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Female Narrator Ron Jude was born in Los Angeles but raised in rural Idaho. After he left home, his mother sent him a gift subscription to the local paper. With no budget to employ a staff photographer, the newspaper ran images made by the writers or readers who sent in their own photographs. Jude began cutting out images that interested him and sequenced them in a way that held personal meaning for him in a book called Alpine Star. Arpad Kovacs from the Department of Photographs.
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Arpad Kovacs It is hard to ascribe stories to go with these pictures. They don't seem to have the same urgency or the same gravity as geopolitical news items. [ambient music evoking a mysterious mood] But I think for the people who live in this town, these pictures do mean something and they represent stories that are important for that community. What Jude does with these photographs is remove them from the original context, and then arrange them according to his internal way of thinking about visual relationships between these photographs.
And so not only are they decontextualized from the original source, they are then re-arranged to make a brand new narrative. And Jude doesn't often reveal what that narrative is. It's up to the viewer to assign meaning to these pictures.
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