I’ve been in image-making/collecting/editing mode lately. I like this photograph quite a bit, but it didn’t quite fit into the series I’m putting together now. Plastic may be ruining the world, but it sure is amazing when sunlight bursts through it, diffusing, glowing.
I’ve always been interested in what happens when things get in the way.
In high school I attended a local performance of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure for English class. Partway through the proceedings, I remember my mind beginning to wander, and found myself particularly focused on the obstruction – this sharp, large wooden flourish of architecture – that jutted into my field of vision in the mezzanine seats, despite my attempts to concentrate on each “forsooth” and “good morrow” uttered before me.
Like the head of the person in front of you at the movies, that dark silhouette bobbing and swaying in a most inconvenient manner, these things, these obstructions, become a part of the experience – subtle barriers that define the subjectivity of viewership.
In 2002 I produced a series of small black-and-white photographs titled Tell Them I’m Lost on the Sidewalk, a collection of encounters with objects that obscured, and corners, peered-around. Many of these images rely on a shallow depth-of-field to pick out each (rather quotidian) subject; we peek in on these undisturbed scenes – with a bit of voyeurism, but also with a sense of self-induced obstruction between the in-focus “subject” and its viewer. Sometimes both viewer and subject feel hidden.
It’s an innocent form of watching – glancing around with casual intrigue – wherein the distance between the subject and the photographer is more about respectful fascination than some kind of cynical detachment. Rather than threaten with his gaze, this voyeur formally examines the specific conflicts and connections that develop in deep space.
This is the aesthetic of obstruction.
Tell Them I’m Lost on the Sidewalk can be viewed within [lost], on good[eye]meriwether[dot]com.
Sometimes we look at household objects. Proximity can make anything seem significant. The bold dumbness of an object, sitting on a table, just being – it can seem so profound, because of (or despite) its inherent meaninglessness. Still, connections are established. Expectation and dismay coexist for the viewer, lingering within the absurdity of that deadpan stare. He is curious, momentarily captivated in his examination; he is also stymied, simultaneously, perhaps considering the futility of looking as a means of true comprehension.
In 2004 I experimented with a series of photographs of people seated in their homes, looking at objects that they owned.
Several of these images were selected for exhibition by a student curator at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showed Suburban Archaelogy in the winter of 2005. Images from the exhibition can be viewed within [sometimes] at good[eye]meriwether.
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.
Years ago, when I began to learn bookmaking techniques, I completed two books that I’ve long intended to upload for online viewing. To an extent, it was the photography in these books, and veiwers’ reactions to them, that sparked the subsequent Pictures of Myself Looking Bewildered.
Find Museum and The First Thing That You Want in [bound], on good[eye]meriwether[dot]com.
