Liz Darlington
This series of images was taken in places where people spend time together: the beach, the mountains, the countryside. Referencing the collective memory of family holidays and weekend outings. these pictures trigger a nostalgic recollection of a place and time past. But this nostalgia is undercut by the realism of photography. The images hover between the real and the half-remembered. They recall the longing we have to recreate the past. In this work, we see both the longing and the reality, a pairing that engages and disturbs simultaneously.
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Liz Darlington is a photographer from New Zealand currently residing part of the year in the United States and the other part in the South of France. Her work has been exhibited both internationally and nationally at spaces such as PhotoSpace, Wellington, New Zealand, Galeria Mathei, Santiago de Chile, Chile, Pinnacle Gallery, Savannah GA, Pfriem Gallery, Lacoste, France and Krause Gallery, Atlanta, GA. Informed by her background in the television and new media industry, her photographs combine digital processes with traditional methods to construct cinematic tableaus. She draws the imagery from her extensive travels that have taken her to more than 40 different countries over the last 17 years.
Her work explores the relationship between photographic representation and memory. Memories are an amalgam of events, people and places that are transient by nature and frequently misrepresent actual lived experience. The fictionalized – even dreamlike – quality of these images evokes a timelessness; they represent neither past, nor present, nor future. Despite their self-evident falsity, we are inexplicably drawn towards their romance and nostalgia, perhaps because they are fictionalized and culturally determined: much like memory itself. Although her work may look like pictorialist photography, the discomfort they embody grounds it firmly in the context of post-millennium contemporary art.
Darlington is currently a Professor of Photography at Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Her work can be viewed at www.eye-con.net