Robert ParkeHarrison arrived on the photography scene
over a decade ago. His success was immediate with The
Architect’s Brother. In these images, which unite photography,
collage, painting, sculpture, and performance, ParkeHarrison, himself,
appears as ‘Everyman’ struggling alone to repair a devastated
planet. With deficient tools, he is nonetheless an industrious, optimistic
soul who attends the earth’s wounds—evident in the photograph
Tree Stories—as if “on a schedule devised by Samuel
Beckett,” wrote Vicki Goldberg in a 2000 New York Times review.
Here, Everyman sits at a desk in a landscape leveled by clear-cutting.
Looking like a film-still from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, he diligently
works at a typewriter half his size. The vine-like wires from his
headphones entangle his feet and connect out to the fallen timber
stacked solidly around him: a strange communiqué/transcription is
underway between nature and man. The look of the photograph
intentionally evokes 19th-century albumen prints. ParkeHarrison
even inserts himself into a 19th-century photographed landscape—Timothy
O’Sullivan’s 1867 view of Steamboat Springs,
Nevada—which he re-photographed and assigns Everyman the
task of stitching the spring’s fissure back together again.