A CONVERSATION WITH JULIE FISHKIN

Images evoking a collective memory are not a new concept, nor are found images that together seem to tell the story of a people with a shared past. Ron Jude's project, however, explores the impression of images clipped from years of photographs from his hometown weekly newspaper. Jude eschews a more cohesive narrative to embrace the essence of fragmented memory, re-contextualizing each photograph, creating a loose, arbitrary sequence. The final project is a book titled Alpine Star, published in 2006. Your project is a look at your hometown through visuals you clipped from the local paper. Are you reconstructing your own story about this place and its people? The fact that I grew up in this town was an important starting point, but ultimately Alpine Star has very little to do with me, or even the specifics of this town. It’s as much concerned with fiction as it is with sociology or autobiography. I think “reconstructing” is a good word though. I’m suspending and then reconstructing the meaning and narrative of these pictures through context and sequencing. Does the suspension of narrative that occurs interest you because of the powerful scenes that the re-contextualized images tend to conjure up? The suspension of narrative is at the heart of what I love about photography. It occurs naturally most of the time in any photograph, and my job is to finesse these ambiguous narratives, whether they’re in found images or my own, into something that’s coherent, yet still a moving target in terms of meaning. I think this is what you’re describing as the “powerful scenes” that are aroused through this finessing process. However, I’m equally interested in the images that hover right at the edge of utter banality and flatness. Those are the risky pictures, the ones that are operating without the safety net of punch line, irony, or any sort of obvious pictorial device, yet they still find a way to draw you in and hold your attention. Do you view these images as powerful in their own right? Some of them, yes, but whatever initial power they might have is dubious and fleeting. Without the proper context they just float, idle and purposeless. How do you come up with the sequence?  What is the produced effect, in your opinion? Just like arranging anything into a coherent form, I tried a hundred different variations until I finally had to settle on one that struck a balance between something focused and something slippery enough to invite multiple readings. That is, a sequence where new narratives vaporize as quickly as they emerge. The desired effect is one that yields equal amounts of frustration and epiphany. Do you manipulate these images in any way? I’m not really interested in the kind of fiction that’s produced through Photoshop manipulations, if that’s what you mean by “manipulate.” Otherwise, yes, they’re all manipulated simply by virtue of being rescaled, sequenced, and placed in the context of an artist’s book.  This deliberate lack of a cohesive story from the images presented can be frustrating because our natural tendency is to force the story out.  What is the meaning of these specific images in terms of the collective tale they are telling? As I mentioned in a previous answer, frustration is very much a part of the experience of looking at Alpine Star. John Gossage once told me that, to a large degree, an artist’s job is to annoy people. I initially thought he was being sarcastic when he said this, but the further along I get in my career, the more I find his advice to be incredibly sage and useful. I think this has to do not necessarily with outright annoying people, but at least defying their expectations and not tethering your work to easily digested, specific meanings. This allows for new experiences with images that may at first be uncomfortable and perceived to be “annoying.”  You mentioned that many of these images are "non-events," snapshots sent by the people who have something to say about their life in this town.  Are you seeking to capture and freeze a story of life in McCall, Idaho through the eyes of its own participants? I’m interested in these “non-event” photographs mainly because of their ambiguous narratives. I love the idea of a newspaper that not only uses photographs generated by the staff (most of whom are writers, not photographers), but also frequently reprints pictures-of-convenience made by the people about whom the story was written. In some cases, the only reason there’s a story at all is because a picture was taken! Alpine Star, at least to small degree, was meant to coexist with a project I did in McCall in the late-90s called 45th Parallel. This project consisted of my own photographs and was set up as a sort of pseudo-documentary project. Just as Alpine Star frustrates attempts at finding clear narratives about the town and its people through an inside source (the local newspaper), 45th Parallel was meant to reveal the tenuousness of traditional documentary photography and how it too is limited in terms of accessing anything authentic about a place. I was looking at what was at the time a strain between the old, natural resource-based economy, and the new, big-money economy that’s driven by tourism. Ultimately, what you’re left with in both projects is a breakdown of meaning, and a sense of the failure of empiricism in photography. I know this isn’t a new idea, and I hope that instead of leaving the viewer with another empty and redundant lesson in deconstruction, there’s a way in both projects to find alternative access points and levels of engagement with photography. I like to think of these two bodies of work as book-ends of the same basic idea about different ways to look at, read, and digest photographs. (This goes back to the word “reconstruction” that you mentioned in the first question.) What is the life-span of this project? Is there a chronological order or any order, for that matter, to these photographs?   I’m continuing to archive photographs from this newspaper, but I don’t have any definite plans for them at this point. The pictures in Alpine Star were culled from papers published between about 1996 and 2005. Although the images aren’t presented chronologically, there is most definitely an order to them. It’s a very considered sequence. (Look, for example, at the placement of the double-page landscape images, and how they operate as pauses between sequences, almost like chapter breaks.) Do you deliberately avoid inserting your own personal story on the collective story of this town? Yes. I think an autobiographical element would be a distraction from what I’m really trying to do. Did this project change your own perceptions of your hometown? It left me just as engaged in the fantasy of my own memories as I was when I started it.

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