Christopher Williams is a los angeles and cologne- based artist whose project is to instruct ‘commercial’ photographers to execute carefully composed and conceived images, primarily studio still lives. The work resembles neutral and inexpressive product shots, indexical images that suggest an unassuming industrial catalog of rational products and objects, frequently of photographic equipment, and evoke the frugality and modest salesmanship of a post war Europe. The titles are both exhaustive and opaque, and presume to support the cultural, economic and production narratives that interest Williams. They are lucid images and appealing in their ardor for explication.
It is the occasional inclusion of women that complicate the sober and scrupulous theoretical thought to which the work clings. Here, the back of a 4×5 view camera delineates a ground glass with an inverted close- up of a woman in a brassiere, her unfocused figure hovering in the background. Outlining the side and bottom edges of the bra are a series of small clamps clinching the sheer fabric, a common off-camera maneuver in the production of fashion photography.
In this, the utopian longing of the work converts to a form of melancholic objectification. In its relationship to the view camera, the female bra is a chassis, a structural truss, a strait-jacket; less an act of erotic contemplation than a dialogue of engineering and mechanical connoisseurship.
Stephen Frailey
Looking at Photography par Stephen Frailey
Published par Damiani
ISBN: 9788862087025
€ 40,00
