Peter Hendricks: good copy.

How many words do I dedicate to something so forgettable? Peter Hendricks: good copy is one of those books of grainy photographs that we have come to recognize as "amateurish." As the title states, it is an album of images, generated from the life of Peter Hendricks, who also happens to be a professional photojournalist. If the prints were tipped into plastic-covered pages of a faux leather binder, and if this sat in a cupboard in someone's home, it would easily classify as a photo album. Except the pictures are not quite right.

Peter Hendricks, text by Geory Diez

Gottingen, Germany: Steidl, 2002

The photographs in this book were snapped as the car moved down the road, as the mercenary media plane flew into famine or war, at the beach in a moment of play, during that time when nothing seems to be happening. They are of a woman, naked or clothed or breast-feeding, of children playing at home, naked by the wading pool; they are of people that are skeletal from starvation and disenfranchised young men from a bloodied Eastern European nation. We are purportedly led through time and space and encounter the world through the eyes of Hendricks as he plays with his family at home and as he travels the world--at joyous times and at times of brutal contemplation. Except for a short story of an airport experience by Georg Diez, the images are shown without context and we are left to contemplate Hendricks' vision of a life where horror and pleasure are all treated the same, where everything has the same terrible beauty.

Except the pictures do not quite fit their mold. These Images are not snapshots. Not with their artful compositions that utilize the edges in a way an amateur never would; their compositions that center subjects an amateur would never even consider making a picture of. Rather, this is a book of offhand pretense and studiously composed photos that, with their graininess, their blown out colors and missed highlights and shadows, are encoded with the style of the naive. These are not the photographs of an amateur seeking to capture a moment for storage in a $2.99 Walmart chronicle. People unconcerned with photography, people who use it as a tool, seek to elide all evidence of the images' manufacture. Hendricks Images are an arty imitation of the snapshots the amateur discards. None of these imitations look like a snapshot, but rather like all of the other photographs that attempt to borrow (or steal) from the amateur an authority that transmits the notion of being there or seeing through the photographers eyes-e liciting immediacy and Intimacy.

But by the very act of employing the "amateurish" aesthetic, any raw experiential value the photographs might have had is overwhelmed by the use of the formal strategies designed to create It. This is not Peter Hendricks' life, but photographs imitating photographs that imitate photographs. They are not even interesting for their own sake. The photographs are not themselves and the book is emptiness, without even the unexplained photographic detritus of a person's life.

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