Lincoln Clarkes, “Giving Notice”
Recent street works by photographer Lincoln Clarkes, Initial Gallery, Vancouver.
In a time when camera phones have turned ‘everyman’
into a photographer and the ‘selfie’ has surpassed the allure of the portrait,
Lincoln Clarkes’ new series of works, “Giving Notice”, returns this expertise
to the terrain of the skilled photographer.
In this thoughtfully curated show by Julie Lee, culled from a larger
selection of work dating back to 2008, Clarkes turns his lens on the cities and
people of Toronto, Vancouver, and a handful of scenes in Miami, Detroit, and
London. The show’s title, “Giving
Notice”, suggests the movement of city-life itself as it shifts through its
many guises from dressed-up to broken-down.
Bestowing his subjects with a straightforward ease,
Clarkes disguises the true complexity of his compositions—two women sitting in
a laundromat, a group of friends hanging out on a street corner, shots gazing
into and through windows, city-scenes in effect doubling as character–the
sensation is that of a fly on the wall, skirting the uneasy rift between
discovery and that of not-so-innocent onlooker.
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| Lincoln Clarkes, Bathurst Streetcar,Toronto, 2010 |
