Phone Camera Work: Patrick Pound

Patrick Pound carefully takes a lot of technically bad photographs with his mobile phone. He takes photographs of chandeliers and basketball hoops, lone silhouettes and parked cars, blurred tree branches and tower blocks. Every single image is presented in the same monochrome format, like documentary evidence, except that each one is blurred. Sometimes the fuzziness is slight enough to make the object pictured look like it is vibrating with it's own internal energy; there are times the blurring is so extreme that the objects depicted are almost unidentifiable.

They're banal things that seem suffused with significance but also permanently unreachable, as if separated from us by a vast gulf of time. Approaching the images to examine them doesn't help. If anything, they dissolve further under closer inspection, much like the clues to the murder unintentionally photographed in Antonioni's classic film Blow Up.

The Soft Real Estate Model images also recapture the eerie atmosphere of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 (1988), a sequence of paintings dedicated to the group suicide conducted by members of the RAF Marxist terrorist organisation in West Germany. Except that the joke here is that whereas Richter used genuine crime scene photography as his source, Pound is using nothing more sinister than the real estate supplement to weave his tale. He flicks through daily newspapers and uses his phone to capture details in the background of advertisements, holding the camera so close to the page that the image inevitably blurs.

Also worth seeing at GRANTPIRRIE is Caroline Rothwell's Blow Back Projects, a series of solid metal marquettes made for large inflatable sculptures. In a nice counterpoint to Pound's work, they are much heavier than they look.

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