Bigger Than Life – Ryan Schude
Ryan Schude is one of those get-up-and-go-guys who will probably change the world or at least its self perception in some unimaginable or unfathomable way many years from now. A photographer who earned his chops by spending a year and a half working in a rental house just so he could get his hands on all the top notch photographic gear that only the professionals could afford. These days his skills are in demand by big agencies and corps. around the world, but his personal work for me hits a level of explosivity and aftermath, both emotional and physical that can’t be ignored.
Think Sherman on steroids and with a lot more friends, add a dash of all the social realist greats for good measure, turn up the colour, turn up the volume, and sit back and be engulfed by the crazy crazy world that is Schude’s mind. We’ve stepped way beyond any recognisable line of visual inquisitivity here; each shot is as jam packed with as much narrative as any arthouse cult movie could handle. Some of the more populated scenes are the metaphysical equivalent of ‘Where’s Wally’, firing a shot across the bow of perception and leaving your logic centre floundering for a source to the event. At least that’s where Schude’s crowd scenes leaves me – staring, craving more inside knowledge, and eventually filling the gaps with my own narrative.
If photography has any sort of future asides documentation and ‘re-presentation’ in the pre-holographic dream recorded pseudo psychic world sitting around the corner, it has to be to dramatise the sheer joy and terror of being alive on a planet over populated with the smartest/dumbest monkeys you ever will meet. Nice one Ryan – www.ryanschude.com
