Fractured Routes

Edge of Humanity Magazine

1 year ago

Photographer Liza Dracup is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Fractured Routes 2024’. To see Liza ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Fractured Routes initially arose from ideas associated with psychogeography and the dérive. The underlining concept aims to visualize fleeting encounters with place and space, whilst traveling on public transport through fluctuating and transient views. By adopting experimental photographic modes of making and embracing the element of chance to navigate the idea of drifting. By capturing presence and absence instantaneously, along with the clunkiness of moving from place to place. The resultant jagged lines of contradiction have a discordant pace and a harmonious connecting rhythm. An encounter with passing through and passing by urban and rural landscapes, whist lost in thought and the moment. The resultant works visualize the hard harmony of a disoriented vision.

Liza Dracup is an established photographer and senior academic based in the north of England. Her experimental methodologies continue to underpin her photographic practice and academic research. This approach has led to various commissions, exhibitions and publications. She successfully completed a doctorate on Photographic strategies for visualizing the landscape and natural history of Northern England: the ordinary and the extraordinary (2017). Her work continues to question how photography made in response to specific landscapes and natural histories can operate within the field of landscape aesthetics. Aligning with wider cultural debates about the value of the ‘local’ from an environmental and personal perspective. Her research tests out strategies that capitalize on the transformational qualities of photography. Her approach utilizes various photographic modes of making. She engages with experimental photographic strategies, which present us with paradoxes that extend beyond human vision. Her photographs place emphasis on the extraordinary properties of the ordinary and reveal hidden or unseen aspects, leading to a more informed, comprehensive and enriched idea of the northern landscape and its natural history. Her wider research loop crosses professional and academic contexts and extends to re-positioning a wide range of historical collections-based research material across photographic, artistic and science disciplines. This research trajectory continues an on-going photographic examination of the broader cultural value of the ordinary and the local. Her work has been recognized through international award nominations for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2012) and the Prix Pictet (2009).

All images and text © Liza Dracup