Many thanks to Simon Karlstetter and Der Greif for the invitation to play, and of course to all the photographers who entered!

So I’ve extended my stay Chez Der Greif by just a few days, not quite ready to get out of the sandbox of images so kindly provided for me here. I’m going to wrap this all up with a few images that play with that moment of dismissal and the suspension of reality. These are reality-based, but not entirely real. Reality transformed via studio and via film and lens; reality transformed via algorithm; reality moving in very different directions and from equally divergent starting points… Call them the »In Between«… And yes, you could easily argue that any of the images in the past few weeks fit into this conveniently vague, expansive category. There is, nonetheless, a through-line here, which has to do with the fact that each of these images, despite operating as they do within their own universes of aesthetic intention, have been transportive to me in some way. In fact, let’s forget about categorizing the images and let’s just put a name to my response to them. Call me, »The Transported.«

Of course, the images selected in this suite of pictures are a particular slice of “the real.” The lyrical, poeticized edge of it, reflecting something that Jean Beaudrillard described as follows: “The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. … Against meaning and its aesthetic, the subversive function of the image is to discover literality in the object (the photographic image, itself an expression of literality, becomes the magical operator of reality’s disappearance).” Not that Baudrillard is entirely sanguine about this process: “In a sense, the photographic image materially translates the absence of reality which ‘is so obvious and so easily accepted because we already have the feeling that nothing is real,’ ” he cautions (quoting Borges). “To be an image, there has to be a moment of becoming which can only happen when the rowdy proceedings of the world are suspended and dismissed for good.” It’s clear to me that we’re still somewhat in mourning for a cut-and-dry world—in so many ways, but speaking here, photographically. Baudrilliard, again: “One may dream of a heroic age of photography when it still was a black box (a camera obscura) and not the transparent and interactive space that it has become.” But this would be a mistake.

But let’s go back to the idea of the real for a moment. The fulcrum point on which photography perpetually balances, this is an idea accompanied by strongly partisan champions on either side, all of whom stand at the ready to defend their chosen perspective. Observational photography continues to astound and beguile, without doubt. Could this be attributable, in part, to the fact that the boundaries between that which we perceive as real and that which we accept as fiction are so porous, and increasingly, thin? Maybe it’s enough to leave this as the leading question for this next thematic category, which I have, for the sake of shorthand, called… »The Real.«

As I wrap up this week of posts, I’d like to give a shout out and thanks to the various shows and books that surely have served as a kind of visual soundtrack, playing somewhere, deep, in the back of my mind as I made this selection:

Ocean of Images, MOMA, NYC
Photo-Poetics, Guggenheim, NYC
Penelope Umbrico, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NYC
A Matter of Memory, George Eastman House, Rochester, NYC
Photography is Magic (Aperture, 2015)

New Year’s (and in particular, New Year’s Eve) can easily be reduced to amateur hour—a set of expectations not to be bought into; a mess to be avoided. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel energized by this time period recognized as transitional: the end of one thing, the beginning of another. There’s something to be said for taking a moment to reset; a moment in which to concretize new intentions and resolutions and to open oneself up to new potential. In the spirit of this notion, what a great moment to immerse oneself in a spate of images, free of context, freshly realized, thanks to the Guest Room here at Der Greif. And so, herewith, I’m delighted to partake in this New Year with New Images. Over the next three weeks, I’ll be posting a series images loosely organized along three thematic lines. Consider them as three propositions as to the wide range of possibilities open to image makers today. I arrived at these themes initially as a way of wrapping my head around the thousands of images in front of me. And especially once I started to winnow down this huge mass of pictures, these rough and admittedly unwieldy categories provided something like signposts to map a way forward – a means of navigation and of ordering.

The first thematic category I’ll call “The Transformational” – images that transform a thin slice of the real into something lyrical and magical. What better way to start the year?