Access
Photographs let me in and keep me out simultaneously: they pull me
toward the time and place they describe until I have to stop short,
suddenly conscious again of their material surface, as though my nose
has hit the glass of a window I’ve been peering through. This
ambivalence—sometimes described as a dialogue between the transparency
of the window and the impenetrable surface of the picture plane—is my
favorite theme in photography’s history, probably because it elegantly
and abstractly refigures so many of the all-too-concrete social,
emotional, and psychological dilemmas I face. In this series I’m trying
to escalate that dialogue, to up its ante, by taking straight
documentary pictures of flat, rectangular surfaces that were designed
to let stuff in or keep stuff out, but that now appear conflicted as to
how or how much they will in fact do so.
To document these surfaces faithfully—to coax their conflicts into
visibility—requires big prints enlarged from big sheets of film shot in
a big camera. For although the subjects of my pictures are easily
recognized as surfaces that regulate access, the way or the extent to
which they do so is not apparent without thoughtful inspection of
details accurately rendered.
In one of my pictures, for example, a brick wall whose doorway seems at
first glance to have been filled with cement bricks was in fact filled
with wet cement that then had lines cut into it to describe the shape
of bricks. A drawing of sorts. In another picture, what might appear to
be a reflective glass door in a wall of glass turns out on closer
inspection of my print to be not glass at all but rather a temporary
door cut into a temporary construction façade that has bolted to
it an actual-size low-resolution vinyl photo of the building that used
to lie behind the façade. My high-resolution print faithfully
records the low-resolution vinyl photo’s illusion of metal, glass, and
granite, but it also records the physical presence of a metal doorknob
and bolts, a concrete sidewalk, and the seams, scuffs, and ripples of
the image-bearing vinyl.
Indeed, many of the pictures in this series show artless, utilitarian
surfaces that have been altered by craftspeople or by nature with the
mediums of art—drawing, photography, gouache, watercolor, mosaic,
museum display, trompe-l’oeil, painting, silkscreen, patinas of
oxidation, and sculpture, for example—so as to conceal something. (I
think of these pictures as allegories of art’s two-dimensional
illusionism, which would make them allegories of allegory,
meta-allegories, like any good allegory, or so it could be argued.) But
however the alterations took place, the traces they leave and the
ambivalent disguises they accomplish are subtle.
To make such subtlety legible, the negatives from which my exhibition
prints are made are 4 x 5 inch color film sheets that I expose in view
cameras with full movements in order to allow high resolution and
perspective correction. The prints range in size from about 40 x 30
inches to 41 x 51 inches. They are very precise, and matte-surfaced,
and just big enough to make the best possible analogy between the
surface photographed and the photographic surface.
Seeing allegorical potential in a new surface to photograph for this
project is like seeing friendly potential in a new acquaintance. I cast
these surfaces as characters in my life, but I also empathize with
them. I recognize in them some of my own ambivalence. Or maybe I
project my ambivalence onto them, and then I project their ambivalence
onto the large photographic surfaces that represent them. These
surfaces repeat my gestures of provisional granting and measured
withholding; my photographs repeat the gestures of these surfaces; and
I repeat the gestures of my photographs by exhibiting them. This is
different from revealing their secrets, and more like keeping their
secrets, or keeping their secrets in play, keeping their secrets
visible, seeing their secrets, like in poker: I see your secret and
raise you one. The surfaces confide in me, I confide in you through my
photographs of them. I’m tempted to say I betray their confidence in
order to grant my own. But access to their secrets remains as
questionable as before they were photographed, as does access to mine
and those of my photographs. All three of us keep hiding our issues in
plain sight.
Click here to see these pictures.
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