Summary
Art and commercial photographer Jesse Marlow has a gift for spotting the absurd and the unusual in this world, and also for composing and titling his photographs in a manner that illuminates such accidents of image and tone. While the Melbourne-based photographer ventures beyond the city limits, he has been long capturing street scenes around his hometown. His candid shots record the daily routines and banalities that structure modern life, expresings and revaluing often unconscious engagements between individuals and their environments. Driven by the spontaneity of life on the streets, Marlow shoots his art photography mainly on a rangefinder camera using 35mm film.
The four large pigment prints in the Art and Heritage Collection are from his 'Don't Just Tell Them, Show Them' series, in which Marlow records his encounters with both animate and inanimate objects during his peregrinations. The photographs aim to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. 'Lines and Legs', for example, brings the very human element of untidy nonchalance to precise geometric fields that reference the very serious tradition of abstract geometric painting. While it may be immediately comical, dig a little deeper and 'Box Face' is also a plaintive appeal against abandonment and life lived in a cardboard box on the street. 'Handout' is a clever bit of wordplay: the hand out reaching out to attach the handout, and also animating the hoarding. The amusing 'Stop' has a dark underbelly; in this mixed up world of primary colours and upside-down signs reading right way up yet hardly visible, it's an accident waiting to happen. Who is supposed to give way here? the blinded pedestrian or unseeing driver?
