Lincoln Clarkes photographs speak for themselves (which doesn’t stop people like me adding our 2 cents). They are fragments of life that he has picked up here and there, moments that he has noticed and recorded. You can find a representative cross section of his work at Polychrome until August 18th.
Clarkes studied painting at Emily Carr College but he made his
mark as a photographer with a series of stark photographs of heroine addicts
and prostitutes in Vancouver for which he was both praised and condemned. Since
then he has photographed wealthy Angelinos, the Burning Man festival, women
with guns, fashion models and many street scenes mainly in Vancouver, Toronto
and London.
The work at Polychrome is whimsical for the most part. Clearly Clarkes
has a sense of life’s contradictions. Some of the photographs are matter of
fact, a pregnant woman waters a lawn, girls eat pizza, there are decaying shop
fronts, natural intrusions, others are more loaded. It’s a balanced show, some
light, some heavy, a group of girls wearing pink tights and bowler hats
(British Airways hostesses? Bank of England couriers?) contrasts with Todd
Davis on a hospital bed surrounded by life-support equipment. Nancy Lanthier in
her biography of Clarkes calls it wry pessimism. Robin Laurence in a review of
a recent show, called Giving Notice at Initial Gallery describes Clarkes’ work as….“somewhere
between glam and glitty. Glitty perhaps.”
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