A Vernacular Modernity - Price Harrison — FIGURES

Price Harrison’s photographs reveal an eye for shape and for form. More surprising, perhaps, for this architect of pristine white spaces is his attention to color and hue, in several cases the artificial shades of mass production.

Artist : Price Harrison

Series : A Vernacular Modernity

Website / Instagram

Text : Raymund Ryan

His photographs communicate a sense of detail both as noun (the architect’s craft of construction) and verb (the love and indeed the fetishization of finish). They evoke a vernacular modernity of planar surfaces, unexpected light, and industrial products in twenty-first century America. His photographs frequently suggest some recent-or future-human presence and activity. As with all art practice, Harrison’s images coax and spur us to look again at the world in which we live.

With degrees in literature and architecture, and now with more than two decades of critical architectural practice in Nashville, Price Harrison is also a music producer and per-former. His attitude to the detail of both sound recording and photography equipment is part of a broader delight in mechanical objects, an “eye” for automobiles and graphics so vital to the American landscape since at least the 1950s. This priority given to design applies, therefore, both to the making of the photograph and to its content. Elegance is here allied to a certain clarity of image-to pattern and to cropping-so that these photographs offer seemingly casual yet carefully constructed moments in everyday life.

In the 1960s, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown documented the burgeoning urban phenomena of Las Vegas.

Concurrently, J.B. Jackson wrote in praise of ordinary and vernacular landscapes, reminding readers that “beauty derives from the human presence.” In Harrison’s photography, we see images of America away from its coastal metropoles and distinct from nature. This is where many of us live today, amid infrastructure and popular culture and multiple belief systems. It’s a world with people on the move amid passing symbols of permanence. Can photography convey this duality of tradition and constant flux? In Harrison’s lens, the human seems yet again to have hit the road.