Christian Patterson: Redheaded Peckerwood - 2nd. Edition

Redheaded Peckerwood is a work with a tragic underlying narrative – the story of 19 year old Charles Starkweather and 14 year old Caril Ann Fugate who murdered ten people, including Fugate’s family, during a three day killing spree across Nebraska to the point of their capture in Douglas, Wyoming. The images record places and things central to the story, depict ideas inspired by it, and capture other moments and discoveries along the way.

From a technical perspective, the photographs incorporate and reference the techniques of photojournalism, forensic photography, image appropriation, reenactment and documentary landscape photography. On a conceptual level, they deal with a charged landscape and play with a photographic representation and truth as the work deconstructs a pre-existing narrative.

Redheaded Peckerwood also utilizes and plays with a pre-existing archive of material, deliberately mixing fact and fiction, past and present, myth and reality as it presents, expands and re-presents the various facts and theories surrounding this story.

While photographs are the heart of this work, they are the complemented and informed by documents and objects that belonged to the killers and their victims – including a map, poem, confession letter, stuffed animal, hood ornament and various other items, in several cases, these materials are discoveries first made by the artist and presented here for the first time.

In book form, the work is presented as a sort of visual crime dossier, including pieces of paper which are inserted into the book. The many individual pieces included serve as cues and clues within the visual puzzle. In this way, there are connections that are left for the viewer to be made and mysteries that are left to be solved.

Redheaded Peckerwood is Christian Patterson's second monograph.

About the Photographer:

Christian Patterson (b. 1972) is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He was nominated for the 2007 Santa Fe Prize for Photography, the 2008 New York Photo Awards Best Fine Art Series, and the 2009 Baum Award for American Photographers. He was a 2010 Light Work Artist-In-Residence. His work is exhibited, collected and published internationally. His first monograph, Sound Affects, was published by Edition Kaune, Sudendorf in 2008. His second monograph, Redheaded Peckerwood, was published by MACK in 2011 and named one of the best books of 2011 by numerous noted international photography critics, Art in America, the New York Times, TIME and The Guardian among others and nominated for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards.

SECOND EDITION

Essays by Luc Sante and Karen Irvine

164 pages
19 cm x 24 cm
98 images including 3 inserts and a booklet
Printed paper over board

Published by MACK