Joe Rudko

Issue 121

Joe Rudko's work in photography examines its continuously expanding role as a tool to communicate ideas, feelings, and truths – and its tendency to shift shape in how it is defined and understood as a medium. Techniques of physical collage, drawing, and sculpture are used to manipulate, obscure, and otherwise distort found photographs, cutting and tearing them to reveal their limitations as representations of personal history. This disruption demystifies the illusion of the photograph, exposing its increasingly malleable interpretation and mortality as a physical object. These interventions give anonymous, once-antiquated snapshots a new life and ability to live beyond their fading past.

These particular works reflect an ongoing investigation into the self, by way of the anonymous photographs of others. These are forgotten, abandoned and lost images, destined for the recycling center. I’ve snatched them up, cut them open, and examined my relationship to them. I often find that we have things in common, and that the world we live in, with all its complications, is the same as it ever was.

Joe Rudko lives and works in Seattle, WA.  
To view more of Joe’s work, please visit his website.