In photographer Amir Zaki’s vertiginous, depopulated views, usually long exposures shot at night, velvety dark blue-greens dominate, illuminated by eerie halos of electric light. Rooflines, cornices, garden walls, empty backyards with potted plants and outdoor furniture outline LA residences and the landscapes surrounding or intruding on them. It’s as if Julius Shulman abandoned black-and-white to do location stills for The X-Files.
In his new photographs, Zaki negotiates the chill, even noir aspects of Los Angeleno domesticity. I write “negotiates” (rather than, say, “interrogates”) because it’s difficult to discern what kind of meaning Zaki thinks his work is producing. Three photographs here were slashed, as were their mounting and framing, and whole sections removed (a horizontal or vertical “middle,” a corner that perhaps followed a roof slope). Zaki’s decision to crowd the three “cut” works chockablock with ten others in which the physicality of the photograph and its support is not an issue has disturbing and, I would guess, unintended—consequences. The excisions do not cam the weight of sculptural concerns; these aren’t Gordon Matta-Clark cut pieces done with photographs. If they are corrections of some kind, why would Zaki produce an edition of eight and cut each apart in exactly the same manner—and what is the relation of the “corrected” pieces to the unedited images? It would have been preferable to see fewer pieces with a stronger focus on what motivates this project, on whether and how the approaches produce different kinds of meaning.
Zaki has never denied digitally manipulating his photographs. It’s tempting to read his cutting away the print and its support as a return of the repressed real, an insistence on a physicality his medium may not really have. Photographs—shadow and light, eminently reproducible—are simultaneously objects and specters; digitization further complicates the photograph’s already complicated thingness. But rather than emphasize the images’ physicality, Zaki’s cutting seems to trash not only those cleft but, paradoxically, all the photographs, any potential importance of the meaning, along with much of his larger enterprise.
Zaki also showed a DVD piece, This Video Was Not Supposed to Exist. It Replaces Another One That Committed Suicide (all works 2001): Huddled near a backyard swimming-pool shed are two preteen girls and a boy of about six, the age Zaki was (an artist’s statement tells us) when Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, hung himself. Copyright law forbade the exhibition of a video in which the kids recite a whole album of Joy Division lyrics (Zaki read the words aloud, the kids repeated them, and then the artist digitally removed his voice and the pauses). In the video that is shown, the kids instead explain why they’re not reciting Joy Division lyrics. While not entirely successful on its own, when combined with the photographs the digital video suggests that Zaki’s interests may not best be served by photography, or by an adherence to any one medium at all. A number of factors—that he offers a video that’s a stand-in for another; that he mutilates his photographs; that in the statement accompanying the show he emphasizes Curtis’s suicide and wonders whether the kids’ recitation of the lyrics’ “angst and depression” would be different if they were older—lead me to think that rather than domestic architecture per se, Zaki is interested in the architectonics of sorrow. He is attempting something much more considerable than the “ominous” nightscaping of Todd Hido or Miranda Lichtenstein. His concerns seem to exceed photography, to require additional concepts and media to witness the relations between locale and psychic climates, between palm trees and sunshine and suicide.
—Bruce Hainley
