Sunday, August 24, 2008

Michael Marcelle's Wilderness

I rediscovered the work of Michael Marcelle via Humble Arts' latest Group Show exhibition. A graduate of the Bard photo program, and subsequent student of Stephen Shore and Tim Davis, Marcelle's imagery is not derivative of the work of his mentors, but certainly pays homage to it. Marcelle's best photographs possess a strangely alluring, deadpan quality in which everyday nuances are infused with a beautiful mystery. When asked in an interview to describe his method of working, Marcelle responded:

"I shoot almost entirely documentary, but it's not with an interest of accurately portraying the world in mind. It's complicated, because a lot of my work is about abstracting the world into a totally alien landscape, but in order to do that it's necessary to have some signifiers that the work is being made in the world. It's basically using the format and methodology of documentary photography to make something that looks nothing like it."

You can find the whole interview here.











All photographs from the series Wilderness

All Images © Michael Marcelle