In those long, long hours between waking and sleep the appearance of everything around you begins to change, taking on a sinister cast; dreams bleed out into the world, they spill across the dark streets, the half-empty beds. It seems like it’s always that time in Marcus Erixson’s photographs, the night life, when there are shadows everywhere, most of them your own. Pulling together those moments of fragmented reflection, solitudes that traffic in cigarettes and wolfish chatter, reading some kind of prophecy in the cracked pavement or the curve of a hip, Erixson is working back into the light, which might at first seem like the dawn, but then again, maybe it’s just another bar... There is a certain kind of energy driving these pictures that can easily burn up whatever it touches and that sense of risk is one of the qualities that validate them. The work depends on an implied presence, the drama of this transient self finding a mirror (however distorted it might be) in the world around him for the turmoil, the rapture and the despair of which we are so fleetingly composed. He will not always succeed, of course, and in a sense that is almost beside the point, because what matters is the kind of authenticity he can bring to the search.
Erixson's website is here. There is also a comprehensive selection of his work on Lens Culture.
