Bryce Julien

I have observed ponds talking to ducks, lamps talking to street corners, chairs talking to windows, and so forth

The phrase 'I have observed ponds talking to ducks, lamps talking to street corners, chairs talking to windows, and so forth' comes from Judy Weiser’s text Photo Therapy Techniques Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums and refers to the phototherapeutic ideology that there is no wrong way to read an image or its content, there is value in each reading as diverse as each individual viewer.

Concerned with exploring the cross section between visual culture and self perception, this series situates disparate images in dialogue with one another, drawing attention to direct and indirect forms of visual perception. Through projective understanding of images, one can draw relationships and construct narratives between any subjects, thereby questioning how information is visually transcribed, re-contextualized and communicated to the viewer.

Informed by photo-therapy and self-therapy methods, I use images sourced from my archive and family album alongside self portraiture to externalize a conversation between my performed roles as the photographic self and intrapersonal self. I reconstitute the significance my personal archive and family album have as objects of personal affect. Individual images collaborate through an installation of clusters, each image captioning the others in its periphery to construct a discourse between topics of family, self, and photographic cognizance.

(2019)