Untenanted Space in the World Trade Center — Winter Sun, 1998, painting by Rackstraw Downes. (thx)

The empty parking lot is more interesting than the grand vista as a photographic subject. The empty parking lot is more interesting than all the world’s brides, grooms, puppies, babies and flowers and sunsets. The problem is that, in the beginning, the empty parking lot — and by extension, the mundane, undistinguished, boring urban landscape, the man-altered topography — was reactionary. These were things unfit for photographs and suddenly there were these people photographing them. That was the sixties and seventies. Now I’m scared they’re going to turn into a new picturesque. The problem with a puppy or a beautiful vista as a subject lies both in their familiarity and in their iconicity: they become stand-ins for conventional ideals of beauty rather than works of art. They refer to rather than embody beauty or art. The word “sunset” is no less art than most photos of sunsets. They become symbols of beauty rather than beauties. There are some things we photograph because they are things to be photographed, not because they are worthy of photographs, and that makes these subjects generally boring. I’m just afraid that, in chasing a certain aesthetic, I’ll come to create these symbolic-not-embodied pseudo-photographs, only instead of referring to conventional beauty ideals, they’ll refer to a certain aesthetic’s ideals, but they will be no less symbols devoid of actual content: garbage cans, intersections, parking lots, gas stations, narrow alleys, suburban laws, empty offices, tricycles, diners, junk yards, yard sales, malls. Things you photograph because they are similar enough to things other people have photographed that they can sort of stand-in for them, reference these earlier photographs without actually being full-blood art in and of themselves. Sort of like how every photograph of a sunset refers to the ideal sunset, while very few do much more, do anything at all to distinguish themselves, to actually carry any sort of significance or meaning or aesthetic beyond the empty gesture of hinting at a conventional ideal.

There’s a very thin line between sharing a general aesthetic sensibility and leeching off of it, creating not-quite-replicas that gain their cool by referring back to the aforementioned aesthetic. It’s not about the anxiety of influence, exactly. I’m not so much worried about copying as I’m about creating something that is its own thing, but the whole point of it is to wink back to some other thing. Who wants to read a novel if all it does, in the end, is prove its cleverness by referring back to other novels? A novel that isn’t a carbon copy of some great author, but rather has fashioned its own style, only the style’s sole feature is its evocation of said great author’s style? It’s the same thing with pictures. Since I’m studying art photography, as of this week, I guess this is a problem I’m going to think more about in the coming year.

But anyway, look at that painting! Damn! I’m not a fan of fisheye effects, whether in painting or photography, but Rackstraw Downes is the shit. Also his general aesthetic, which is similar to a bunch of photographers’ styles — no hypothesis about which direction the influence went, or if these are independent developments — is similar to the one I worry about leeching off.