Monday, December 31, 2012

Walk it Off: The Photography of Nick Hance McElroy

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.
You know those marvelously itinerant people who go to Iceland or Thailand after college and aren't afraid to ride a chicken bus around a mountain with no guardrails? Those people fascinate me. If I wasn't so PhD-student-broke and so prone to motion sickness, maybe I’d wake up one day feeling particularly ballsy and then I’d be one of them, boarding a train and a plane and a fishing boat and then riding a grizzly bear into the Alaskan tundra in search of Bob Ross's friendly ghost. But until that day, I'll continue to love photographers like Vancouver-based Nick Hance McElroy, who takes pictures the way I would on a tremendous adventure (whether or not he's on a tremendous adventure himself).
Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.

Most of his photographs are human-less, and the ones that aren't never allow more than a single road-trip companion or new-found friend to enter the frame. Dogs and ponies and snow-covered sheep populate his pictures, which are imperative or instructional, ordering us to "walk it off" or showing us "how to be alone."

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series.
Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.
The photographs aren't always beautiful. A metal pail full of severed doe heads becomes the aesthetic equal of a tiny white house with red flowers and a red roof, or a blue car on a snow-blown hill. Each friend, vista, and carcass is treated with the same loving, unhurried attention. 

Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.

Untitled photograph from the Thirteenth Month series
Untitled photograph from the How to Be Alone series.
Untitled photograph from the Great Divide series.






Hello Again Friends

Following a wretchedly long paper-writing hiatus, All The Little Houses is back back back! Expect epic arts, dreary poetic musings, sweet tunes, belligerent felines, pleasing prisms, life updates, and other blather.