
Jo Ractliffe: Under a State of Emergency
“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”
“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”
“Demand found in Lautner’s dusty models a way of problem solving and working through designs even though these were for Lautner’s building proposals that never saw realisation.”
“The phrase “necessary fictions” both characterizes state-created realities, whether simulation in the military training context or the deployment and consumption of fictions in civilian society, and also comments on the documentary form.”
“In contrast to the concrete metaphors in the urban architecture and the materiality of construction, the bodies and flesh of the workers on the beach refer to something humane: of the flesh, tactile and intimate, something that is deeply lacking in these isolated lives.”
“I think what was really drawing me to Marina’s book was how it was animating this story of the mountains, their potential and actual destructive forces and how human lives are so dwarfed in the scale of that force yet so emotionally attached to life in the mountains.” – Sunil Shah
“This is a so much about family that the idea of the hotel and its function as the construction and as a dwelling for temporary accommodation, reflected through the blueprint cover and letterheaded endpapers is anything but the impersonal experience of temporary lodging.”
“Through connections to her family, dual religions, rituals and historic re-interpretations she staged herself in performative postures, using dress and ritualistic objects to perform specific rites or ceremonies for the camera.”
“This set of images playfully break advertising’s conceptual ethos and artifice and instead represent real-world, unorthodox behaviours.”
“The desire to be home and the sorrow of separation creates a new narrative within my images, which is now the narrative of my life, or in light of what is happening globally, narrative of our lives.”
“I proceed in conversation with the camera, with other photographs, with other photographers, I forget about what writing can do, I think about what photography can do.”
“The path of paranoia leads us to a pizza parlor, armed to the teeth and utterly convinced of the righteousness of the mission. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re left with doubt, uncertainty, and a recognition of our own limitations.”
“I felt ambivalent about what was unfolding but in the end, the psychic energy and latent subtext, prefaced by a short story involving a headless woman, a bird and a photographer was too compelling to dismiss.”