The photographic act is, for me, a way of exploring and manifesting the inner voice that essentially guides my responses to immediate and accumulated experience.
There is a notion related to the creative process and advanced by the poet Baudelaire that has helped me understand the nature of photographic seeing. Baudelaire proposes that all things out there, in the external world, are signs and symbols whose relationships and analogies may be deciphered by the sensibility and imagination of artists. If one can envision the conglomerate of all things that make up our world as a type of hieroglyphic that needs to be understood, then photographic images can serve to decipher or interpret segments of that scenic and enigmatic whole. Photographs need not explain, but they can suggest or insinuate meaning.
My images tend to reflect the external effects of modernization: global consumerism, urban evolution with its contrasting cycles of growth and decay, social marginalization and disconnection. I tread urban space and seek the sense of chance discovery that is deemed characteristic of street photography, but images that might appear to be the result of a casual discovery are often informed by conceptual preoccupations and designs.
I am interested in the narrative dimensions created by pairs or series of thematically related images. My latest works advance a style of visual articulation that consists in the seamless merging of inter-referential photographs.
Biography
Born in Santander, Spain, in 1950, Enrique Manchon has lived in Vancouver since 1965. He studied Fine Arts (BFA, 1973) and Spanish Literature (MA, 1982) at the University of British Columbia and now teaches in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at UBC. His work has been part of group exhibitions at the Gallery of Photography, SUB Gallery at UBC, Simon Fraser Gallery, Simon Patrich Gallery and Elliott Louis Gallery.
Group Exhibitions
2010 Elliot Louis Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
2001 Photography 9x10, Simon Patrich Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
2000 Photographers 9+1, Simon Patrich Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
1999 West Coast Photographers 8x8, Simon Patrich Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
1991 Robson Street Merchants, Vancouver’s Vancouver Photographic Competition, Honourable Mention.
1975 The Fourth Annual British Columbia Photographers Exhibition, Simon Fraser Gallery, Burnaby, B.C.,
Review and photo published in The BC Photographer, Winter 1975.
1974 Gallery of Photography, Vancouver, BC.
1973 Photo Show, S.U.B. Gallery, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.
