I was struck instantaneously on seeing the landscapes in Justin James Reed's ongoing project "The Real Unknown", by their deeply psychological air, by the forceful and poetic abstractions he was constructing, and by a sense of vibrant, interconnected, overlapping, countervailing ideas being somehow at work both within the compositions and the wider body of work. They are only generically, I think, landscape photographs in the conventional sense of the term. What makes them unconventional beyond the tight and oblique composition of the images, is, I think, their unrelenting search for and reverence of the unknowable mysteries at work in the land, in the woods, between the trees. They are not possessive in the way that a good descriptive landscape photograph will invariably be, but instead seek somehow to devolve the power to name, to reject an insistence upon the strict measurement of proportion and provenance.All of this is, I would argue, in a very real sense inscribed onto the surface of these pictures. Underneath and outside of the frame however, is one of those countervailing factors. Each of the photographs has been made at a property lot set to be developed for sale. [Read more ...]
A lengthy interview with the photographer follows the introduction.
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