The exhibition brings together a selection of photographs taken in recent years on different continents. All the pictures were taken in former British colonies, whereby the information about the respective photographic context is deliberately kept vague. For in principle, the focus here is on what these places have in common, irrespective of their different geographical locations and cultural development, namely their colonial past, which has inscribed itself in Palmer’s pictures in many different but thoroughly comparable ways.
The artist’s gaze searches for very specific signs and constellations along the seams between the colonial past and the immediate present. Roger Palmer often confronts us with inscriptions or characters that lay out culturally familiar tracks in a foreign environment. What is found is fragmented and commented on through the point of view. Palmer tends to keep his distance from his subject. The demolished picket fence with the word fragment “Now” in the photograph “Waterloo” stands out in brutal sharpness and contrasting black and white against the soft grey tones of the landscape in the background. The optical barriers through which Palmer views these places problematise both the photographer’s standpoint as a representative of the culture of these former colonisers and the intertwining of the colonial exercise of power and indigenous culture. In his photographs, Roger Palmer carefully brings both contexts together and blends them into one another.