Eric Weeks
Exhibition Director
9th Annual Jeonju International Photography Festival 2016
Jeonju, South Korea

I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Although one understands that the photographic image is a subjective document, especially in the digital age, there is a complex oscillation between photograph perceived as fact and photograph read as fiction. This act involves a suspension of disbelief, first noted by Aristotle, where a viewer understands intellectually, or often subconsciously, that they are viewing fiction but suspend their disbelief and come to a catharsis despite of that knowledge.

FACT/FICTION is an international gathering of artists who are engaged in presenting photographic facts juxtaposed against each other, offering their work up to a decoding by the viewer in order to share commonality and tell intricate, non-linear, open-ended stories. These works investigate the mysteries of reality and the human condition, and have a kindred relationship to the rich history of literature.
These artists are dedicated to the medium of photography's unparalleled ability to record minute details of the real world, but also understand that the significance of these details are malleable and able to be transformed through their works. The artists included are: Lucas Foglia (United States), Victoria Hely-Hutchinson (United Kingdom), Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman (United States), Maroesjka Lavigne (Belgium), Stacy Renee Morrison (United States), Orit Raff (Israel), Arne Svenson (United States) and Matt Wilson (United Kingdom).

Victoria Hely-Hutchinson and Lucas Foglia make documents - photographs that are both an investigation of a social subset, and a personal exploration. Their work represents one end of a spectrum presented in this exhibition. They present facts in a documentary style, capturing a specific moment, a specific experience of someone else or the other, but implicitly the photographers communicate stories about their own upbringing and experiences.

Hely-Hutchinson's photographs public school students in England. In the UK, public schooling refers to an education system that is privately run and not government supported. Typically, students who attend are from the higher social classes within the UK, and enjoy educational and societal privilege. Hely-Hutchinson was a public school student herself before immigrating to the United States to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York City. As she moved through her college art education, she began to look at her earlier experiences and that of her siblings. She often presents her work with a letter from the headmaster to her parents, chiding Victoria's recent behavior at a school bonfire, and how it set a poor example for the younger girls and offended visitors. In her photographs there is a tension between the traditions of decorum, and the shenanigans and horseplay that are the part of most teenagers' coming of age. The young men wear suits, the women uniforms and they cavort in posh settings. Sometimes the children have already co-opted the manners and visage of a proper adult, while at other times they act like youths. The photographs tell her own story, as documented in this next generation of students, and a third story to the viewer, one of fiction.

In his series A Natural Order, American Lucas Foglia befriended then photographed groups of people in southeastern United States who have decided to live off of the grid, and practice self-sufficiency. Like Hely-Hutchinson and her examination of elite British society, Foglia turned his examination on a subset of society that resonates with his own personal experience. He grew up on a farm in upstate New York, and his family lived in a hybrid manner with only some modern conveniences. The Foglias canned their own food, heated their house with wood and bartered for goods with neighbors, but also owned a few vehicles and computers. In Foglia's lyrical photographs, there are glimpses of modernity such as rifles and bathroom fixtures, but many of the facts described such as his subjects' clothing, the shelters they live in and the farming methods they employ suggest an earlier era. His photographs describe specific people and locations that were in front of his lens, but what do we as viewers really know about these people? His subjects become protagonists in our own stories that are rooted in the facts presented, but brought to full fruition when combined with our own cultural knowledge.

The British photographer Matt Wilson operates within the tradition of documentary photography of the twentieth century. He plans long trips to places that are unknown to him, and responds in the present to what he finds there. He uses a light and facile 35mm film camera, and very consciously utilizes the specific attributes of analog description. The series presented here, No Hablar Con Touristas, is a tour de force of pushing film photography's limits of low-light description. The warm tones in his images are from using daylight film under artificial lighting conditions, and the grain evident in the images are by using film with a high-sensitivity to light. His photographs combine the facts that he describes with the way in which he describes them. The resulting images suggest a dream, or a cinematic view of the quiet recesses of Havana. Wilson's world is dark, murky and warm, while at the same time inviting and a little dangerous. His knowing technical hand makes the photographs seem factual, suggesting that "these Cubans I have met live here like this", but in reality Wilson's encounters did not look the same to his naked eye. It is only through the transformative powers of photography that these stories unfold. His work calls to mind the narrative color use in Jane Campion's The Piano and Wang Kar Wai's Chungking Express, while his use of contrast and high-key grain are homage to photographers Josef Koudelka and William Klein. Wilson tells empathetic short stories through an incorporation of sophisticated visual language that is based on his knowledge of the history of photography and cinema.

