Much overdue we have
the Marc Pricop photo feature. I originally got Marc to send me some of his
stuff around October/November last year and I started working on a write up
that has since been lost. I’m just having a wild guess here, but I think I
would have opened the post with something along the lines of “If you have been keeping up with our photo feature posts, you
would know we have looked at some interesting and diverse photography. This
time around we have the wonderfully mysteries photography of Marc Pricop.”
Apart from that I have no Idea what would have come next so I’m going back to
the original interview I had with him on messenger! Please read below!
Would you say these photographs were made upon
returning to your home town of Queenstown, on the west coast of Tasmania. A sleepy
mining town that wears the scares of its history in the walls of the valley it
dwells in, queens town has become the backdrop for a personal exploration of
memory, time and what it means to go home?
Lol I'd say that a few years after moving to the mainland I became
intensely interested in the histories of Tasmania, the west coast particularly,
and how it has a very distinct sense of identity that has been formed over time
by the histories
Well mate I’m pretty sure you would say what i just
said coz i took it verbatim outta ya fuckin book!
What about your photography style?
How would you describe it?
Haha I know but
that was written for a very specific body of work, and these photos are from
that but also after it. Well when I first started my work was heavily
influenced by photographers like Alec Soth, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Todd Hido,
Larry Sultan, Trent Parke, etc. but over time photography began to interest me
less and ideas of truth and experience more. Now when I make work I have an
idea of Tasmania in the back of my head that has been informed by everything
from my own lived experience of growing up there to the ways that it represents
itself.
Truth and experience!
because you’re not really a true doco photo guy?
Now my intentions
have shifted towards representing the place I know and love and all of the
complexities that make it what it is, these being things that usually don't
lend themselves easily to words
you stage stuff?
you photograph things that were going to happen,
or happenings, but you make it happen with your
camera?
I don't adhere to
strict documentary guidelines
how would you describe that then?
like if someone said you’re a documentary photographer…
I guess the easiest
comparison would be to literary fiction
explain that, literary fiction
Well take somebody like the author Richard Flanagan for
example - he can write about a river guide watching themselves drown on the
Franklin river (his own experience) and still reveal more of the nuances of
life and significant events in Tasmania's past than most dry colonial history
books can. The bloke has a fierce grasp on the language of the ordinary and I
admire that.
so, it’s like a story but taken from truth or
surrounded in truth! facts turned into a story to make an experience?
Yeah! But you can never really tell a whole story in a
photograph, although it can allow people to invent their own narratives.
that is what your work does! it evokes people to
make stories up, to speculate, what is going on, because there is something
going on!
And that's the thing, if I can show people something
interesting about the ordinary then I believe that they'll look closer or want
to know more about what is going on! People aren't stupid, they're just used to
having everything sold to them - usually through visuals. So, I hope that my
work can offer them something different to that.
anyway, dude i gotta go to bed haha
Haha that's okay I'm super cooked too
Thanks for asking
questions it was really fun
Im probs not gunna use any of this haha
