Alpine Star 2004-06
Based on a sequence of pictures culled from the back-issues of a small town newspaper, Alpine Star by Ron Jude engages with the fictions of our collective memory. We find at work something far stranger than the standard assault on a photographic “code” that has undermined most discussion of the subject. This is not just another deconstruction of photography as if it were a kind of conceptual problem to be solved and explicated, but rather an irrational poetics of the archive. Jude has fashioned an uncanny anti-narrative, its precise structure defined by a tension native to photography itself. The result is more than just the sum of its parts – he achieves, in this minimal way, a very satisfying and provocative ambiguity.
—Darren Campion, The Incoherent Light