People Who Look Dead But [Probably} Aren’t.

By Andrew Frost

A number of recent exhibitions have explored the possibilities and potentials of the found photograph such as Beijing Silvermine at Gallery 4A that rescued images from the recycling bin to create a history of vernacular photography in China, or in Doug Rickard’s New American Picture at Stills Gallery, a body of work that explored Google Street View as a way to produce a new kind of street photography/reportage. One of Australia’s leading exponent of this kind of work is Patrick Pound, an artist whose soft focus re-photography of found images from a variety of sources produced a beautiful if unlikely reimaging of commercial images.

His latest show with Stills is People Who Look Dead But [Probably] Aren’t part a continuing project of collecting found photographs and then organising them by type. The title of the show suggests that the viewer considers the images in ways that weren’t meant by the people who took them, but which seems undeniably appropriate given many of the corpse-like poses.  Pounds typological obsession extends into other collections of people with cameras, people struggling in the wind, people listening to music – but in this collection something else seems apparent. Given that these are all vintage photographs it’s more than likely that all these people might still be alive, but they probably aren’t

March 19 – 22

Stills Gallery, Paddington

Pic: Patrick Pound People who look dead but (probably) aren’t [detail], 2011-2014.