![]() ![]() Time, place, action, and identity variously align, fracture, and morph in these still and moving images. Filmed seventeen years later in the same location in Utah, Bradley and Lachman’s Shadow is a prelude to Dark Blood, the imagined past of the leading character, which combines images of the original film, its sets and artifacts, with footage from Shadow’s production, along with the new film. An ill-fated encounter with a traveling couple ends in the Navajo’s death, though the ending scenes were left unfinished until 2012. The narrative of Dark Blood is the story of a young Navajo man living alone in the Nevada desert near a nuclear testing site. Bradley, whose photographs and films explore celebrity and the fractured nature of identity, worked with Lachman to create two video installations and a series of photographs referencing Dark Blood, derived from Lachman’s memories of filming the original work and combined with Bradley’s complex identification with the late actor as both subject and symbol. Lachman, whose best known films include Far from Heaven, Erin Brockovich, and The Virgin Suicides, was director of photography for the1993 film Dark Blood, which starred River Phoenix, and which was still in production at the time of the actor’s sudden death in Los Angeles. “I think the larger issue is, as human beings, how do we cope with loss? If you’re so in love with something, or if something resonates in such a beautiful way with you that it creates this formation of your identity, and then it’s suddenly ruptured-that relationship between the icon and the fan-how do you cope with that? There doesn’t seem to be a real coping mechanism in society…How does one keep in touch?” –Slater BradleyĪ haunting meditation on mythology, mortality, and identify, Dead Ringer is a groundbreaking collaboration between American artist Slater Bradley and noted cinematographer Ed Lachman.
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