Osheen Harruthoonyan @ Lonsdale Gallery

Group show “Looking Ahead” til Dec. 13

Some might call this imagery photography.  It is.  In that a negative and photographic paper were used to make them.  Since the advent of digital photography and click of the button “dark rooms”, it’s become hard to distinguish what is photography and what is not.  

Osheen shows us that photography has always been manipulated.  He doesn’t use digital photography.  He makes a virtue of this fact by constructing works that seem like photographs from another time and perhaps another realm.  The overall look is somewhere between x-ray and negative.

I’ve been thinking of them as light collages using the medium of photography as a base.  Scratched negatives, both personal and found, and old-fashioned burning and dodging make up his methods of reconstruction.

Perhaps, a distant nod to The Cottingley Fairies and ghost photography that sought to fool a gullible population in search of fame and fortune.  Osheen’s places, people and essence is of another era. Mad Men comes to mind.  We are so far away from who they are that these memories now seem more like ghosts.

There is little artifice about the construction of some of these images.  They are really quite crudely made and it’s difficult to know what exactly is happening in them.  Intentions are left mysterious.  Who these people are and what they do is only intimated.

In age where we are accustomed to the seamless hyper real images of digital photography, going ultra analogue is just cool retro.