Permanent Collection

All art ends up as photographs. And in a strange misalignment, most of those photographs depict only the artworks’ images, not the fact of their material presence.

The photographs of Permanent Collection are phenomenological, relishing in the materiality of the paint and the history and labor embedded in the canvas. Made in American and European museums, they are photographed from oblique angles so light from existing museum sources changes the often-reproduced meaning of these works, adding light to familiar narratives, and blotting out anticipated images.

In a move unfamiliar to photography, the light in these pictures is often used to obscure, as well as to illumine. The light, more than a way to describe, is part of the picture’s content. As in my series called Retail, where signs from neighboring businesses reflected in the windows of suburban homes, the light in these works is an essential part of their content, not merely an aesthetic or storytelling tool. With no flash or external lighting, and printed to approximately the size of the original works, the pictures remind us that works of art are vivid and present things curated in particular places under concerted conditions, rewritten by the careful decisions of humans and institutions. The pictures have been shown all over the world and are in the [ahem] permanent collections of many museums. Nazraeil press published a book of these pictures in 2005, with an essay by Walead Beshty.