Flatness, Light, Black & White
Photographs, 8 x 12 in, inkjet prints, 2013
This series of photographs charts the formal properties of the image in the digital age: its mutability and propensity for multiple perspectives, its capacity for compression, flatness and transparency, its ability to generate surface as far as the eye can see. These images consciously engage in some or all of these digital effects, while also invoking the conventions of traditional photography. They depict a real space, for instance, a barbershop complete with barbers and customers, mirrors and décor. They document real events, shot over the course of an afternoon spent in that space. A classic street scene even makes an appearance through the picture window that illuminates the shop with its bright, midday light. And though these documentary elements are essential to the series, they are not its subject.
In a 1928 essay entitled "The Conquest of Ubiquity" , Paul Valery predicted a future in which works of art would achieve complete immateriality. “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our homes from far off to satisfy our needs, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultra-rapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know.” His description of the dematerialized art object is uncanny in its precision. Our daily lives are now filled with just this sort of stimulation – a light, continuous, flow of auditory and visual information, delivered to us through the interface of our screens.
The ever-presence of digital information has flattened out the contours of life and filled in all its gaps, allowing us to glide across its surfaces without difficulty, without constraint. There is no longer such thing as an empty moment or an unanswered question. The screens that fill our lives have delivered us from the non-continuous, the singular, the isolated. Everything is accessible, potentially navigable in every direction, at any time, simultaneously and forever. The actual horizon is a mirage, just as discrete images are an illusion wrenched by force from the continuous stream that floods our lives from multiple sources at all moments.
In spite of their documentary details, their modest size and black and white tonality, the photographs in “Flatness, Light, Black & White” are not photographs at all. They are temporary configurations at best, rendered in paper and ink and placed behind glass for the sake of exhibition. But even as we continue to present images in this familiar formulation, we must acknowledge that they are no longer credible as finite things. If images can be conceived of as anything at all, it is only as clusters of binary information, expressed as shifting reflections in the glossy black surface of the screen. Their appearance of permanence in the gallery is no more than an aesthetic affectation, as suspect as algorithmically generated dust and scratches on a JPEG.