Stacy Renee Morrison's series The Girl of My Dreams is an engaging and complex journey that attempts to tell the story of an American woman who was born 133 years earlier than the artist. She first met this woman through a small discarded trunk, found in the garbage on the streets of New York City, which held all kinds of personal effects. Through painstaking research, Morrison unearthed the identity of the trunk's original owner, Sylvia DeWolf Ostrander, the scion of one of the largest New England slave trading families, who was born in 1841 and died in 1925. Morrison discovered and befriended Sylvia's great-granddaughter, as well as the current owners of the houses Sylvia lived at in Bristol, Rhode Island. The amount she has uncovered about Sylvia is astonishing, but still, there is so much that Morrison does not know about her subject, and this is where she calls upon her alchemist's skills to attempt to recreate Sylvia's life. Using all of her knowledge about photography (including long exposures, blurred motion and controlled color palettes), combined with her knowledge gained from primary source materials, Morrison conjures up images that offer a glimpse into the life of someone long gone. Some of Morrison's facts presented through her photographs are actual clothing and ephemera once owned by Sylvia, in locations once inhabited by her, but out of the necessity of photographing a time and place that existed 150 years ago she also employs great fictions in the photographs too. Though Stacy Renee Morrison and Lucas Foglia's photographic strategies could not be more different, their results create a conflation in time that only the viewers' imagination can coalesce.

American photographer Arne Svenson is also a conjurer of sorts, in that he weaves stories from a scarcity of facts. In two series titled The Neighbors and The Workers, he has captured glimpses of neighbors and workers in the windows of the building across the street from his apartment in New York City. At first glance, his work evokes questions about voyeurism and why do we like to look at other human beings, but Svenson's work quickly moves past those issues because of a his keen discernment in what he chooses to present to the viewer. His images in no way compromise his subjects, but rather elevate them by comparing them to historical figures represented through art history. Svenson's art is rooted in the recognition of gestures and form and patterns that we know from the great expanse of visual cultural output over the past number of centuries. By drawing references to that shared knowledge with his camera, he is also referencing all the stories connected to that shared knowledge. The tension in his photographs is between the very contemporary clothing worn by his subjects in modern, almost Mondrian-like geometric settings, and the comparisons he makes to gestures found in paintings from the Renaissance and Mannerist periods. Each image suggests a story that is culled together by a minimum of mundane facts told on a bare stage, combined with Svenson's sensitive recognition of the glorious and beautiful gesture.

Belgian Maroesjka Lavigne's series Ísland, which is the Icelandic term for that country, is, like Svenson's work, a minimalist aesthetic experience, echoing the fact that Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. In Lavigne's series there seems to be two main types of photographs. One is of the Icelandic landscape, most often obscured by fallen or still-blustering snow. A ship floats forlornly on a snow-covered land, and can no longer find the ocean, somehow having lost its way. Over there a red sky (or is that lava?), is flecked with white flakes. These images act as metaphor for the human condition. The second type of photograph is populated with the protagonists in Lavigne's stories. They are usually isolated and alone. Only once in the series is more than one person depicted within the photographic frame. Although Lavigne presents the facts of the austere Icelandic landscape, and the visages of seemingly cool and pale-skinned inhabitants (including a white-furred arctic fox), she has constructed a fictional world that is devoid of the courser conundrums of daily Icelandic life. In Lavigne's beautiful world, all is quiet, cold and still.

The collaborative team of Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman has created a grand body of work (over 800 images) that relies on social media as the raw material in which to build their poignant narratives. They write about their Geolocation series, "We use publicly available embedded GPS information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world." By combing through the vast quantity of tweets (there are an estimated 500 million sent daily), Larson and Shindelman mine for 140 character statements of personal, intimate and often philosophical nature. They then travel to the location from where the tweet was sent, and make photographs that they present with the original tweet. In their work they are combining instances of fact; the original thought represented in the tweet, and the facts that are suggested by what they choose to photograph at the site of origin. Their process suggests they are practicing private detectives, and that the origin site can provide clues to the original mystery. In truth, though, they are poets who make multiple subjective choices, from the tweets with which they decide to work to the information they choose to include and juxtapose within their frame. They carefully employ methods of photographic visual communication, such as point of view, color contrast and harmony, time of day and atmospheric conditions, all cloaked in a frontal objective framing reminiscent of Walker Evans and the Bechers. By reporting facts disguised in the language of objectivity, Larson and Shindelman have created affecting lamentations for humanity.

Israeli artist Orit Raff's work represents the other parameter of working strategy in this exhibition, in juxtaposition to Hely-Hutchinson's, Foglia's and Wilson's documentary styles. The photographs presented from her series Priming at first viewing appear to be well-crafted environmental studies, but these are camera-less images that Raff painstakingly created with the assistance of an architectural team and 3D-imaging specialists. These spaces do not exist in reality, but are based on detailed facts. The facts come from literary sources such as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. Raff takes the authors' descriptions of locations from these novels and combines them with historical research to create images of spaces that have only existed in the author and readers' imaginations until now. Although they are visual representations of imagined spaces, we read the signs presented, and what they signify, as we do any photograph that was made with an optical system. Since the earliest practice of photography, artists such as Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson desired to make images that read as true depictions of reality although they were composites of numerous realities. Raff takes that desire, as well as the concept of this festival's main exhibition, Fact/Fiction, and complicates it one more step by starting with fiction that she then turns into visual facts, to be deciphered back into fiction by the viewer.

The medium of photography, and the images created through its various processes, have always had a kindred relationship with literature, painting and the imagination. Because of its ability to describe the world so specifically through optics, viewers are often dazzled into the belief that what they are seeing actually existed, rather than subjective facts that are transformed by artists into images that communicate stories more subtle and intricate than what first appears to the naked eye.