The Marc Pricop Photo Feature!
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
