empyreal

Ron Jude - Nausea, 1990-1992

Nausea—taken from the title of Sartre’s book— is a remarkable body of photographs using the interiors of schools to explore what Jude calls ‘psychic oppression’. Using a highly original visual language, this first show of Jude’s work in Britain includes some of the most intriguing images to emerge from America in recent years.

…Jude appears to be returning to the scene of a crime—peering through windows, doorways, and iron grilles into deserted rooms and corridors. Avoiding sentimentality, Jude trains his camera on the mundane, recalling the banality of humdrum life.

Jude’s photographs have an affinity with William Eggleston’s most vital work. In place of obvious pictorial devices he employs radical framing and narrow focus. With an immaculate eye for colour, he invests, each scene with a tension and unease that brings to mind the films of David Lynch.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Meiji period, an era when Japan made rapid political and social changes and opened to the West for the first time. At the first world’s fair in the US—the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876—Americans got their first look at Japanese craftsmanship. “Philadelphia Collects Meiji,” an exhibition highlighting the collections of four Philadelphians, is now on view. 

Magazine cover spotlights radical theater director Erwin Piscator. Das neue Frankfurt. February 1928. Cover detail.