Niki Feijen’s haunting images of abandoned houses

My opinion of this work vacillates to and fro like the pastie tassels of an exotic dancer; and this is not without some pleasure – it has caused me to reflect upon my own sensibilities and assumptions.

That said, I tend to think over-processing can drown out nuance, and HDR and similar techniques may well be the faux-wood paneling of our time. Still, I try to generally see technique as successful (or not) based upon what I extract to be the concepts underlying the work. There seem to be many comments directly stating or implying some expectation, a directive, of urbex. Perhaps there is something to this. Framed as urbex, these baroque scenes (with varying degrees of processing – not all overdone according to some roughed-in standard of taste) do present much more in terms of allegory or narrative then do many abandonments, simply hallow ruin. Do I believe these are to lesser or greater degrees (ghosts aside) staged? Yes. And this seems contradictory to the artist intent. But, regardless of issues of fidelity, I’ll gladly take some pearls from the set. I like to get lost in them, and I forget the critical mind (thank god for these moments) – they are rabbit holes. It might also be responsible of us, in the critical role, to acknowledge that well regarded documentary photography from the past has not been without some controversy about being staged. Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, just to name two, have been accused in very credible argument as having staged a number of photos. And Lange even admitted to removing a distracting element in her iconic “Migrant Mother” image. So standards of the real, the true, have been the subject of much debate within photographic method for some time now.

And, yes, it is Halloween. I almost didn’t consider this – embarrassingly.