"A beautiful announcement of death" by Alexander James

13 juin 2013

"A beautiful announcement of death" by Alexander James

"A beautiful announcement of death" by Alexander James. Photo courtesy Alexander James

Capturing the forgotten alchemy of a medium often considered to serve a purely documentary function, I create meticulously crafted scenes immersed here in huge dark tanks of water. For the most part I destroy these creations, leaving behind only the medium format transparencies as documents of these acts.

Through careful manipulation of water and light and without the use of postproduction techniques, here I have produced a new series of photographic works that weave a historical thread between the mechanical reproduction of today's image making and the meticulous realism and existential gaze of painters such as Pieter Claesz of the 16th Century Vanitas tradition of painting.

With direct reference to the classical paintings 'Ophelia' (1851-52) by John Everett Millais and 'La Jeune Martyre' (1855) by Paul De La Roche, 'A beautiful announcement of death' takes the tragic story of Hamlet's Ophelia as a central focus, drawing also a comparison with my own personal experience of a former lover's suicide.

"A beautiful announcement of death" by Alexander James. Photo courtesy Alexander James

In my practice the camera, like the painter's oils, is a tool in which to eternally preserve my subjects: at times a collection of inanimate objects held in a purgatory state and at others the bodies of characters inscribed with historical and personal narratives, which the final image forever tells. It is both ironic and telling that water, the very element which for the Greek Philosopher Heraclitus stood as a symbol for the unstoppable mill of time, changing everything in its wake, serves precisely as the functional device through which I achieves the painterly effect of these works.

In 'A beautiful announcement of death' photography emerges as a perplexing aporia, a kind of sorcery which successfully presences the past and yet only brings up ghosts. (source http://www.behance.net/)