Editors note: This article grew out of a collaboration between artist and critic, but also between brother and brother. It started during the artist's graduate studies when, forced with the task of building a logical and in-depth critical framework for his photography, he asked his brother the writer and critic for help. What the critic Mike Smolinsky can offer in this case, and what makes this piece rather unique in its field, is an intimate knowledge of the artist going all the way back to his birth. Despite this unlimited background information, however, the essay is not a biographical piece about an artist. This is an essay about the process of making art, about "the act of looking," and specifically about whether or not the documentary mode of making art—the primary act of Matt Smolinsky for the past 15 years—has any relevance at all in today's post-postmodern world.

The act of looking, like the act of reading, is not neutral or naïve—it’s full of emotions, interests, values, and obligations, which may include the obligation many people feel to back away from their more immediate emotions and interests when responding to art or literature. I don’t believe in Objectivity (capital “O”), but I believe in the desire for it, which can be impassioned and productive. At the very least, I believe in something beyond subjectivity.

And so, disclosure: I am Matt’s brother, which means I am an “interested” party in discussing his photographs. But familiarity can cut both ways—perhaps I will be harder on him than I would be on a stranger.

This is one of my first attempts at writing about photography. One of the things I’ve learned by looking at photographs is that I use theory as a way to keep anxiety at bay—anxiety about whether my ideas and judgments will seem sophisticated or strange, or anxiety about confronting something without a conscious framework. I have a Ph.D. in English literature, and my education has taught me to sublimate emotional responses to art, for better and worse. It has also taught me that we always bring a “theory” to bear when we read (or look or listen), even if that theory is so deeply ingrained that it seems like common sense. In other words, we bring a set of assumptions about language, literature, and human nature with us when we read a book or look at a photograph, even if we aren’t aware of it. This isn’t simply a bad thing: Our values and assumptions may blind us to some things, but they also enable us to see or read in a meaningful way.

I still believe all of this. But in looking at Matt’s photographs, I’ve found that it can be useful to let my emotions and body speak fully, or to let the most fleeting, chance impressions arise, and then start excavating and polishing my ideas in the aftermath. Even if my emotions and bodily responses are nothing more than deeply ingrained prejudices, subconscious frameworks, encrusted ideologies, why not let them speak freely? One of the reasons academic writing is so qualified and impenetrable, in my opinion, is that many academics are afraid of being caught out and pinned down for a position that others might criticize. They are also afraid of appearing naïve. I certainly feel this way much of the time. But these fears foster a powerful distrust of emotional response that ends up choking the life out of aesthetic response; eventually you learn the lesson too well and end up sublimating your reactions before they fully register, at which point you can only create a stillborn response, something suffocated before it comes into being. How much better to be open to the full range of response, or to let your individual reactions build, crest, flower, implode? When criticism works, the intellect serves not to eradicate emotional response but to shape it, and the presence of other readers is an occasion not for circling the wagons but engagement.

I find it easier to react unconsciously to photos than to literature, in part because my training is in literature, but also because one can take in a photo in a more compressed interval of time than a book. Photographs are more like poems in this respect than narratives, and maybe something like Rorschach tests compared to literary texts in general. What photographs lack in overt intertextuality they gain in intensity and condensation. Like poems but even more so, they strike you with concentrated force, catching you off-guard. I love this about photographs, and I hope that as I continue to look at them, I can avoid building up too thick a theoretical screen.

Unlike Rorschachs, however, Matt’s photos tend to be object—as opposed to subject—oriented. They want to be historical documents and capture something outside the self with precision and accuracy. This desire is problematic given poststructuralist ideas about representation, but I like the fact that his photos try to reclaim a space outside of the artist’s subjectivity and to circumscribe the presence of the artist out of respect for what is photographed. (I use “poststructuralism” and “postmodernism” interchangeably for the most part, though poststructuralism usually refers to philosophy and theory while postmodernism is more often applied to aesthetic forms.) I don’t see this as disingenuous but as reverential and mature. Matt looks at things quickly enough, or long enough, or openly enough, or from enough angles to discern what other people overlook and to allow unscripted elements to emerge. This is an act of care for the object, to look even when the world doesn’t fit your pre-existing ideas, or past the point when your own needs and desires seem to be fulfilled. It takes courage to allow objects to throw you off-guard or interrogate your settled sense of the world. In this, Matt’s notion of spontaneity may be influenced by his many years of practicing Zen Buddhism: Spontaneity and clarity in Zen are the product of extreme discipline and rigor, not laxness or intoxication. (Interestingly, Zen also suggests that the subject and object of perception arise simultaneously and can be grasped with clarity. This articulation of subject and object is different from Western notions of objectivity and self-reflexivity.)

