ALEX TURNER

ARTICLE | City Art Magazine

The Vantage Point

Vol. 1 No. 2, p.20, Winter/Fall

By Susan Johnson

Using strategies a kin to the funhouse mirrors at a carnival, photo-artists, Alex Turner and Pat Fleischer, manipulate the photographic image of the urban landscape, each creating a distinctly different vantage point for the spectator, while Jeff Thomas explores the viewpoint of the human landscape in CONTACT 2004, Toronto’s Eighth Annual Photography festival.

Alex Turner‘s photographs in “Passage of Time “render a complete revolution of his viewing space to a flattened version, as a two-dimensional world map, transforms the three-dimensional earth from a 360° sphere to a 180° representation. Strip malls, the Bloor, viaduct, variety stores and parking lots are shown in the seemingly impossible panoptic view. This radically altered arrangement of the horizon is complicated by the fact that it is not immediately apparent to the viewer that this is a transformation of what has been seen by a complete turn of the head/camera.

Essentially it is evident that something is very different, but the normal processes and benchmarks to decipher the sense of the space in the photograph are not adequate. Perhaps, unless one is told that this is a flat version of a visual revolution it may never be apparent. Certainly the viewer’s ability to interpret this work from a literal point of view is curtailed opening up other possibilities. As spectators we are no longer in charge, all-knowing, when confronted with this dislocated and interrupted view.

With this strategy, Turner in affect mirrors, not only the unreality of the photograph, but of the surrounding world and our dislocation from it. There is a sense in which this is “a landscape whose construction by culture is made explicit“ as Deborah Bright wrote. To compound this sense of the hyper-real the horizon is presented in a very defined and limited format. With dimensions of 35“ x 2.5“, it is almost like peering through a mail slot in the door. The contrast of the full and the restricted speak to an experience of the city.

This theme extends throughout the work in choice of subject matter, malls with almost deserted parking lots—in a banal form of plenty there is nothing. The photos present an opportunity for the viewer to pick through these offerings laid bare….