lUCAS JODOGNE

Transitions

This series of pictures has been granted through the VPMA and are the product of "Documentary Photo Commissions Flanders". Lucas Jodogne, whose previous work hinted in the right direction was selected for the job.

Broadly speaking, the theme is to be the changing daily environment. The idea being to grasp the accelerated transformation of built-up as well as open areas and the lives lived inside them. The work area is the province of Antwerp, Belgium. The project is about fixing images that typify changes in the social, cultural, economic or individual atmosphere and thus influence the built-up and open spaces in question. Particular attention is to be paid to the tensions such changes create between city and country, tradition and modernity, economy and culture, individual and community.

Viewpoints

The peace of the landscape deceives. The everyday aspect hides a silent, simultaneous war on several fronts. Between present and past, for example, between space as territory for use and space as heritage to be cherished. An obvious truth is lacking. Not everything is worth preserving. Prosperity calls for never-ending economic dynamism that, at times doesn`t give a damn about reason and harmony. What is more, todays heritage is often made up of yesterday`s irrational interventions. Nature too is entangle in various silent disputes: with development, with agricultural production, with pollution, with civilized planting, with recreation. Occasionally this kind of fight makes the news. Pungent reportages are then made with striking visual material. Jodogne, however, prefers sites about which, at first sight, there seems nothing to tell. Areas of subversion and silent alliance between economy, culture and nature.


At times landscapes do not speak, not out loud, not silently. No border sensitivity, no repressed conflict. They simply show us what they are: a collection of independent decisions linked occasionally random proximity. Some landscapes have something surrealistic about them: an immediate scene of objects lacking all ratio of togetherness. This ad hoc character suits photography. The photographer patiently looks for for specimens where the game of cause and coincidence has yielded a result which he, for one reason or another, finds remarkable: interesting composition, a strange contrast, unexpected synergy, a perfect void. Such activity is less futile than it may seem. Planning and architecture too - alongside having a feeling for historical grounds, functional motives or symbolic associations- must learn how to deal with the aesthetics of coincidence. In the isotopic interspace - the not-quite-town-not-quite-country-space, that is is increasingly presenting itself as a metaphor for modern life - this is becoming a major starting point for environmental design.

The book links
Original picture size 120x170 cm