Ron Jude

Alpine Star

Based on a sequence of pictures culled from the back-issues of a small town newspaper, Alpine Star by Ron Jude engages with the fictions of our collective memory. We find at work something far stranger than the standard assault on a photographic “code” that has undermined most discussion of the subject. This is not just another deconstruction of photography as if it were a kind of conceptual problem to be solved and explicated, but rather an irrational poetics of the archive. Jude has fashioned an uncanny anti-narrative, its precise structure defined by a tension native to photography itself. The result is more than just the sum of its parts – he achieves, in this minimal way, a very satisfying and provocative ambiguity.

—Darren Campion
The Incoherent Light

Emmett 

Originally photographed by Ron Jude in central Idaho in the early 1980s and forgotten for nearly three decades, the images in emmett range from hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, midnight horror films on a TV set, and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from his past. Reconsidered here as a “new” body of work, these early photographic efforts—vernacular in tone, lacking in irony or pretense, enhanced by cheap filters and telephoto lenses—now resonate with unexpected menace and melancholy, building on Jude’s fundamental interest in exposing “the folly of rational thought” through fragmentary photographic narratives.

Related conceptually and residing thematically between two previous bodies of work, Alpine Star and Other Nature, emmett explores our desire to give structure and assign meaning to our memories, and our inability
to ever fully know or understand ourselves through self-reflection. As Jude brings coherence to his own
unintended “series” of emotionally charged pictures, the everyday notion of the past collides with the more
philosophical and improbable idea of The Past, creating a tension between our sentimental engagement
with photographs, and the nagging sense that it’s all just an illusion. Through nuanced editing and a
purposeful exploitation of his own photographic mistakes, Jude fleshes out and finesses this tension into
 something palpable—an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motörhead and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Nausea

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.

—David Chandler, Senior Curator
The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 1992

People may say that Ron Judes images may be boring, or too simple, I however find his simplicity very beautiful. Little snatches of what we see in everyday life that we may take for granted, things that we may see but store away far in our mind never thinking about it again. I find this approach incredibly refreshing for I like to find beauty within the simple. I was worried that my photographs may seem too plan however seeing these I realize that I should stick with that I persevere to be beauty.