BRUCE CHARLESWORTH
PHOTOGRAPHS
In this series of photographs, inanimate objects are suspended in air or liquid or held in place by a mechanism.
Composite photographs of landscapes, buildings, interiors and objects from real life.
This group of photographs includes images of ingestion, mutation and drugs. Several subjects are inanimate objects treated as if they embody potential life.
A short series on things presumably found at airports, border crossings, security gates, concert venues and in police raids.
These photographs were taken during the four-year production of Charlesworth's feature film, Private Enemy - Public Eye. Many images were shot on sets built for the film or used some of its props, costumes and backdrops.
Images in this series contrast extreme distance and scale with larger-than-life close-ups, touching on the uncontrollable power of nature and interior landscapes implied by close inspection of human faces.
As in the previous photo series 'Trouble', scenarios are distinct from each other, image-to-image. In 'Fate', the man in the black suit is as much a perpetrator as a victim of circumstance.
Connections between these images come from their visual style and situational equivalency, and from the almost omnipresent character in the black suit.
A send-up of the detective fiction genre with intermittent photographs, The Man in the Back Seat interweaves characters from three of Charlesworth's 1981-82 videos and the photo-novella, Special Communiqués.
Special Communiqués is a photo-novella made up of text and thirty-five images shot on Polaroid SX-70 film. Its story centers on a detained man and his daily life.
This fifty-image photo-novella resembles a film in its serial parade of absurd, dreamlike scenes.
These painterly works were done during the same years as the black-and-white photo-novella, Eddie Glove. After Charlesworth shot these images with a Polaroid SX-70 camera, he replaced parts of their emulsions with acrylic paint and collage.