To say that a photo is not or cannot be a naïve, spontaneous revelation of things-as-they-are—that it constructs instead of simply discovering what it represents (see, for example, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida)—does not necessarily imply the end of photography as evidence of anything. Nor does it mean that photography is a “mere” construction. For one, there is nothing mere about a constructed artifact. Beyond that, certain types of photography positively solicit the unfamiliar. The poststructuralist critique of ways of seeing (Berger, Barthes, etc.—the critique is generally accepted at this point, almost an empty gesture) need not be the end of photography as evidence of anything beyond the consciousness of the photographer. I think the attempt to rework documentary photography is particularly important right now given the contradictions and limitations of postmodernism. Can documentary photography as a genre still yield anything? I think so, and I think it yields more than just evidence of its constructedness. The intensely self-reflexive postmodern aesthetic has yielded work of great interest and beauty. However, not all photography need by viewed along a continuum that ends with Cindy Sherman.

The distinction between constructivist and realist aesthetics has obviously been an important and contentious one in photography criticism, as it has been in literary criticism. But critiques of realism don’t simply proceed from a healthy intellectual distrust of objectivity; they can also betray an intense and unrealistic desire for control, a discomfort with chance and randomness, an aggressive attempt to bring everything under the purview of discourse, and a tendency towards solipsism. Even researchers in the “hard” or “empirical” sciences acknowledge the effect of the observer on the observed—this has been accepted in physics at least as far back as Einstein—but that does not preclude all forms of truth-value.

A number of contemporary philosophers have attempted to think beyond poststructuralism without falling back on a shaky foundation of realism. Alan Badiou, for example, is a theoretically informed philosopher who continues to strive for clarity in thought. Badiou believes that an utterance actually says something about its object or referent, not just about the conditions of the utterance or subjectivity of the person who speaks. It may be worth distinguishing between clarity and order as we think about what realism might mean; perhaps one can let go of the assurances of structuralism or the grand narratives of modernism and still achieve clarity of thought or representation.

Fredric Jameson takes a somewhat different tack in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson points out that postmodern aesthetics must be seen in the context of late capitalism, and he makes a claims for the enduring value of content—even of genres like social realism—in the face of the playful indeterminacy and self-reflexive formalism of postmodern art. For example, he compares Van Gogh’s “Peasant Shoes” with Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” and Walker Evans’s “Floyd Burroughs’ Work Shoes” to suggest that the relation to content that obtains in postmodern aesthetics is different from the relation to content under modernism. Of “Diamond Dust Shoes” Jameson writes, “It is as though the external and colored surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces, most notably the traffic accident or the electric chair series, this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject” (Postmodernism, p. 9).

In my opinion, this mutation in the relation between subject and object in postmodern aesthetics tends toward the creation of the “art star” (as opposed to, say, the tortured and alienated artist under modernism): the “object” of Sherman’s or Richard Prince’s art is the self as persona, perceived as multiple, shifting, constructed, and commodified. Postmodernism has yielded a great deal of knowledge about subjectivity, but little about the object world, which has been left largely to science.

Jameson also makes a claim for the enduring value of content in the face of the manipulations of contemporary media. The world of advertising, where the demands of art and commerce are most thoroughly integrated, is as aware as the academic world of the ways that our subjectivity and perception of reality is constructed. Of course, art has always been commercial or economic in the broadest sense, but that does not imply a collapse of the distinction between works of art that are pure form, emptied of content (and which reproduce perfectly the commodity form under late capitalism, in that they are nothing more nor less than exchange value), and works of art that exist within economic contexts but which strive to perform other kinds of cultural work, such as social analysis or critique, witness or memorialization. The recognition that art exists in an economic context can easily become an excuse for cynical commercialism. For Jameson, as for Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton, the referent or content of art retains value for just this reason, and they see postmodern aesthetics as complicit with an abdication of social protest. I think it is revealing that those theorists and critics who want to retain a notion of realism in the arts tend to be Marxist in their approach and are interested in the moral dimensions of art.

This is not to say that poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of realism are wrong-headed or unwarranted. Postmodernism has been a powerful and necessary reaction to the tyranny of so-called scientific or historical objectivity, historiographical or theoretical grand narratives, Romantic notions of aesthetic production, essentialist ideas about human nature, and so on. However, it is also complicit with a socioeconomic structure that elides the reality of poverty, for example, and with a general turning away from hard questions of social justice and toward the contours of “subjectivity.”

