Roy Arden
NOTES ON FRAGMENTS - photographs 1981-1985
by Roy Arden

As a young artist in 1981, Roy Arden had studied the canon of art photography in search of a mode of photography that could function as a lyrical but realist poetry. He wanted to be able to reflect his experience of the world in a fashion that was personal but not autobiographical. From 1981 to 1985 he produced a body of 6 x 6 cm colour transparencies entitled Fragments. The photographs of the German Parisian painter Wols were the primary inspiration for the style of Fragments.

Fragments is largely composed of portraits or figure studies and details of urban texture including natural phenomena. Arden purposely chose to work with an antiquated, but optically sufficient, twin-lens Rolleiflex. The tenor of Fragments is essentially melancholic. He was looking for that time and space that means-end rationality had overlooked. The portraits are not about identity or character so much as being - regarding the person as someone who inhabits a body. They tend to focus on details or characteristics like a larger-than-normal ear, or the colour of flesh in the sunlight.

The other photographs are of various phenomena mostly encountered on the street. The focus is on the abject and the forlorn. This is not the city of the busy marketplace or park, but the forgotten or undervalued corners that seem to reflect the pedestrian's solitude. There are many images of vitrines, which the photographer saw as metaphors for photography itself and interiority in general.

An erotics of vision runs through the photographs - which have few explicitly erotic subjects. The liquid texture of the ektachrome film is willfully exploited. Objects are drawn out of darkness by the light which is often harsh or cruel. Arden wanted to draw attention to appearance itself. A shallow depth-of-field is often employed in the service of a poetics of appearance. He also tried to show how appearance is a violent material phenomena, that the light which makes things visible also degrades and transforms the surfaces it strikes. Made in Vancouver, Geneva, Paris and Berlin, these photographs are united by a vision rather than a subject or place.