, all by itself, the meaning of the whole only coheres when all of its parts and all the subliminal connections between them have been fully absorbed, a process which takes time and perhaps distance. Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land.
I always find Red Headed Peckerwood a really difficult project to settle with, it's beautifully clever in approach and output but theres always an underlying philosophy of truth. The work creates an engaging narrative of lies which when put together in series and viewed in his book become a story about history. This is a genius way of producing work and something which is bringing contemporary documentary photography to the gallery in a new and exciting way.
This series interests me because he manages in his approach to bring back to life the emotions, feelings and environments as he travels along. The work is engaging the viewer and narrating a historical story, this is something I could benefit from including in my project, although I am aware not to make my own series to personal and develop multiple layers of narration throughout this layer is important to me. To narrate my own personal emotional reasoning in a way which is stimulating to any audience.
He makes an american road trip of different proportions to Robert Frank and the like.
This series interests me because he manages in his approach to bring back to life the emotions, feelings and environments as he travels along. The work is engaging the viewer and narrating a historical story, this is something I could benefit from including in my project, although I am aware not to make my own series to personal and develop multiple layers of narration throughout this layer is important to me. To narrate my own personal emotional reasoning in a way which is stimulating to any audience.
He makes an american road trip of different proportions to Robert Frank and the like.