Eric Fredine is based in Edmonton. And I must say his photographs depress me... First, after several months, it's really time for winter to go - really, really time for it to go. Yet Eric can muster the willpower to go and make some good photographs of it, damn him...But secondly, Eric has really got a sense for this place, this city. After a couple of years, I'm still trying to make sense of it - visually, photographically. I have some inklings, but it takes time. Someone recently commented that it didn't look like the city they had spent a few years in. Eric's response was that to took him more than a decade to get to this point.
Now, I'm not going to say that someone can't go for a place for a few weeks, or make a number of visits, and not make good pictures. But generally they tend to be different from work made by someone who has been able to take the time to become intimate with a place (although, of course, the other danger is that after a longer period of time you actually stop being able to see the place)
Eric has some other good city work that I couldn't find on his site right now. In the meantime, here is one of his prairie pictures. He has done a couple of series of work which also really make some visual sense of the prairie. (and once again, they suffer from what I'm coming to call internet prettiness - reduced to a small jpeg online, they tend to look interesting but pretty. Having seen some of the prints at a show, that isn't at all what comes across "in the flesh")
(BTW, the top picture just won a Winter in Edmonton, Now photo competition - I almost entered, but - oh yea of little faith - figured icicles and cute snowy trees would be more along the right line. It blows me away that they were open enough to chose Eric's photo as the winner - that alone is almost enough to carry me over to spring!)
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