Weekend Portfolio: Shane Rocheleau & Brian Ulrich | A Glorious Victory
Writing and Photography by Shane Rocheleau and Brian Ulrich
Photo Editing by Haley Winchell
About the artists: Shane Rocheleau (MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University) is an American photographer whose work confronts the endemic position of toxic masculinity and white supremacy within the American experience. Rocheleau's work has been exhibited in the United States, Spain, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Ukraine, The United Kingdom, India, and Germany, and his photographs have been featured in a wide variety of online and print publications, including Aperture’s The PhotoBook Review, Dear Dave Magazine, The Heavy Collective, and Paper Journal. His work is variously collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, the Vogue Italia Collection, and Fondazione Teatro Regio di Parma, amongst others.
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 published by Gnomic Book.
Brian Ulrich’s photographs portraying contemporary consumer culture are held by major museums and private collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Eastman Museum; Getty Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; North Carolina Museum of Art; Margulies Collection; Bidwell Collection; and the Pilara Foundation Collection.
Ulrich was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. Monographs include, Is This Place Great or What (2011) Aperture, followed by Closeout: Retail, Relics and Ephemera (2013), and the forthcoming, The Centurion (2023) FW: Books.
About the project: A Glorious Victory
A Glorious Victory is an ongoing collaboration between artists Shane Rocheleau and Brian Ulrich. It explores the larger American historical struggle between power and freedom evident writ small in the people, architecture, and landscape of Petersburg, Virginia.
Petersburg played a pivotal role in the settling of the Colonies, the American Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement, amongst other primary American plot points. Indeed, Petersburg exemplifies American class and wealth divisions, undergirded by the legacies of chattel slavery, Confederate sedition, de-industrialization, and the rise of a national, corporate infrastructure predicated on notions of exploitation and hegemony. Unlike in some American cities where the scars of a problematic history are physically whitewashed, the pain and cruelty inflicted by white supremacy and economic tyranny remain overt here.
Yet, despite meager resources and troubling levels of violence and inequality, the city and its people survive and sustain. We have found companionship and resilience, hope and grace: whether that be in the otherwise suppressed African American oral traditions scrawled on the homes of Pocahontas Island, the stark and romantic light refracted and shaped by the undulating landscape, the untamable, ancient Appomattox River, or the generosity of Petersburg’s residents who offer us their time, their spaces, and their immutable, vulnerable truths.
We have been visiting Petersburg since 2013. In that time, we have made countless thousands of pictures, collected archives, objects, and stories, but, intentionally, we have also maintained a slow pace to counteract and minimize our reactivity, biases, and stereotypes. While subjectivity is inevitable, A Glorious Victory will not be complete until the project’s inexorable fiction honors Petersburg’s actual complexity: its horror, beauty, and centrality in a shared American story. But further: we must honor the people who have lived and who are living this history. Otherwise, we perpetuate another of this country’s original sins: we exclude the many in favor of the few who have for centuries exploited, oppressed, and cheated to win.
