Peter Piller

For the first time, Peter Piller has made a detour onto the road more traveled by: He is exhibiting his own photographs, in fine constellations of pure poetry, along with the anonymous archival shots painstakingly organized into categories invented by the artist. Piller is famous for his Blick (literally “view,” though not far from “blink”) and not for knowing the moment to press the button on a camera. He unerringly intuits when a found photograph becomes one worth exhibiting, when it makes a statement without ever having made a statement. In the series “Dauerhaftigkeit” (Permanence), 2005–2006, drawn from the archives of a textile mill in a small town in the Netherlands, Piller has taken pernicious joy in the photographs taken by the “factory’s journal photographer” that present the failures (which are not so much failures, per se, as representations of the typically unseen): accidental images of the ceiling or other instances of bad (or “another”) timing. A color shot of a helicopter captured midair with only one of its rotor blades in sight—like a fly missing a wing—is here coupled with a black-and-white image through a window of “nothing,” the moment when Piller focused his camera on a parked truck (possibly) and captured instead an abstract extract of puzzlement. The fact that one carefully examines each of these “works” on the walls—in pairs or in loose groupings of free verse—making connections where there were none in the mind of the photographer, exposes the many forks in the road—man with camera, archive, artist, gallery—and, hence, the many forks in the mind. That is what makes all the difference.