One photographer who seems to be thinking about these issues productively is Sebastiao Salgado. He advocates long-term projects that yield a personal but still object-oriented kind of knowledge, similar to what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description.” Salgado has not abandoned documentary photography in the face of poststructuralism but has reworked what it might mean, and I think Matt’s work can be seen as doing this as well. Salgado’s work both embraces and resists postmodernism. For example, his commitment to human rights, especially in a postcolonial context, runs counter to the anti-humanism of most poststructuralist thought, to the decentering of the subject that has become so familiar. (It is perhaps no coincidence that just as so many formerly colonized peoples were gaining political independence that European philosophy began decentering the subject, as if to take away philosophically what had been won politically.)

In some ways, postmodernism was a reaction against modernism; in others, it was a continuation of it. For example, postmodernism embraces pastiche, and it rejects the notion of the artist as a solitary genius working outside of any social, historical, or economic context, both of which set it apart from modernism. At the same time, the preoccupation with form and the subjectivity of the artist is common to both and can be considered a continuation of Kantian prejudices regarding what counts as properly aesthetic. Both modernism and postmodernism reject as vulgar and facile the genre of social realism, the ethical dimension of art, and the pleasures of mimesis; and this is clearly a class-inflected definition of the aesthetic. (Pierre Bourdieu covers this ground decisively in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, which has influenced my ideas about aesthetics very much.)

I see Matt’s photos in this vein, as going against the grain of certain tendencies in postmodernist art by insisting on authenticity and veracity. The photos claim to present a truth that exceeds their formal construction and the subjectivity of the photographer, and they claim to possess a value and an emotional force in excess of the photographer’s ego or their marketability. That is, they strive in some fundamental way to be object- as opposed to subject-oriented, and this necessarily requires the photographer to be open to what the object might say, to relinquish some control.

On the other hand, the photos in this collection also seem to have incorporated certain postmodern critiques of modernist art. For example, they are not presented as autonomous artifacts, stripped of the need for context. (Another way to put this is that they are not naturalistic or proceed from an uninformed notion of verisimilitude, though they do aspire to a revised form of realism.) Matt’s photos include handwritten text, doctor’s charts—“extraneous” elements that ground them in a reality outside the bounds of the frame. I see this as a way of explicitly contextualizing these photos into personal narratives. At their best, the photos steer clear of a confessional mode while declaring the personal and historical worth of what is photographed. This is enhanced by incorporating them into the form of a handmade book, which suggests they are worthy of the care that such a process entails.

Perhaps it is in the confrontation between self and other, familiar and strange, scripted and unscripted, that the documentary photograph retains its impact and stretches our senses and our understanding. Maybe photos can still render something accurately, though that “something” may not be the givenness or undisturbed nature of the object. Perhaps a photograph should be considered an event instead of a thing, which necessarily implies an observer with a subject position who intervenes and does not simply witness reality, but one who intervenes the way an anthropologist does, by entering a context and risking his or her own transformation in order to record/construct the object of research. In Matt’s collection, for example, the photos entitled “Fertility” imply that the photographer is not simply looking at the scene objectively or disinterestedly. And note the witty inclusion of the word “masturbation” in the second frame, which seems to me a recognition that the photos veer dangerously close to confessional. As in many of his photos, Matt asks what place the artist has in the world he attempts to capture, and to what degree he can or should efface his presence.

Badiou defines the “event” as “anything that disrupts the present situation”; he is concerned with how something new can be seen. He attempts to “think beyond constructivist ontologies by seeing the event as a rupture of ontology.” Badiou describes the event as “located close to the edge of what qualifies as void or indistinguishable in a situation, i.e., the part of it where the prevailing forms of discernment and recognition cease to have any significant purchase.” He explicitly links this definition of the event to aesthetics: “The artistic event…is a change in the formula of the world…something like ‘becoming formal’ of something which was not. It’s the emergence of a new possibility of formalization…the becoming form of something which was not form” (“The Subject of Art,”).

With Badiou in mind I would like to turn to “After Daido,” a photo which by its title alone (the word “after”) indicates that it is temporal, more event than object. If you allow your eyes to focus, you first see that the subject is a dog, and one who looks aggressive. But then, when that effect subsides, you notice the dog’s sitting position, and (s)he appears patiently waiting, perhaps for a treat (though the hostility lingers). The blurred focus, I think, encourages this self-reflexive seeing because the image is not clearly and distinctly something—we must give it shape, and as a result, it becomes something of a spectral screen. If you look at the photo for a while longer, it becomes difficult to tell which are the eyes, mouth, and nose—all the holes look equal, and they are all empty places, vacuums, almost void of subjectivity and imbued with any life only by stepping back and looking at the whole image, especially its contours. But even then, the contours are indistinct and unclear.

