Chris Gallagher | Picture Lake / 100 Hundred Views of Mt. Shuksan: An Homage to Katsushika Hokusai and Robert Linsley

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Chris Gallagher, "Picture Lake"

Courtesy of the Artist.

100 Views of Mt. Shuksan is a conceptual photographic body of work consisting of 100 pictures exploring the relationship of an image to its title, while also functioning as an homage to artist Robert Linsley, killed in a cycling accident in 2017 and his photographic project 100 views of Mt Baker, which in turn is inspired by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s 100 Views of Mount Fuji.

An image, viewed on its own, seems to require a title or caption in order to answer the inevitable question; what is it or what is it about. The caption or title is a text image that is supposed to support the picture image. The picture of Mt. Shuksan, which is the sister mountain to Mt. Baker, is taken from ‘Picture Lake” hence that becomes the natural title of this Mt. Shuksan image and rather than remain outside of the picture it is included boldly in the picture. 

The title PICTURE LAKE is both a text image and a literal description of the scene (picture of a lake) printed over the picture with the text keyed out by another image so that PICTURE LAKE becomes another image that intrudes into the image of Mt. Shuksan. So instead of asking the title to conjure an image, the title becomes an image and interacts directly and graphically within the image it normally just supports.

Rather than consist of 100 different images of the same subject, as per Hokusai and Linsley, Picture Lake / 100 Views of Mt. Shuksan is 100 pictures of the same image with the same title but with the text replaced with 99 other images, made up from the reprocessed mother image, the artist’s archive and some public images. The work explores the effect of a title on a picture when the text does not cite another image but literally is another image.