“I never want to see another picture of ________.” Industry veterans share their pet peeves on themes in contemporary photography. In this series they present their “rule” along with five photographs that break the rule in an effort to show that great work is the exception to the rule.
Rule Setter: Stephen Frailey, Editor-in-Chief, Dear Dave
Rule Breaker: Cru Camara
I never want to see another rustic, melancholy landscape. The natural world, whether landscape, still life, or figurative narrative, is most often depicted as a place of melancholy and longing. It may not be inappropriate, per se, but relying upon the rustic world to convey a vocabulary of emotions that commonly produce sentiment, nostalgia and sadness might not be the most imaginative interpretation of subject, to say nothing of an imposition. Does nature always need to be a trellis for our most sullen emotional register?
I am reminded of Richard Misrach’s marvelous early photographs of desert cacti at night—illuminated by strobe they appear as if electrocuted.
Cru Camara transforms the natural into a riot of knotted color; a hallucinogenic maelstrom. Fronds become lurid, stems acrid. Perhaps the photographs seem less original if considered with the humid and tropical environs of her native manilla, but the work is an object lesson in fleeing a predictable depiction of the world around us, of seeking a response that is unforeseen. At the same time, it proposes a provocative re-arrangement of fact and fiction, as well as our cultural enthusiasm for artifice, for simulacra.
—Stephen Frailey