Is this a kind of mirror for the viewer? That is, alternatively aggressive and pleading, begging for a treat but also hostile, about to bite the hand that feeds it? Given this representation of the viewer, I wonder how the artist feels about us. Are we in need of discipline? Sympathy? Are we child-like or bestial? Subordinate? We are all of these things, I think, but more importantly, the viewer is a ghost, created by the image and vanishing by it as well. This is one kind of “life” that a photograph can create: a hungry ghost, constituted—just barely—by its empty spaces and indistinct contours. I think Matt’s photos register and thematize poststructuralist critiques of representation most powerfully when they depict the object as a ghost. With “After Daido,” the more you try to make the image (and by extension, yourself) come into focus, the more you are drawn to its emptiness. The effect is unsettling in an instructive way, and a “biting” critique of one kind of subjectivity that the photographic image can create. The photo can be interpreted as exactly the process Badiou discusses—a becoming form of that which was not form, and an enactment—not simply a representation—of this process, in which the subject and object arise together, in which cause and effect cannot ultimately be separated. In effect, the object is an event, from this perspective; it is both objective and subjective at the same time.

The photo “A Stranger’s Shoes” seems to me a poignant elegy for the object, a lament for what is lost when photography no longer attempts to capture the truth of something or someone “out there.” I don’t know if Matt deliberately created this photo to be in conversation with Van Gogh, Warhol, and Evans, but I think these works of art can be productively interpreted together. “A Stranger’s Shoes” has great cognitive and aesthetic power; it beautifully internalizes the post-structuralist distrust of objectivity while asking us what is lost when we turn toward the subjectivity and consciousness of the artist instead. (Ultimately I think it’s a false choice, and I think Matt does as well.)

In the first frame, we see a pair of shoes on the side of the road. My first reaction was “These shoes belong to someone.” My second thought was, “Perhaps the person is homeless,” a reaction reinforced by the roadside setting. Perhaps this person was walking along the road, a road without a sidewalk. Maybe the person was injured. In any case, the shoes seem to imply the presence of their owner, but only as an absence. Someone is not there. In addition, the shoes are not presented as commercial or aesthetic objects, in spite of the fact that there may be a certain beauty to them. They are valuable because they were someone’s and because they memorialize that person’s absence, similar to the way flowers on the side of the road memorialize someone who died there.

In the second frame, it appears that the shoes have moved or been moved. If we look carefully, we see that the angle is slightly different. They seem more ghostly to me as a result, as if they were able to move on their own. Immediately after this impression, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps this is a staged scene. And so the third frame concludes the series nicely, though it does not resolve anything. Because in the third frame we become aware of a perceiver, but one in a car, making it unlikely—but not impossible—that the driver moved the shoes, at least physically. It is as if the mere perception of the driver shifted the shoes, had some metaphysical effect on the ghost invoked by the shoes. Note, though, that we don’t see the driver/perceiver; he is brought into the frame but not reflected in the photos. Is this disingenuous or not? I’m not sure. Nevertheless, I see this series of photos as an elegant exploration of the object world and of the act of perception without lapsing into a cheap, winking self-reflexivity, mostly because we are forced to acknowledge the reality of the person who once walked in those shoes. That person is not represented, and maybe that is an act of tenderness in that the person is not captured by the photograph or subsumed within the photographer’s subjectivity. At the same time, there is a mournful quality to the person’s absence.

In Vaguely Stealthy Creatures’: Max Kozloff on the Poetics of Street Photography, Martin Patrick states that in the “underrated genre of street photography,” “glimpses of concrete specificity launch us as viewers into a vertiginous zone of ambiguity. Photographic details, however sharply rendered, become mysterious clues to something always just out of reach. Kozloff recognizes that to lurk near the edge of chaos without succumbing to it can be an altogether pleasant sensation.” I think this is an apt description of what “A Stranger’s Shoes” accomplishes, for to lurk near the edge of chaos is to confront someone or something separate from oneself. But lurking also contains some sense of menace, as does the third photo. Who is this driver, and what is his relation to the person whose shoes are memorialized on the side of the road? Is he an innocent bystander, or somehow implicated in what has occurred? I’m tempted to pun on Rear Window, the Alfred Hitchcock thriller that features a professional photographer as a protagonist.

This is to say that “A Stranger’s Shoes” exists in a moral framework, in which something is at stake in our perception of the photos. To interpret this photo in a thoroughly postmodern mode is to make that person who once walked in the shoes vanish. If we focus too much on the perceiver or the act of perception, on the constructed nature of the image, we will lose sight of that ghost. It is a commonplace that photography kills what it photographs. “A Stranger’s Shoes” suggests that much of that responsibility—to either eradicate or give another kind of life to the object—lies with the person who looks at the photo.