The context in which we find a photograph goes a long way toward determining the way it is read. Even if the pictures are not essentially changed, the shift in context redefines their meaning. Photographs are without some obvious measure of their intent, as such, and so we are guided in our understanding of them by the experience of how they are brought to us. Altering the context of an image renders the photograph as an unstable point of contact between use and effect. In that sense, the meaning of a photograph is always semantically open.
Based on a sequence of pictures culled from the back-issues of a small town newspaper, Alpine Star by Ron Jude engages with the fictions of our collective memory. We find at work something far stranger than the standard assault on a photographic “code” that has undermined most discussion of the subject. This is not just another deconstruction of photography as if it were a kind of conceptual problem to be solved and explicated, but rather an irrational poetics of the archive. Jude has fashioned an uncanny anti-narrative, its precise structure defined by a tension native to photography itself. The result is more than just the sum of its parts – he achieves, in this minimal way, a very satisfying and provocative ambiguity.
See more here and read this interview for some more background on the series.
