Liz Darlington's Projects

Witness, photographed in Romania, represents constructed realities of real events. The images deconstruct the language of documentary photography. They make no attempt to return the Romanian culture to a document of the real. Instead, they celebrate the necessity of nostalgia and its pivotal place in the realm of the poetic. Yet these images are grounded in the photographic real, depicting a nostalgic picture of a place that is firmly planted in the present. Although photographed in 2012, they reference a pre-Modern world, a world which rarely exists, but one to which we are inexplicably drawn. Each photograph provides a constant reminder of a sustainable life that survives on the margins of an ever-changing globalized world.

This series of images was taken in places where people spend time together: the beach, the mountains, the countryside. Referencing the collective memory of family holidays and weekend outings. these pictures trigger a nostalgic recollection of a place and time past. But this nostalgia is undercut by the realism of photography. The images hover between the real and the half-remembered. They recall the longing we have to recreate the past. In this work, we see both the longing and the reality, a pairing that engages and disturbs simultaneously.

The Construct series are beautifully nostalgic. Dark, somber and haunting, they depict a variety of “Homelands” (that most nostalgic of places). These Homelands, however, belong in the historical past rather than any specific geographical location. They belong to — are very much part of — a pre-Modern world, a world which no longer exists. These pictures are postcards from the past, each one self-consciously a construct, a fictional picture of another place in time. And if these Homelands seem already familiar, it is because we have encountered them before, in films, on TV, in commercials. They live in the collective conscious rather than individual memory, places of reverie, nostalgia and Romance. Softly focused, allusive and dream-like, these pictures revel in their Romanticism. They make no attempt to return the cultures they depict to the realm of the real. Instead, they celebrate the necessity of nostalgia and its pivotal place in the realm of the poetic.