Fixations by Alex Carder
Print Book, 102 Pages
Large Format Landscape, 13 × 11 in. (33 × 28 cm)
$100 — available by contact (signed and numbered)
$125 — sold on blurb
Foreword by Erik Germani
Fixation — the treatment of a print with salts to render it inert to further exposure — has been banished from the workflow of digital photography, but of course every artist has aesthetic fixations. Alex Carder's include: long shadows, harried pedestrians, golden light on limestone, silhouettes, disrupted reflections. For five years he has explored these subjects with increasing confidence. But their significance won't be gotten from the photographer.
Asked to explain an image's intent, Carder gives a technical description of its visual features. An unintentional evasion: to Carder, the intent is the capture of those visual features. Street photographers, once called "closemouthed" by Max Kozloff, enjoy a sphinx-like inscrutability. They shoot in the same haphazard conditions as a photojournalist, but for the sake of aesthetics rather than a newswire. What do they make of their work? What do they want us to make of their work? The ambiguity is amplified in the case of this particular sphinx.
Carder's public self-presentation is reticent to the point that I feel licensed only to note that he was born in 1988, and bounced from East to West Coast before his family settled twenty minutes from Chicago, where the remainder of his childhood and adolescence played out. To acquaintances, his persona emerges through curation, his identity a mosaic composed of those things he will admit to appreciating. On his anonymous blog, all the text — from transcendentalists, stoics, Charles Bukowski — is quoted, and his voice can only be found in single word fragments which categorize the posts. Beneath a glamour shot of French actress Marion Cotillard, the tag "swoon." (Even this is secondhand speech, borrowed from the dialect of the internet.) These photos are an extension of that curatorial impulse: here are some moments, panned from an experiential stream. What drew his eye is left to the viewer: I'd like to briefly make my guess.
The first and largest section of the book comprises images taken in Chicago's Loop around quitting time. At that hour, the Loop is a ray tracer's nightmare and a photographer's playground. Carder captures startling effects of light: the dragnet of caustics wavering upon a shadowed building opposite a reflective one; the stuttering shadows in a skywalk's mirrored underbelly; light in the leaves of a locust tree. Polygons of shadow appear in unexpected places and configurations to form modernist, stark compositions. Absolute black leaps to pure blue in a single pixel; wedges of shadow carve up a building's facade.
Within the photos, people are deemphasized, apparently just another compositional element. Seen at a distance, frozen in their walk cycles, they provide some organic curves and interesting silhouettes. Their crisp outlines and disconnected attitudes lend some images the air of architectural mockups. At first the photographs read as establishing shots for close-ups that never come, but soon the stray citizens fixed in a 35mm field of classical architecture seem less incidental. Carder is looking up; they are not.
The subjects in Carder's photography are practiced urbanites: their eyes linger only in the ninety degree arc between the horizon and their toes. They focus on the sidewalk's black freckles of old gum or else stare at the next intersection. In short, they are missing it. Though these pedestrians don't know it, they find themselves in a space worthy of photographing. So how come none of them act like it? Why do they not look around? (In one of my favorite images, one woman does. Holding a dog leash and a stroller's handle, she gapes upward, seemingly dismayed by the top edge of the bounding box.) The expansive headroom begins to read as an exhortation to look up, look around — something a photographer is well-positioned to tell us.
But what does the photographer tell us of himself? Carder's presence coalesces in the remaining sections, at first slowly. The black and white photography of Section II is disquieting. Taken during the winter months, they feature a seasonally affected blurriness: the contours have leached away along with the color. The two more focused images, of shadows beneath feet, are not the recognizably human silhouettes in the first section. They are inverted; heads cannot be discerned. Jittery, smeared, monochromatic — these are either the photos of a ghost hunter or the photos of a ghost, a lost soul fascinated by the world but weakly tethered to it.
The night photography in the next section promotes the former interpretation. The crowds are gone, as is the magic hour light. The camera lingers more over people, and regards the subjects with empathy. (A sometimes difficult emotion to evoke, considering the exploitative, acquisitive nature of the medium. You "take" a picture.) When evicted from his customary palette, Carder gravitates towards strong reds and greens, and the compositions become more intimate. The section serves as a short, sharp counterpoint to Section I.
Section IV features two varieties of self-portrait: mirror and shadow. These are the only images in which Carder's eye allows itself to fall into the prosaic arc of the pedestrian. Here we see those black freckles of old gum, or one's reflection in a mirror. But in Carder's photographs I sense no particular fascination with himself as a subject, for he never relinquishes his status as observer. The Canon is always poised before the eye, the face occluded. In the only image that exposes his eyes, Carder's attitude is one of frank appraisal; one imagines a judgement forthcoming once that cigarillo stops coaling.
What's more, self-portraits of photographers make it seem as if our picture is being taken, owing to the same trick that doubles the square footage of so many restaurants: in unfamiliar rooms, mirrors are easily mistaken for windows.
Considering the illusory optics of a self-portrait-with-mirror, the photographer's "true" self-portrait might be his or her shadow cast on the ground. With the camera a shadow can be fixed upon the earth, record of a moment in which a person with such a shape looked at such a spot. These images are reminiscent of pictures taken by Vivian Maier, another Chicago photographer (Ray Metzker and Harry Callahan are Carder's other notable influences).
The book's final image places the photographer at the center of his world. Though Carder occupies the focal point, his images have trained us to look elsewhere. After a beat, we notice the other things: showgirls in heels and flamingo-pink headdresses, pedestrians climbing stairs, some silhouettes in the distant background, a field of orange color subdivided by tree branches, a confused splotch of red rising over the canopy. To photograph your shadow is to make a covert assertion of identity, presence.
