Miraculous Mundane: Photography and the Art of the Ordinary

1. The closer you look, the more you see

An important curator recently visited my wife's studio to look at her newest body of work. An exciting prospect, yes, though the result turned out to be largely disappointing. Alexandra, whom I call Zone—a childhood nickname with mysterious origins that suits her intense focus when she's deep in a project (her roller derby team, on the other hand, knows her as Shut 'er Speed)—is a photographer who, for most of the last decade, has specialized in antique forms: tintype, ambrotype, and prints from glass-plate negatives. She's interested in the ways old technology blurs our perception of time and how we experience people and objects differently when we see them rendered in images that look as if they were taken a hundred and fifty years ago. For the past couple of years she's been shooting plant parts and small found objects in extreme macro—with an eight-foot-long camera and a scavenged military aerial survey lens—in a way that intentionally confuses your senses, makes you wonder if you are looking at something natural or human-made, an ancient artifact that has survived underground for thousands of years or an ephemeral wisp of organic material that will soon decay to nothing.

The curator, though polite, made it clear she wasn't at all compelled by this work. It wasn't "contemporary" enough for her, meaning, I suppose, that it wasn't overtly political, didn't explicitly tackle big social issues, nor did it offer a hip ironic wink. Zone spent several weeks fretting over this response, wondering what she should work on next, and feeling despondent about various attempts that led to dead ends. The curator's disinterest suggested she needed to find a subject that was somehow bigger and more important, and thinking this way quickly tied her up in knots and kept her from getting anything done. Then, one day after spending several hours working in the garden, she came inside, flushed and excited, and announced, "I just want to shoot plants. If people aren't interested in looking at one of the dominant life forms on the planet, fuck them."

I put myself through similar contortions every time I'm between writing projects: I tell myself I need to come up with an idea that matters, that speaks to our fraught historical moment, that resonates beyond my own limited experience. I fret that no one could possibly care about my dull life, my mundane observations, the paltry reach of my imagination. I convince myself I'm through, I've got nothing left to add to the literary conversation, I should take up kickboxing or crossword puzzles. And then, eventually, I'll recall some small moment from my childhood or overhear an absurd snippet of speech or read about some obscure historical detail, and before I know it I'm down in the weeds of a story, deep enough among the stalks that I'm no longer able to see how they look against the horizon.

What Zone's experience reminded me—and what I always eventually remind myself whenever I struggle over questions of significance—is that all an artist can really do is follow her interests and obsessions, and that it's okay if those interests and obsessions don't matter to curators or editors or other tastemakers. But even more important, it reminded me that the question of subject matter is secondary to the question of treatment: because of course nothing is dull or insignificant if you really pay attention to it, if you examine it in all its complexity. The most "ordinary" object or experience is infinitely intricate if you look at it closely enough, and focusing on the mundane can be not only political but revolutionary: just take for example the impact of Ivan Turgenev's portrayal of serfs in A Sportsman's Sketches, which helped to bring about their emancipation just a handful of years later, or the influence of Gordon Parks's 1942 photograph American Gothic, Washington, D...