Tag: surreal

It’s slightly morbid: the question of what an image is. A body of material, a skin of light, a chemical skeleton, anatomy of shape and line. The delight of coroners and large circling birds.

But what an image should or could be—the daydream of it, the excitement of it—is often the delight of the artist (and, no doubt, the viewer too). And if it’s not universally true, it’s true at least of Peter Franck who once said that “an image should be difficult, cumbersome, but humorous.”

Franck was describing a number of black and white slides he’d discovered back in 2015. Originally made in the 50s and 60s, the images looked every bit the mid-twentieth-century artifacts they were—that is, until Franck introduced them to color. Both astonishing and disorienting, it was as if the images had fallen asleep in Kansas and woken up in Oz.

Franck experiments with images incessantly, both those he’s taken and those he’s found. In his series of seascapes and landscapes, old collodions have been seared, bleared, and smeared (to borrow a lyric from Hopkins). Strange objects emerge; familiar objects turn strange. Inside out, wrong-way-round, merging, erupting, collapsing: the where, when, and how of it all slips by the sentinels of physics and leaves in its wake a ruin of time and humiliation of matter.

Some moments in history seem more dissociated from reason than others. Ours feels particularly absurd. In that spirit, Franck’s work summons Beckett to the stage for an encore and offers Alfred Jarry (father of pataphysics) an open mic. The poet Bruno Nagel is the “voice between noise” in this feature. His poetry branches out from Franck’s photographs in ordinal directions—like Hamlet, a bit mad, “but mad north-north-west.”