Weekend Portfolio: Lucas Olivet

Images and text by Lucas Olivet

Medicine Tree is an attempt to capture an unsettling reflection in Northern BC, Canada. The landscape there, both rural and industrial, speaks to a history of violence, of loss, as well as a longing for reparations. Infused with a foreboding feeling, the photographs seek to shape our perceptions of masculinity in the far West, in a postcolonial region where the number of missing people - indigenous girls and women, more specifically - is an unaddressed lesion.

Between socio-economic and environmental issues, the viewer is placed within a hub of late stage capitalism where everything is piped out, trucked out, temporal and transitory, where bodies are valued for little more than the sum of their parts. Medicine Tree comes from a metaphor relayed to Olivet by an inhabitant of Prince George, BC’s northern capital, about the resinous black spruce growing tall near his dilapidated trailer: I’ve never seen a tree make so much medicine. Maybe it weeps so much for all the poison here.

The work was nominated for the Swiss Federal Design Awards last year and got the honorable mention for the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize in 2019 awarded by The Center of Documentary Studies Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. It includes a non-fiction essay called PG written by Lauren Haddad and some field recordings as an audio accompaniment.

Lucas Olivet (b. 1985) lives and works in Switzerland. He graduated from Vevey School of Photography in 2009. His work has been shown internationally with exhibitions in Vancouver, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Paris, Zurich, Arles, and New York. Through his lens, the Geneva-born shooter addresses issues of memory, loss, and longing by way of his own life as well as through a wider historical and cultural frame.

More of Lucas Olivet’s work can be found on his website.