Album

Artists

• Joe Rudko

Statement

The pieces in Album are made from thousands of photographs recovered from an abandoned shed in Washington State.  The pictures span roughly 100 years of time (1902-2005), holding all kinds of subjects within them: water, reflections, sunsets, smiles, vacations, and most everything else that could live inside of a photograph.

Sorting through thousands of photographs I noticed that some subjects appear more often than others, and across wide gaps of time. Repeatedly tearing particular subjects from their original context highlights the ubiquity of these subjects and the multitude of interpretations that a single moment in a single photograph can hold.  If a single photograph is a marker of something valued, than large quantities of unique photographs set up a dialogue between individual and collective values.
 
Surfaces appear in the work as a nod to the photograph itself. Black and white photographs mingle with a range of colors that vary across time, place, and chemistry.

Particular subjects start to speak for themselves.