Follow The Leader, Simon Cuthbert (#100)

Follow The Leader, 2002
Simon Cuthbert
Type C Print
200mm x 255mm

Check out Simon's work on Instagram @simoncuthbert64

Simon Cuthbert makes photographs that reverberate across a spectrum of long established photographic genre. With an eye honed by the rigours of museum collections documentation, his day job, his work provides an important challenge to notions of Heritage- the white bread miasma that is Brand Tasmania.

Over twenty years Cuthbert has refined an extraordinary visual archive detailing humans desire to create structures that provide shelter and comfort, utility and efficiency. Part portrait and indexical document, part social commentary and part elegy Cuthbert toys with the viewers habituated knowledge systems of the built environment. This is the true Nature of the twenty-first century world not the artificially sequestered wildernesses so dear to Romantics. In the supposed “non-places” of the suburbs, the roadside layover or desperate barren paddocks we encounter ambitious invention, wilful individuation or entropic approximations of such. What is striking about Cuthbert’s archival vision is a palpable sympathy for the subject matter.

A Cuthbert leitmotif is an insistent compositional isolation that enhances the forensic incremental detail provided by the lens but also elevates what are essentially architectural studies into the genre of portraiture. Here in these terrains it is difficult not to anthropomorphise- sometimes “Cuthbert’s” structures stand resolute, sometimes stagger against all odds, where simple survival is in itself heroic. Of late this sensibility has become much keener indeed much more mature.

Craig Judd August 2017