Lucas Blalock
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Work from his oeuvre.
“Carmen Winant:
All of your pictures are shot on 4× 5 film, scanned and then post-produced in Photoshop. Why work across multiple formats?
Lucas Blalock:
Early on, it was important that the pictures had a foot in both the analogue and the digital. When I began making pictures in the late 1990s, I fell in love with the 4 × 5 camera. But analogue is not so significant to me anymore. I am more interested in the way in which it affords me moments of translation.
CW: Between analogue and digital processes?
LB: Yes, such as processing the negative through the scanner into Photoshop colour-space or removing the dust. Procedures like those, and others, become over-articulated in my process. Instead of approaching these procedural steps as expected, my action might be more evident, or less correct. As opposed to painting, which is considered to be an accumulation of a set of decisions, photography is classically thought of as a picture made by a single decision – the shutter – and that Photoshop or the darkroom is a kind of ‘post-production’. For me, the state of the photograph is much more in the physical object and I tend to think about all of these steps as stages of production.
CW: Your work is reminiscent of surfing the Internet for images for hours on end, or of being on hallucinogenic drugs. Both of those experiences are alienating in their own way: hyper-real and hyper-false. In your work they appear to co-exist.
LB: I started to think of the real and the false in this way partially through Jean-Luc Godard, which, in turn, led me to Bertolt Brecht’s ideas about theatre, and gave me a model for thinking about photography. I am interested in how I can use the technologies of picture-making, intended to be highly transparent, in opaque or interruptive ways. Offstage tools – studio, camera, Photoshop – are brought back onstage, and into the picture.” – excerpt from an interview with Carmen Winant for Frieze.