Kirk Pedersen: Tradeoffs

Cloth with paper jacket, 12 x 12, 93 plates from Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Seoul, Bangkok, Hong Kong and several cities in China. James Scarborough writes... It's an intriguing project, Pedersen's attempt to anthropomorphize demographic data. It correlates with past work he's done, spending large blocks of time living and teaching, observing and photographing, the roil and boil of the urban Far East, where (or anywhere, for that matter) the detritus of advertising morphs into the collaged shards of a fragmented reality. That the people he photographs are emotionally and sociologically neutral is precisely the point. Pedersen works on the fringe of microeconomics and the behavior of the people its theories seek to explain. His esthetic folds into the consumption patterns of those he photographs. He walks a narrow line between cynicism and despair, finding unexpected beauty in the precise though fleeting moments each image captures.