John Miller
Under Construction
A fragment of a fragment, a part of a part. A sense of incompleteness prevails. Does this arise from the subject matter? Or from the fundamental nature of photography? David Schoerner’s prints confront their viewers with the stubborn yet transitory facticity of materials. Everything is present yet somehow elusive.
When Schoerner’s mother decided to build a new house in Sweden, he asked her and his aunt to document the project with black-and-white, disposable cameras. After developing their pictures, Schoerner zeroed in on the most curious parts, cropping out the rest. Next, he printed the cropped images, photographed those, and made a second set of enlarged prints.
What do we see, then? Five pipes are lying in the grass. A box behind a bush, sitting at an angle. A perfect silhouette of a tall pine tree against the sky with other trees in the background. An array of furniture blankets with four boards on one in the foreground. A view out a window of a small tree, various railings, and a wall built from granite blocks. A drooping clothesline or telephone wire against the sky. A chain-link fence surrounded by foliage. These grainy, black-and-white images feel not only distant but also uncanny. They evoke a sense of mystery and intrigue, leaving us to wonder what exactly haunts them.
In linguistics, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis asserts that various languages segment “the semantic continuum” differently. As a result, the nature of a thing is, to some extent, culturally variable. Moreover, the process of segmentation and separation from an otherwise undifferentiated whole produces meaning. One can easily imagine this as a parallel to how the camera frames—and thus creates—subjects. When asked about composition, John Baldessari responded, “It’s anywhere you point the camera.” As such, default camera composition relates to probability theory; randomness on one level falls into order on another. When Schoerner’s mother and aunt shot these photos, his mother’s house, presumably, was an unbuilt whole, of which we can only glimpse prospective constituent elements.
All the images feel remote, ghostly. I deliberately chose the verb “feel” rather than “seem” because of the pictures’ haptic impact. That is their paradox; they are distant yet embody a sense of touch. Schoerner’s grainy, low-tech approach intensifies this quality. Ironically, state-of-the-art digital photography, which aims to give the viewer more, to deliver maximum presence, results in the exact opposite. It devolves into a miasma of manipulable data. The digital cloud vaporizes photographic indexicality. Conversely, humble photo-chemical prints exert ever greater documentary authority. Of course, our sense of the medium is highly relative especially because, historically, photography has encompassed such a heterogenous range of material processes. It has never been just one thing. Thus, the character of photographic mediation shifts accordingly—and with that, what we expect of a photo and what we believe it to be.
The hauntedness of Schoerner’s project recalls the work of the so-called psychic photographer, Ted Serios. Serios claimed that he could mentally project images onto Polaroid film simply by concentrating. This proved to be a ruse, yet given photography’s elusive nature, people wanted to believe that imagination alone could take the palpable form of a photographic print. And, by using a pinhole-like “gizmo,” Serios nonetheless produced highly evocative images. Schoerner does the same but without the trickery. Contrary to Walter Benjamin, anthropologist Michael Taussig argues that belief in photographic objectivity is nothing less than a modern form of otherwise disavowed sympathetic magic based on the premise of copy and contact. Accordingly, even if we take hold of a silver gelatin print and crumple it up, the absences that make it what it is still escape us.