Contemplating eternity

The haunting, lyrical morbidity of Rocky Schenck’s photographs

It’s safe to say that the groundwork for Rocky Schenck’s photographs was laid in childhood.

Schenck grew up in the suitably atmospheric sounding town of Dripping Springs, Texas. There his parents took great pains to nurture Schenck and his sister’s fantasy lives. One Christmas, Schenck recalls, his parents filled the entire living room with hay to suggest a visit from Santa’s reindeer. And they not only incited Rocky and his sister’s belief in the tooth fairy, they encouraged the children to become pen pals with their respective fairies.

“My tooth fairy’s name was Thistleseed, and I communicated with Thistleseed for years,” says Schenck in the drawl that still haunts his speech despite decades of living in Los Angeles.

But there was a flip side to his parents’ fondness for fantasy.

“Mixed in with all this fantasy was my parents’ very volatile relationship: They loved to party, loved to drink, loved to entertain,” Schenck says during a recent stop in Atlanta. “So it was two worlds that they introduced me to. The world of fantasy and this very heavy-duty world of a volatile relationship and psychological games.”

Schenck’s images on view in After Dark at Jackson Fine Art are infused with that paradoxical cocktail of pathos and beauty, and a subtle contemplation of life and death.

“I think the photographs are me trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle.”

It’s a very personal puzzle for Schenck, but his images also address a larger human desire to find meaning in the physical world, in the time-defying mountains and oceans and deserts he photographs, which inspire spiritual reckoning. Look into Rocky Schenck’s sepia photographs and you enter a world where contemplating eternity is an avocation. Endless country roads beckon travelers. Staircases swirl heavenward. A group of faceless people cranes their heads up to the sky, acknowledging the great gaping maw of the unknown. Schenck’s images are of a ghost world of past and present where life and death coexist and the living reach out to touch the dead, but never quite connect.

Schenck’s photographs recall the work of 19th-century experiments in the photographic medium, as well as the work of early 20th-century pictorialist George Seeley (whom Schenck considers his most important influence) and photorealist painter Gerhard Richter. It is often hard to tell, upon first appraising Schenck’s work, if you are even looking at a photograph or at a painting.

Shooting through a series of homemade filters and lenses (in addition to some darkroom techniques he is reluctant to divulge), Schenck pictures an unlocatable Anywhere than could be actual or imaginary. Never completely abstract, but never completely naturalistic, not quite grim but far from happy, Schenck’s photographs are perpetually in-between. In that regard, they contain the poignant contradictions of his own childhood.

“My parents are responsible for everything,” Schenck, says with fondness.

Using his camera like a decoder that makes the world clearer by first filtering it through his hazy subjectivity, Schenck creates luminous, haunted photographs that appear as a testament to a truth once removed, like travel photos of Earth taken by an alien.

“I take my camera everywhere and I shoot whatever I come across. It’s like I’m taking stills for a movie,” Schenck explains.

That movie is undoubtedly Schenck’s own life, which he attempts to comprehend through these production stills of his own psyche.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com