Kathleen Cullen

John Filker
 

Les Claires Matins is the name of the apartment building located at 51-53 Avenue de Nice in the French town Cagnes-sur-Mer. Its sun bleached modernism recalls French cinema of the sixties. Here John Filker uses a digital camera to record the filmic quality of this intriguing structure, then proceeds to explore its composition while varying scale and artistic medium.

 

The process of reproducing his photographs using a variety of materials creates a subtle Rashomon effect. Much like a film still, a frozen moment suggests preceding and following events. Is this particular instant a significant element belonging to a sequential narrative or is it a closed self referencing loop. Individual perception recognizes the former while the photograph insists upon the latter. The ambiguous nature of a photograph supersedes all narrative presumptions. The true abstraction of the image or illustration is the unnamed context in which it exists.

 

To create the square format c-print travel series, Filker uses a traditional 2-1/4” Mamiya film camera to capture found compositions featuring saturated color in commonplace scenarios. These photos then become the source for re-representation.