The pictures show things that were important – at one time – and are abandoned or ignored now. J. Jason Lazarus of Fairbanks has been taking pictures of Alaska and the American West for years. This exhibit is called Western Consumption, and features disruption and extraction, and what’s left behind after we humans take what we want.
“I'm encouraging people to reconsider how we approach land stewardship.”
There are pictures of an empty factory, an abandoned mine filled with toxic water, a huge building, intended as a distribution center, but never completed, and building shaped like an igloo on an Alaska Highway.
But these aren’t just photographs. Lazarus uses a rare technique called Mordançage, that happens after the photo is developed. He started working in the process in 2019.
“The process involves taking a traditional dark room print and basically destroying the layer of emulsion on top of it by blistering out the shadows and the darkest areas of the image into these manipulable uh, veils.”
The Mordançage process may be just right for portraying the damage done to nature or structures after their essentials have been harvested.
“Tear and rip and destroy and, and, uh, it creates a third dimension to the print and makes it feel like the print is either coming alive or, or seeping out of the frame itself.”
Even though he shoots, and teaches, a lot of digital photography, Lazarus says the Mordançage process is rewarding because he gets his hands dirty in the dark room. He teaches art and journalism photography at University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Alaska photographer Richard Murphy has been an associate of Lazarus’ for years. He said at a recent reception for the exhibit that the technique is very “front speaking” in these photographs, but to look deeper.
First of all, they're a mastery of the Mordançage technique. I mean, you would have to go a long ways to find anyone as skilled as Jason Lazarus is with this stuff, but I would tell someone who was looking at it, not to get completely caught up in that, because it can distract you from what the photographs are saying.”
Murphy says the photos themselves speak to the theme of Western Consumption, even without having their emulsion manipulated.
But Lazarus, who has a lot of photos with different techniques that aren’t Mordançage, says he planned each of these photos with the technique and the Consumption theme in mind.
“I've shot these specifically for this process. I've gone around and pre-visualized them before I even shoot them in a lot of respects. And even though that ends up coming down to what the process wants to give me, I've really defined this entire body of work to be for this process.”
The exhibit is in the ground floor display space in the Rasmuson Library until the end of June. After that, Lazarus hopes to take it to other places in Alaska and Western States.
