photographs

Praha CZ 1990 © Mark Pimlott

“The photographs I have made since childhood have been made in response to fundamental and fleeting perceptions that revealed the World to me. The camera seemed the most suitable device with which to capture them. I saw meaning embedded in spaces and objects: their forms held the key to understanding the human impulse, the World, and one's place in it. Part of this belief may have been connected to the mythic dimensions of my childhood surroundings (the vast spaces of the Canadian Shield) and the Utopian atmosphere that prevailed in the 1960s in my native Montréal. The co-existence of suburban banality and Utopian futurism (represented by the city's innovative architectural developments and the parallel experimental urbanism of expo67) suggested that there was one vast environment, manifested in an array of forms. Empty parking lots were inexorably linked with airports, corporate office buildings, meandering semi-public subterranean interiors, métro cars, megastructural space frames, motorways, suburban bungalows, sylvan wildernesses, and even reconstructed historical villages. Their unity, their equivalence, their a-temporality, was a plausible, authentic and exciting reality for me. These childhood impressions have remained with me, despite knowing how things are and how they have to come to be. I continue to hope that the World is available for re-discovery, for revitalised occupation.”

In passing: Mark Pimlott photographs was published by Jap Sam books in June 2010.

Recent exhibitions of photographs were at Netwerk, Aalst in 2011, at Projektraum-Bahnhofstraße 25, Kleve, in 2010, and at Stroom Den Haag 2008-2009. To see a portion of a talk at Stroom Den Haag, click here.