Aaron Canipe
Plateau
[ FUJIFILM/YOUNG TALENT AWARD 2015 RUNNER UP ]
Plateau is an exploration of the North Carolina piedmont region. The piedmont, situated between the mountain and coastal region of the state, has long been home to tobacco farms, furniture production, and textile mills, among other industries. This series takes it’s inspiration from North Carolina’s eminent writer Thomas Wolfe and his short story “The Lost Boy”:
“Here,” thought Grover, “here is the Square as it has always been-and papa’s shop, the fire department and the City Hall, the fountain pulsing with its plume, the street cars coming in and halting at the quarter hour, the hardware store on the corner there, the row of old brick buildings oil this side of the street, the people passing and the light that comes and changes and that always will come back again, and everything that comes and goes and changes in the Square, and yet will be the same again.
Plateau is an attempt that finding, in the small towns of the piedmont region, a changelessness and consolation for the state’s rapid growth. Plateau holds on to innocence while looking towards the future and finding the quite global in the local.
Bio
Aaron Canipe earned a BFA in photography in 2012 from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. While in D.C, he worked as a photographer and contemporary collection archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Canipe also co-founded the publishing and design imprint Empty Stretch, which focuses on curating books, zines, and exhibitions highlighting up-and-coming artists and photographers. Canipe is a recent graduate of the MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts program at Duke University.
Other Links
FujiFilm/EPF Young Talent Award is an additional grant for photographers under 25. Using David Alan Harvey’s words “A heart felt thank you also to FujiFilm for making it possible for the EPF to keep focus on the future generations, the young ones, the ones with a vision already making a mark now… and just might make another jump soon…”
gorgeous……and filled with the kind of poetry of the quotidian that i cherish so much….
besides Wolfe, i’m reminded of that gorgeous novel “jim the boy”…the poetry of ar simmons and reynolds price……
my only point out: allow all the pics to ring in color…especially the snake as kite-tail hanging from the wired sky…
congrats!
I was clicking through, enjoying the placid, bucolic, tension of this essay when suddenly I was startled to click into a picture from my very own home town. “My goodness!” I shouted silently to myself. “Aaron Canipe came to Wasilla! But why would he include a picture of Wasilla in an essay on North Carolina?” Then I realized that the mountains in the background were too far, too low and much too tame to be those against which our own Wal-Mart is framed.
But otherwise… could have been…
Which brings me to Bob’s comment. The first time I looked, the fact that a few images were in black and white did not bother me at all. I took each image for what it is. After I read his comment, I looked again and a felt a little dissonance and irritation by the fact the black and whites just suddenly popped up and struck a somewhat different tone. And then I thought of my own town, Wasilla, which, while I have never shot a single project for hire within its borders, I have been photographing one way or another for 34 years – at first, most all on the final inches of rolls of Tri-X or T-Max I had shot on the job but wanted to fill up before I developed the film, film and processing being too expensive for me in those days to just shoot willy nilly, then on to digital color of varying quality and resolution and now mostly on my iPhone.
When I make my book, “Wasilla, Alaska: Intimate Moments In a Cold and Distant Town” I must draw from all these sources. I suppose that will annoy some. They will say I should have done it all black and white or all color, ignoring the black and whites, or all high-res digital or all iPhone. Maybe it was kind of like that for Aaron somehow. Anyway, I am back to my first impression – not being bothered by the black and white at all, but just enjoying it for what it is. And I am struck by the power of Bob’s suggestion in that this is how I saw it at first and then after I read his comments I felt a little bothered by what before had not bothered me at all.
Frostfrog :)
the b/w need to be returned to their first state…the snake executed and hung, the hearse as if a store window, needs to refract the light….
the reimagination of those powerful images reduced to monocrome are set akilter…they need, for both the heart-beat of this work but also for the essence of this project, to be alive with color….
as a cat that photogrpahs almost exclusively in b/w film, i would just say, that the power of the images and the light upon these moments, gets all lost in the reduction to b/w…and then it looks like an appeal to the classicism and angst of b/w, when in truth, gravitas isnt about appearance but recognition :)…
the monocrome pics make little sense in their state….but this photographer is young and will learn, not to appeal to tradition but to the power of his own observational power :)
yes, the b/w conversions detract but there is so much observational poetry and essence, that it becomes forgiven….
shine the hills and suspended broken light
:)
he’ll get that :)
Bob, you write with authority and conviction I can’t argue against. But I would note that the photos of the snake and the hearse come with a shock value that defies some of the other values inherent elsewhere in the essay and in looking at it again after reading your latest critique, it seems to me the shock value is increased by the sudden switch to black and white.
I am very glad to learn that you are a cat. As you know, I love cats, love to photograph them and try to photograph at least one wherever I go. Now I must somehow find a way to photograph you, because I have been to Burn many times but have yet to photograph a Burn cat.
The pictures of the kids are pretty special. Not so sure about the landscapes.
Does anyone read Thomas Wolfe anymore, I wonder?