I’ve been staring at this untitled Walker Evans polaroid for two weeks; I found it on The Met’s website a few week’s ago. It is being exhibited as a part of their contemporary photo show, depicting everyday objects, called Hidden in Plain Sight.
This bouquet of bottle and jar scrubbers is given an intensely centered composition, one that seems decidedly amateur, but has come to resonate for me, particularly when such dumb, manufactured items are given the honor.
After all, don’t we dedicate our time and money to such things in excess throughout our lives? Sans dishwasher, how much time is given to washing dishes every day, despite the fact that we’d never think to focus our vision on these integral tools to the process? I adore the obscene red, the brooding shadows. That plastic-handled sponges speak with the lust and foreboding of a sneering pulp novel’s glossy, paperback cover — this is the power of polaroid.
There’s something so indisputably chemical about the color in polaroids. Absent is the grain of film, and yet I want to use the word, invoke “grain,” to describe the toxic texture that exists just beneath the plasticy surface of a polaroid object. Also, there’s the perfection of rendering such plain Objects within the one-of-a-kind polaroid format, a self-contained photograph that collects the weight of its unused dyes and processing liquids, but also of its unique thing-ness. Polaroids have the heft of a real object, not that two-dimensional phantom of most photographs.
The show concluded three days ago; I was unable to visit in person. But the online samples unveil another compelling objectsmith, of whose work I need to see more: Gabriel Orozco. In Dog Circle and Sand on Table he plays with the variant forms and qualities of sand, to delightful results.
Alec Soth puts forth some praise on Orozco’s body of work on his blog, and posts the following amazing image, revealing an admirable formal cleverness.
