Photographer of the Week: Clare Strand

As much as I love scamming Barnes and Nobles by reading Aperture without ever paying for it there was one instance where I honestly felt it was a real crime not to buy the issue. It was issue #200 and on the cover was a deranged woman wearing a striped dress sitting at a desk in front of a graphed white-board. On the desk was a clock used for film processing. As if the woman was graphed herself and not real, the clock assures us what Roland Barthes once stated about photography, "the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that it's testimony bears not on the object but on time." Barthes' ideas on photography rings through the work of Clare Strand compressing each chord into the most minimally executed progression you'll ever envision.

Goddamn.

Strand understands both the capabilities of the medium and it's constraints. A great example of her intelligence with the medium is her renowned series "Conjurations (2009)". A body haphazardly floating, a severed little girl, a standing figure underneath a cloak, all referencing the comparisons between photography and magic. Barthes again resurfaces with this notion, "...the realist do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art."

By staging her subjects in the middle of each magic trick, Strand emulates this emanation of the 'past reality' while also showing the polarization of such reality through the absurdity of their being. Strand also leaves everything undone. As the operator she takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary leaving the viewer marooned, waiting for the ordinary once more. Obscuring the proper indications of photographer and magician, Strand acquires an ingenious example of how this medium functions and the ways a photograph can press you between two planes of glass endlessly waiting for reality to return.

Me and Julia are psyched on this girl.

To see more of her works go here.

Each week I will be posting a small column about a contemporary photographer/artist.

xoxo George