My thanks to Dickon for this link.
All images © ParkeHarrison
He [Robert ParkeHarrison] comes down on the side of lamentation but expresses it with an unusual combination of poetic license, laboriously constructed props and a wry and melancholy, vaguely allusive sense of myth. He appears in every picture, in a black suit and white shirt with no tie, a kind of Everyman or a minor employee of the universe, patiently, dutifully doing a job that’s too big for him. That job is essentially to take care of a devastated Earth with inadequate equipment. He works or performs obscure rituals in large and empty landscapes beneath gray skies. Perhaps this is one man’s private way of saying that neither pollution, global warming nor digitalization can entirely extinguish the hands-on experience and human desire to create. New York Times (Feb 4, 2000)
Trained as a photographer, ParkeHarrison did not follow in the well-practiced wake of environmentally charged photojournalists or social documentarians. Theirs was a cautionary tale fixed in the present day; it did not always project a future. Instead, ParkeHarrison conjures up a destiny in which humankind’s overuse of the land has led to environments spent and abandoned. The veracity of the photograph, from which all his images are constructed, provides the convincing backdrop for narratives of separation and loss. And the influences from literature, theater, cinema, and painting enrich the work with symbols supportive of the artist’s universal subjects, particularly the struggles of the Everyman… Curator’s Comments on ‘The Architect’s Brother’
