Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison

        "My photographs tell stories of loss, human struggle, and personal exploration within landscapes scarred by technology and over-use…. [I] strive to metaphorically and poetically link laborious actions, idiosyncratic rituals and strangely crude machines into tales about our modern experience."
-Robert ParkeHarrison

        Both in their early forties, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison are collaboratively responsible for some of the most awing photographs I have seen. Taking on the heavy topic of the environment and its slow destruction at the hand of human monotony, the ParkeHarrisons make a strong argument for the power of art to address current issues and effect change. Though the photographs are staged, they bring to light a harsh potential future, which brings a certain unease to the images that cannot quite be matched with documentary work on the subject. The photographs are at the same time both immensely beautiful and terribly distressing.
        In their most well-known series, The Architect's Brother (named one of 'the Ten Best Photography Books of the Year' by the NY Times in 2000), Robert poses as the self-described "everyman", in images conceptualized and executed by the pair. The series, the look of which is enhanced by the use of paper negatives and collage, shows Robert in a seemingly post-apocalyptic environment of desolate landscapes and pieces of makeshift technology.
        The pair's two more recent series, Gray Dawn and Counterpoint explore the same issues, with a change of aesthetic, moving to color (which they apply to the large prints by hand using pigments) and a more modern look. This abandons much of the apocalyptic feel of their earlier work, but is possibly even more disturbing as an element of surreality has been removed and the images appear alarmingly real. In their most recent work Counterpoint new models (a small girl and a woman- which may be Shana though I am unsure) are introduced as well, creating a little more room for creativity with compositions and sometimes creating more of a contrast between poetic, innocent and alarming.
        I cannot urge you enough to look at their images, as I believe they are not only beautiful and haunting but also very important to photo history and culturally relevant.

For extensive galleries of their images, here is their website
and the full The Architect's Brother series.




images: parkeharrison.com