(2) Marks of Indifference
I hope to make it to this exhibit at the Met before is closes (on March 22nd). The show looks pretty interesting - I was going through the images online and came across this one by Mark Wyse
Mark Wyse (American, b. 1970)
Marks of Indifference #4 (Accident #1), 2006
Chromogenic print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2008 (2008.84)
The accompanying text to the photo states:
A professional printer as well as a photographer, Wyse makes technically assured yet enigmatically reticent images showing traces of past life or activity. The title of the series, Marks of Indifference, refers to an essay on photography and conceptual art by the artist Jeff Wall. Wyse uses this reference to denote the idea of the camera as a dispassionate recording device as well as the larger question of how artists’ conscious and unconscious intentions manifest themselves in photographs. The “indifference” of the title also applies to the subjects of the pictures themselves: a car with a large dent in its side, a road sign surrounded by overgrown foliage, the marks left by shelves torn from a wall. In this photograph of a squirrel left for dead on a paved suburban street, the large scale, sharp focus, and unusual worm’s-eye view combine to give the picture a powerful, dreamlike intensity.
Funny, my friend Mark Gregory has an photograph very near to Wyse’s. I liked it when he first took it, and I still like it now (even despite its rather gruesome nature):
Oh the funny world of syncronicity, eh?
