Adam Fuss
Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Artur-Ladebeck-Straße 5
March 2–May 11, 2003
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
September 25, 2002–January 12, 2003
Curated by Cheryl Brutvan and Thomas Kellein
It’s easy to see Fuss’s cameraless photograms and latter-day daguerreotypes as reactions to our digital era, in which photography’s ring of truth has a hollow sound. But as this fifty-five-print not-yet-midcareer survey (curated by Cheryl Brutvan of the MFA and Thomas Kellein of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld) shows, Fuss is interested less in documentary fact than in evanescence and immateriality. His archaic techniques provide a direct imprint of the thing photographed, but the result is a paradoxical loosening of the image’s bonds to the physical world—an aspect that puts Fuss’s pictures in a league with Robert Ryman’s all-white canvases and Wolfgang Laib’s pollen floor pieces.