“All I can do is organize stories which are neither metaphors of reality nor analogues but act as working constructs.” Alain Robbe-Grillet

All photography is autobiographical. Every picture implicates a photographer as part of the narrative it conveys; every viewer, when looking at the picture, adopts the photographer’s perspective. This evidence of authorial presence and the corresponding shift in perspective from photographer to viewer is one of the characteristics of photography that makes the medium so tantalizing. It seems to offer a suspension of disbelief, a device which makes us believe that we can actually see the world through another’s eyes, one which presents us with the possibility of comprehending other worlds, other lives than our own.

Well, it’s nice thought, of course, but it’s a lie, especially when the photographs we are faced with are images of the photographer’s own daily life, his friends, lovers, and family. These pictures, more than others, tempt us to create a meaningful story from a collection of bits and pieces. Photographs, like sentences, are fragments chosen from endlessly combinatory possibilities of objects and scenes. By their very nature broken and incomplete, they evidence the pursuit of an enigma. The photographer pursues a life by capturing tiny slices of it, far apart in space and time, which fit together in ways which the viewer and even the photographer can only guess. And the photographer’s attempts to organize the pieces are really only evidence of the pursuit itself; as Roland Barthes wrote, “Tell me how you classify, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The three artists in the show, JH Engstrom, Leigh Ledare, and Ari Marcopoulos, each present us images from their respective w orlds, images that become all the more enigmatic the more personal they are. These pictures are attempts, as Robbe-Grillet writes, not to make a descriptive story of the world or to create its parallel, but to make pictures that work to construct something that was, or might have been, true.

Curated by Arnd Seibert