Shane Rocheleau
Shane Rocheleau
Lakeside
Hardcover
9.5 x 11 inches
148 + 16 pages
EDITION: 500
Gnomic Books
About the Book:
Shane Rocheleau's most ambitious monograph to date, Lakeside tackles the historical contradictions of white supremacy as they are manifested in present day suburban Virginia.
“Lakeside, Virginia is a psychic landscape, a representation of countless spaces initially built to feign the ‘American Exceptionalism’ writ to redact America’s contentious reality,” Rocheleau says. “Lakeside is also a place with 11,000 people doing the best they can—ugly and beautiful things alike—while drowning in the reality that dreaming gets far less than its promise.”
Rocheleau’s three monographs—You Are Masters Of The Fish And Birds And All The Animals (2018), The Reflection In The Pool (2019), and Lakeside (2022)—are variously collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Vogue Italia Collection, Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma, and Tate Britain, amongst others.
Image courtesy of the artist
Book review by Vann Powell |
Shane Rocheleau is an American photographer based in Richmond, VA and has focused his photographic practice on addressing the ever-present and endemic issues of toxic masculinity and white supremacy. Shane’s third Monograph, Lakeside, is no different in its confronting of these issues. The book’s name, Lakeside, takes its name from Rocheleau’s Richmond neighborhood, a lower middle-class neighborhood populated with Rocheleau’s preoccupations. Lakeside is full of brilliant and tough complexity, offering up a perspective on lower middle class white America that is equal parts tongue in cheek and heartbreak.
Image courtesy of the artist
The book is not so much a tough love letter as it is a note written in feverish frustration at a person parked across two parking spaces. Rocheleau’s visualizing of his participants successfully walks the line between earnest documentary and magical realism. There are moments in the book where the reader might feel as though they know exactly what is being said in the images only to later be confronted with a shift in observational positionality that send one into a tailspin, desperately looking for solid ground. One section that acts as a de-centering force is the book's annotation, found towards the end. The casual reader (admittedly me for the first few passes) might take these notes as an honest attempt to contextualize the preceding images, only to find out, through close inspection of said annotations that you have been had and Rocheleau has played a joke on you. Appearing as a sort of anti-annotation, there is a certain nod to Rene Magritte's pipe that sublimely lands, given space and time.
Image courtesy of the artist
In terms of the books’ materiality and design Rocheleau collaborated with Gnomic Book founder, Jason Koxvold, touse a delightfully interesting variety of papers (pay attention book nerds) that further drives the book’s complex nature. Production wise, made mostly on a large format 4x5 view camera, the images portray a deep sense of intimacy that only the view camera can afford. It is precisely this intimacy afforded by the view camera that allows for a deep and critical look into the toxic masculinity and instances of white supremacy that Lakeside offers.
Rocheleau’s visual language in Lakeside is a rich prose mapping the visual topography of a corner of white America that feels existentially insecure at the same time it feels self-righteous of its right to the problematic ideology and the subsequent identity it embodies. In Lakeside Rocheleau is successful in forcing us to look at what a lot of us, understandably, cast off as repressive and ignorant; Rocheleau impresses upon us the need to dissect and tackle one of the most alarming and dangerous aspects of contemporary American Society.
Image courtesy of the artist
