A while ago I wrote a bit about the polaroid work of Mike Slack, but neglected to comment on his series High Tide. These polaroids have stuck with me; they are portraits, in a way, and are quite different from his other work. Photos of representations, they seem to be taken in front of television screens. Actors and actresses are caught in awkward blinks, glances to the floor, and moments of resonant emotion — yet it is difficult to distinguish exactly which is which. Each aims his or her gaze downward, as if in shame, or melancholy. Whether this is the part they are playing, we are not aware. With photography’s snap-and-grab capabilities, let alone that of the pause button, each moment becomes ambiguous, and the history of television seems to become an extended period of mourning or contemplation.
These came to remind me of the Lee Friedlander series Little Screens, probably among my favorite of his work. Friedlander photographs anonymous television screens (in lonely and cheap hotels, or homes so sparse as to resemble them) with clever, often stirring, scenes beaming into the largely empty room, charging the space with the glowing power of that sole isolated film frame.
Sort of like the Kuleshov effect in film editing, the little screens seem to comment directly on the goings on in the room we are sitting in, despite the blandness of each location. That man flickering onscreen smirks at the prominent toilet bowl, stifling some unnecessary bathroom humor.
Walker Evans described them as “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate.”
And just to round out the trio, not quite so biting in its cleverness, but lovely and haunting to look upon (and interesting commentary on the eerie omnipresence of these “little screens” in our lives), Matthew Pillsbury is the photographer behind the series Screen Lives. Through long exposures the screens turn to blasting white, and illuminate the casual goings-on of the homes they inhabit, wherein people turn into ghosts.
