Artists: Michael Ashkin, Beatrice Pediconi, Ethan Ryman, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Tribble & Mancenido

In the second half of the 20th century, the then MoMA curator of photography, John Szarkowski, famously predicted that one day there would be more photos than bricks in the world. This analogy already seems dated in an era where images are free of any terrestrial context whatsoever, where they are shared, seen, even loved, yet rarely printed. Photos, most likely, if one could count to infinity, have far outstripped bricks, yet now they float, competing with the air itself. Its arguable, though, to some traditionalist, that all those instagram images out there aren’t really photography. Photography is not a snap-shot, but an image that conveys purposefulness. This may be photography’s one chance for survival as an art form: to continue to find ways to be purposeful, to matter, in a world awash with images. One way to accomplish this is to ground the photograph in material, to consider and resolve, not just the image, but how the photograph is seen and experienced. All of the artists in Photography: Its Material and Mattering, do this with aplomb.

 Here, with Dismal Dreaming, Michael Ashkin seems to be single handedly trying to accomplish Szarkowski’s task with his “extreme” series of black and white photographs, arranged brick-like in a continuous, infinite stream of dread. These pictures were taken in Palm Springs, California, but do not be fooled, the decomposition is all around us, which Ashkin demonstrates an uncanny ability at recognizing. Each of his pictures is always, surprisingly, perfectly composed––considering the sheer number of them––lending a stable, almost stagnant air to the flux of capitalism’s engulfing entropy.

Workers are Taking Photographs takes us to the working core of Tehran, where Farideh Sakhaeifar arranged a situation in which she, the artist, allows the worker to shoot (always) himself, not killing with the shot, but allowing him to lift himself out of his condition. The pure white placard held behind each functions like an afterlife where he, like she, gets to emigrate toAmerica and hang on the white walls of New York’s multifarious galleries.

White, too, plays a role in Tribble and Mancenido’s Atwood Road series; however, three out of the four works hung here use primary colors to filter the young artist couple’s first house in upstate New York. Humble, no doubt, but––considering the attention lavished by the minimalist aesthetics––heroic in stature: a working family’s dream of home. Perhaps the ultimate version in the series is the one where the house is obliterated by white?

 Ethan Ryman has a theory of obstructivism that contends it is impossible to ever see something whole because something else is always getting in the way, and then that obstructed viewbecomes the view that we mistake for the whole, forcing an abstraction on experience that is always far from “real.” If one looks carefully at his photo diptychs a trompe-l’oeil effect occurs from the combination of a high-resolution photographic image, which only the most recent digital technology could allow, with the oldest, most essential ingredient in photography: light.

Light hitting a surface prepared with emulsion to capture, freeze, or appropriate a moment in time. This is traditional photography, before the digital, when a photograph was born in a series of baths. A liquid state that is then dried and solidified, usually into some sort of recognizable bit of reality. Yet, Beatrice Pediconi does not play this game, her photo reality remains liquid and true, like the material encased in any Polaroid photo packet. Her’s is photography’s (and our)primal form, born of the sun and the sea, liquid and always longing to be free…

David Dixon, June 2020