Scott McFarland

In an ongoing project, Scott Mcfarland is making of a small number of subjects. His recent focus has been on three sites: the increasingly out-dated laboratories in a few Vancouver commercial film processing companies, gardens of west side Vancouver houses, and a cabin in Roberts Creek (a small town on the Sunshine Coast of BC). A relation between McFarland’s depictions of these three subjects is, on the surface, oblique at best. The lab images are mostly tight close ups of equipment and film processing paraphernalia. The gardens are varied, combining portraits of gardeners at work with images of trees, foliage, and in one idiosyncratic photograph, a hunting fox. The cabin photographs include portraits, depictions of the cabin’s exterior at night, and a number of interior shots of kitchen implements, lights, accoutrements and furnishings. The difficulty of tying these subjects together with a unifying theme or as a conceptual projects if compounded by the variety of McFarland’s documentary approaches. His pictures form a collection of heterogeneous details and events. Most importantly, each of his images is individually resolved and formally self-contained. Courtesy: Union, London