God loves Lindy
Ross Pulbrook's contribution to the group show Which Art in Heaven consisted of a selection of some 40 or so pictures of the TV news. Using colour slide film in a small (35mm) camera, he has redocumented the Chamberlain saga. These "suburban landscapes" were produced sporadically over the last six to seven years, during the period of the various trials and inquests. Pulbrook has made several other series using the same technique, and these are of the Pope, the Queen, soap operas, and test card patterns.
The framed prints in the exhibition were quite small -the same size as the slide originals. This allowed them to be multiply hung, one above another. The possibility was well exploited, and the resulting arrangement of images deserves some description. The prints were laid out in vertical rows of thematically related images, which viewed from a distance appeared to be single units or an image matrix. Such methodology is quite uncommon. Photography is generally displayed in horizontal, linear rows, possibly forming a chronological narrative. Matrix like groupings were also used by modernist poets to juxtapose words and allow various angular readings of text.
Rephotographing television isolates a single integrated picture from a flow of images, and static images are displayed simultaneously. This effectively reshuffles or telescopes the temporal positioning of each picture in respect to its screening order. It suggests an alternative reading to the sequential, chronological narrative model proposed by the broadcasts themselves.
In linear narratives each image informs and relays meaning to the next. To produce still photographs from television broadcasts is therefore to intervene in this process. Perhaps this is part of the reason why certain singular images were at first
Ross Pulbrook, God Loves Lindy, 1987
