Musician/performer, filmmaker, and photographer, Tav Falco guides us through the home towns and gravel roads of America s deep South, the backwoods spiritual sanctuary that he knows so well. AN ICONOGRAPHY OF CHANCE is a psycho-iconography in pictures, with a captioned intertext of the urban specters, rural fables and visual cliches that have made the gothic South a netherworld of dreams and a necropolis of terrors.
Roadside icons in Arkansas, Louisana, Mississippi, and Tennessee evoke more than indexed/nuanced signs and meanings; they are infused with emotion, and through Falco s lens become living, breathing images. Whether overtly or discreetly conjured, these images resonate with the undercurrent of sentiment, of betrayal, of lost causes in which the photographer's pictures are soaked. The secret eye of Falco is drawn to that which was overlooked, thrown out and rejected by established norms of perception, whilst his decorticated compositional framing reveals the sadness and nakedness of America forlorn, adrift, and distracted with colliding identities.
In Falco's hands the camera excavates an Orphic vision of the American South, penetrating like no other in his stated mission to agitate the dark waters of the unconscious.
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