2016 Festival ←

Lee Henderson Never Letting Us Take Breath

Zalucky Contemporary
Lee Henderson, Anxiety being merely fear stripped of imagination (11 19 KODACHROME-BILD Framkallad av Hasselblads), 2016. Chromogenic print, 28 x 40”.
Lee Henderson, Anxiety being merely fear stripped of imagination (11 19 KODACHROME-BILD Framkallad av Hasselblads), 2016. Chromogenic print, 28 x 40”.
Lee Henderson, A chain assisted path goes 1/3 the way down the West end of the gorge next to Devil’s Cataract look- ing at final plunge (APR 7 1 A5 Kodachrome Transparency), 2016. Chromogenic print, 28 x 40”.
Lee Henderson, A chain assisted path goes 1/3 the way down the West end of the gorge next to Devil’s Cataract look- ing at final plunge (APR 7 1 A5 Kodachrome Transparency), 2016. Chromogenic print, 28 x 40”.
Lee Henderson, When you cut your finger, it comes out dense and rich (CAT 64 2 762 Kodachrome Transparency), 2016. Chromogenic print, 33 x 44”.
Lee Henderson, When you cut your finger, it comes out dense and rich (CAT 64 2 762 Kodachrome Transparency), 2016. Chromogenic print, 33 x 44”.

“In taking a photograph, this tourist projects himself in a loop—forward, to the comfort of home, where he’ll then imagine backward into the memory that he is in the midst of constructing as the photograph is snapped … Caught up in the romance of the rhetorical, he might later describe that moment of shutterpress as one of being perfectly present. But the truth is that when that shutter gapes open, ‘the present’ is the last thing on anyone’s mind.”

So intones a voice from the back room of Never Letting Us Take Breath, a nebulous photographic project by Lee Henderson. This installation grows from the fusing of two found slide archives: one a collection of an unknown family’s holiday mementos, and the other from a defunct travel agency. Personal snapshots are juxtaposed with destination promotions (both dating from the mid-1900s) and relayed through the mimetic media of print, slide projection, and sound. The project points to two aspects of photography that underlie its slipperiness as a discipline: its mechanical ability to represent the past indexically, and the human desire to fling oneself perpetually into the future.

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