Ron Jude: Emmett

Jude's latest book project, Emmett, brings new life to a selection of his own early photographs, made in the early 1980s in central Idaho. Enhanced by special-effects filters and cheap telephoto lenses, the pictures include hazy scenes of a summertime drag race, a forest across changing seasons, midnight horror films on TV and a Nordic-looking teenager who appears as a specter from the artist's past. Edited here nearly 30 years after its making, this experimental body of work acquires unexpected nuance and humor, and has the serendipitous qualities of a dream--memories reorganized into a fictionalized narrative, imagery suffused with both an unsettling melancholy and the glow of youthful reverie. Related conceptually to and residing thematically between his two previous books--Alpine Star and Other Nature--Emmett achieves an aesthetic inspired by equal parts Motörhead and Jean-Paul Sartre.