ABOUT

'Jake Hitchcock’s fine art documentary style is often based on encounters, between the observed and himself. Both the anonymous subject and the observer himself occupy a momentary concurrence in which both are somewhat blissfully unaware of the other’s actions. In his medium format images from both the capital Ljubljana and Lake Bled in Slovenia, landscapes are reminiscent of traditional oil paintings found in the Narodna galerija, and portraits of passers by possess a nostalgia of metamorphosed memories.

The artist himself says “I’m more inspired by compositions in traditional painting and I like to think of some photo[graph]s as timeless.. you can not pinpoint a specific moment.” Yet he enjoys the interruptions of modern life that subtly infiltrate his images - “entwining renaissance style [settings] with reality.”

One specific image bolsters this idea of intertwining past and present realities. It depicts a woman and child resting on Ljubljana’s castle’s wall, which crown’s a 375 metre high hill east of the Old Town. The young girl playfully lays while her mother watches on through the lens of her mobile phone. A modern flood light permeates the landscape, comprised of Ljubljana’s stark architecture and a horizon drawn by the Karawanks. There are these interruptions, subject and object relations, that subtly draw our attention to the modernity of the image.

The adolescence of the country is commensurable to the artist’s gaze upon his new subject, Ljubljana. His perspective is not that of a tourist, rather a traveller in pursuance of a muse.'