The immediacy and visual richness of Angela Orrell's photographs give them the power to serve as portals to other places. Often those places hover in that poetic space between past and present. Training her lens on communities whose ways of life were once commonplace, Orrell's images beguile the viewer's sense of time. Silvery images of a venerable local diner, a final tobacco auction, a family-owned barbershop, or fishermen returning with the days catch feel archaic and distinctly American. In their details we discover a bygone era and are surprised to learn that they are, in fact, contemporary documentations of a vanishing present.
Her pictures grow out of deep and carefully tended relationships with the communities that she photographs and are often presented in conjunction with oral histories, objects, and video footage that she collects. In this way, her images form part of a complex portrait that preserves and pays tribute to old ways of life and the people who allow them to live on. Although the subjects of her photographs are often plain and careworn, their beauty is revealed at every turn: the dance of light across a chrome surface in a diner, the mix of textures on aging faces and hands, the furrows left behind in busy fields all demand our notice and our awe.
In a world that assaults us daily with literally thousands of retouched, enhanced, and cleaned up images, we are reminded of the uniqueness of the natural and the honest. Invited to look at old ways of life with fresh eyes, we are reminded of the words of an even older poem:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
- John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn 1819
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment