Much of Reuben Wu’s landscape photography has a dreamy, extra-terrestrial feel that suggests his landscapes are not of this planet. So far, so sci-fi, but this multi-talented DJ, pop star and visual artist is also a trained industrial designer who’s as partial to science as he is to science fiction. He tells Carol Cooper how he likes to capture the reality of things, just with a slightly shifted vision…
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe – attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time.” So recalls Rutger Hauer’s dying android in Blade Runner. I’m reminded of this speech as I listen to Reuben Wu recount his odyssey to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. “We travelled over frozen land on snowmobiles. There were some incredible visions I’ll never forget, like riding towards the setting sun over the frozen Tempelfjord as spindrift caught the golden sunlight.”
Once best known as key member of electronic band Ladytron, Wu is increasingly recognised as an accomplished photographer. In 2011 he published Svalbard, a book of shots from his Arctic adventure, and the 38-year-old recently had his first exhibition, Distant Suns, at the Schneider Gallery, Chicago, where he’s now based.
“I love music and I have been doing it since I was five years old, but I relish the freedom I get from exploring the world and expanding my own vision,” he says of his new direction.
He’s always had an open and exploring mind, and an interest in the visual arts. Along with music, one of Wu’s first loves was drawing and, after leaving university – where he formed Ladytron – he worked as an industrial designer. “I quit to make music and travel, but I still have an ongoing fascination for ‘things’,” he says.
Wu started photographing remote, unusual locations as he toured the world – from observatories in Chile’s Atacama desert to an abandoned theme park near Beijing. “I explored a few similar sites in China on that tour. I visited this place in Shanghai designed to resemble an English market town; there were replicas of Bristol’s Christ Church and the Rows of Chester, very surreal.”
He seems to have a nose for sniffing out the surreal and a knack for lending a fantastical appearance to the ‘things’ and landscapes he records. He loves experimenting with different cameras and is a fan of film. On a 50-mile hike in Patagonia, he carried a bulky Mamiya RZ67 along with his tent and equipment: “It was the least sensible camera to take, weighing about a third of my payload. But it changed the way I took pictures in that I had to stop what I was doing and set it up. Working with film cameras has disciplined the way I shoot on any camera now.”
His use of Polaroid film, particularly for the Svalbard collection, helps to bestow a dreamy, otherworldly quality to his work, but is this appearance of unreality his goal? “I don’t think I aim to make something look less real. In fact what I envision is very real. When I first figured out that I could make the camera see better than the human eye and make a picture out of virtual darkness, that was when I first got really excited about photography.
“It ceases to be about a moment, and becomes more of an infinite sustain of time, and this looks uncanny to us. If you tweak your own sense of perspective, you can create something new, a bit like saying a word over and over until it seems completely alien.”
So, it’s all a matter of perspective for Wu. He has a fondness for sci-fi: Philip K Dick is one of his favourite authors and he quotes 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien as among his inspirations for his first commercial video, for GE Transportation, a portrait of an Ohio freight terminal.
“I’d love to make more videos. The GE piece was truly a music video, as the music and visuals were created at the same time. The essence of it is the synchronicity between sound and vision.”
And what next for his photography? “I have my next exhibition in San Francisco at Lot21 Gallery in May. I’ve also collaborated with fashion designer Gunseli Turkay on a collection featuring my images printed onto fabric and I’ve been working with the artist Kat Von D on concepts for her album artwork based on the designs of Alexander Graham Bell.”
One wonders when this Renaissance man finds the time for all his projects, but then time is a bendy concept for Wu. When speaking of how movies inspire him in both his music and photography he says, “I imagine a lot of my work as stills from films. The reason why I love Lynch, Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Herzog is that so much of their moving pictures appears to stand motionless, like a photograph. I love the tension of the unmoving.”
Where many would describe a photograph as a frozen moment in time, Wu sees “an infinite sustain of time”; where the rest of us might witness a film as motion and time passing, Wu sees stills. Here is a man with a unique vision who creates images that can, like Rutger Hauer’s speech, transport us to the Tannhauser Gate and back.
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