Although this wasn’t an exhibit I’d normally be interested in, I wanted to write about it because it’s something I’ve never really explored or fully appreciated. Nonetheless, I thought the goals and experiments of the exhibition was very interesting and thought provoking (most often, after I had read the placard, I must admit). Anyway, the work I saw was the Surface Tension modern photography exhibit at the Met. It was a rather small exhibit of about 25-30 pieces. There were a few I jotted down that caught my interest.

The piece I was most interested in was Chris McCaw’s Sunburned. McCaw builds custom large and medium format cameras, loading standard size photo paper in lieu of film. For almost the entire day, the four prints scorched a path in the paper, and beyond this you can thinly make out the landscape of the mountains in the desert. He exposed the paper on the winter solstice, the day in which the sun follows the shortest path in the sky. I thought this was a really interesting piece. At first glance it looked like complete garbage. I throw away messed up photo paper in the darkroom that looks cooler than this. But after I understood the goal, and recognized that the discoloration in the background was in fact mountains, I really appreciated the piece a lot. I love how in an increasingly digital world, some artists still create their own film cameras and use them to interpret and record light in their own unique ways.

To the left of McCaw’s piece was a photograph by Daido Moriyama. Although I didn’t think it was one if his best works, I thought it was cool to see Moriyama’s work in an exhibit like this, especially since I’ve been looking him up a lot over the past month or two. I have to admit though, I don’t know how well his piece fits into the exhibit...

In the corner of the space was an enormous twenty-by-six foot photo mural of a concrete slab of freeway surface. The artist, Miles Coolidge, photographed a portion of the Santa Monica Freeway designated as an Accident Investigation Site, hence the title of his piece. The photograph was taken at a 1:1 scale, pointing out literally every imperfection, cigarette butt, crack and detail of the road surface. This is truly a great example of the photographer’s primary role, to point. And that’s literally all this piece does. As simple (and almost unoriginal) as it was, I really loved the way it was put together, and the concept behind it. Think about how many hundreds of thousands of motorists pass over this site each day, none of which take any notice to what Coolidge is pointing out. Of the entire freeway, this definitely had to be the most interesting portion of highway in terms of defect and detail hidden within.

One piece that got me thinking was Marco Beuer’s Spin. The concept was pretty straight forward: Breuer placed a sheet of exposed photo paper on a turntable, and allowed the record player to scratch through the layers of the paper. The placard noted that Breuer uses no cameras, lenses, film or enlargers in his “photography.” I found this interesting. Is this photography? Breuer’s not really playing with light in this piece; he’s playing with chemicals. I’m unfamiliar with any of his other works, but the mention of his work as photography got me thinking as to what exact point the word “photography” can no longer be used. In my opinion, this is one of those cases, although I’d be interested in hearing an argument otherwise.