Jessica Murray Projects is pleased to announce Patrick Lakey’s first solo exhibition in New York. German Photographs (1724-2005) is a series of photographs of the places in which philosophers lived and worked – specifically, the lineage of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment German philosophers, from Kant to Adorno. Traveling throughout Germany, England, Switzerland and finally to Los Angeles, Lakey has photographed the places where these thinkers wrote, thought, lived and in some cases died.
The sweeping scale and formal composition of the images reference another influential German lineage, that of the “Becher school” of photography. Although Lakey’s project pays homage to this method (that of producing typologies to document a socio-political heritage), this project relies on the individuality of the image to derive meaning. According to Lakey, “the idea is to make photographs of the environment where they (the philosophers) worked, to look at their surroundings, to see what they saw… Each photograph asks what the specificity of a place (that a particular person was there at a particular time in relation to a particular kind of practice) may mean.”

Patrick Lakey was born in Washington, DC in 1970. He received his BFA from University of Texas in Austin and his MFA from University of California, San Diego. His first solo exhibition was presented at Happy Lion, Los Angeles in 2005. He has been included in several group exhibitions, including Das Spyder-Man at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Recent Works from LA at Galerie Michael Janssen in Cologne, and I-10 at McClain Gallery in Houston. Patrick Lakey lives and works in Los Angeles.