- 16 pages, 10″x14″ (opens to 20″x14″) (260 x 370 mm)
- printed on newsprint
- with an interview by Matt Offenbacher
- Buy the Zine
- Download the PDF
Zine page spreads:
Zine trailer
Interview
A conversation conducted over Zoom while Ari was recovering from COVID
August 24th, 2022
Matt Offenbacher: Let’s start with a really basic question, how did you even begin noticing these marks in a way that made you want to photograph them?
Ari Salomon: When the pandemic started, I was antsy being stuck at home and felt art opportunities vanishing all around me. So I made a determined effort to do a project about the pandemic. I wanted to capture the historic moment, and I did what I always do — grab my camera and start walking. I explored my neighborhood, taking pictures of the boarded-up windows, the handmade signs, the graffiti, and the empty streets.
I had a few images of these marks in the beginning but they were part of a larger project. Later I realized the repetition of seeing all the marks in a group was exciting and I shifted my focus exclusively to finding these groups of marks.
It also helped that I started using my new iPhone 13 in 2021 and these images looked so good I captured many of them on-the-go. It became more about quantity and infused more fun in the process.
I was initially attracted to the minimalism of these marks on the ground. Where I live (the Mission district in San Francisco) there are so many of them and they are almost always made with tape on the concrete sidewalk. So even closely cropped they are instantly recognizable.
I’ve always been interested in how photography makes you see the world in a different way. In my Interface series, I really learned the power of repetition. If I have one picture of something that looks like a face, many people won’t even notice it, but if I show several then people get it pretty quickly. And with a large group of images, I can start including more subtle versions where the viewer has to work a little to find the face and it starts to really dig into their brain. The viewer tunes in and starts seeing faces everywhere, just like I do.
Matt: You mentioned using your iPhone camera rather than your large camera — one thing that’s interesting about this work as street photography is the “looking downwards”, which is unusual. I wonder if it has something to do with how we habitually use our phones horizontally to the ground while cameras are usually vertically oriented. Of course, when our phones are pointing downwards I guess they’re also pointing upwards too.
Ari: Yeah. And they’re pointing everywhere because there are so many of them.
Matt: Yeah, plenty of them! But they are most often pointing up and pointing down — it’s just a really different orientation than the way Western pictures developed, which is all about us as vertical, bipedal creatures, with our eyes positioned at the apex of our bodies. A lot of the conventions of picture making are all around that orientation to horizontal and vertical. And these pictures flip that down 90 degrees into this other orientation.
You were talking about your transition from being locked-down to reemerging into public space and these pictures really capture something about that moment. We were invited, or even encouraged for economic reasons, for psychological reasons, to come back into public — but we were not familiar with the new rules about how safe it was to get close to someone else. I can remember thinking, what decisions am I making about being back in public? Being with people I don’t know, people outside my pod? Of all the technologies that were developed during the pandemic, this is such a humble one. Just some pieces of tape on the ground, much simpler than N95 masks or cutting-edge vaccines — but very effective.
What was your experience of actually seeing people interact with these marks? In my observation, people pretty much respected them.
Ari: In one of the series taken in my neighborhood there were many markers at a food pantry — a whole city block — and people were definitely respecting them. That’s a large-scale, dramatic case but many locations, of course, have a very small number of them, and people still pay attention to them.
I love this idea of subverting conventions. You talked about pointing the camera down and that’s so interesting to me. In my panoramic photos, I stitch together images and try to see how that differs from the way a camera frames the world.
Cameras have a certain aspect ratio, lenses have a certain perspective and distortion. There are some parallels between how a camera works and how the human eye works. But you really see with your brain, not with your eye, and your eye is different than a camera in many ways. It’s not that my panoramas or my other experimental approaches are more real, more like reality, but they are trying to break with conventions. Part of the goal is to make the viewer think about what the conventions are, what are their other assumptions, and, perhaps more ambitiously, how can we be more mindful in our lives.
In the first exhibition of this series (at Minnesota Street Project) I’m going to present the images on the floor. Because they are pictures of the floor, it makes sense and it dodges the issue of presenting them vertically or horizontally on the wall. On the screen, I present them vertically— I guess the phone screen encourages creating vertical images. But I shoot horizontal on my phone all the time. Of course, on Instagram, in some views, it’ll still crop them square, which was one of my least favorite things about Instagram. Don’t get me started on my other pet peeve — vertical videos.
Matt: The square format has become its own convention thanks to Instagram.
Ari: Yeah, when they started you had to have a square image — you couldn’t have a horizontal or vertical image, it would just crop it square. I thought “this is dead to me”.
Matt: Because they were pretending like it was a Polaroid.
Ari: That’s one of the things that made me dislike Instagram. But that’s another story. Okay, so subverting conventions. That is great. I’m glad we talked about that.
Matt: If you exhibit them on the floor, people will probably be walking on your pictures. How do you feel about that?
Ari: I love that, because it’s all about the images being distressed. And showing the passage of time — how they’ve changed over time and how we’ve changed over time. I think that’s a nice feature. I’ve never worked with this kind of sign material, but it’s made for walking on. So it’s certainly tough and it won’t just fall apart right away. Maybe it’s too tough for an exhibit that’s only going to be up for a month. But I thought that I could sell the images that are distressed from people walking on them for more money than a freshly printed image. An authentically exhibited and interacted-with image that looks nicely distressed. I’ll wait and see how it looks. I don’t know how these will survive being peeled off the floor, which is another way to get distressed, which could be fine. It’s something I look forward to playing with in this show.
Matt: I like the idea that the distressed object is more valuable than the new or whole object. That’s super evocative for me. It really resonates with this theme in your work of subverting conventions.
It’s not just about perception and trying to unnaturalize the way a camera sees, your work proposes all these other ways of seeing. Seeing itself, what you pay attention to, has a lot to do with assigning value. There’s a really close connection between attention and value. So I love this idea of valuing distressed things. We’ve all been distressed, especially the last few years. We’ve been in so much distress. Our society has been fraying, our democracy is fraying around the edges or even has some tears in it. The social contract feels really distressed and that’s really hard. And now there’s an invitation to pretend like everything’s okay — but your work invites us to be with this distress for a bit longer, to see what we could learn about it, or to value the distress in and of itself for what it might reveal about who we are.
A lot of people have talked about the pandemic like a portal, or a lens that has revealed things about society that weren’t super visible to everyone before, but suddenly, many more people were able to see inequities and the limits of our social structures. I think that’s parallel to how you’re talking about wanting people to see how they’re seeing, to train people to see things in a different way. Seeing something over and over is a way of showing people a different way to see.
Ari: You used the word “unnaturalize” in relation to the way a camera sees. I love that word. “Defamiliarize” is another word that I love — I made a small typographically-driven book about that word a long time ago when we were in college. And I’m becoming aware of how my interest in seeing things in new ways, in challenging conventions, also ties in with my interest in meditation. Meditation is also about being mindful and not taking things for granted, being aware of how your mind works and how your emotions work. This is something that I perceive in my daily practice, and I find it so helpful.
That ties into my interest in photography, where I don’t just want to make beautiful photographs, but photographs that have the potential to make a viewer rethink the way they see. It’s an ambitious goal.
With my Interface photos, people have seen the world in a different way. It’s so clear with that project. I have friends who regularly send me faces that they find. Perhaps they wouldn’t have seen the faces without coming across my work. And there’s another connection in meditation, in the repetition of meditation, in sitting doing the same thing over and over and over again, being mindful of breath, or whatever the meditative focus is. In this series, it’s the same mark, the same type of mark over and over. I’m interested in documenting every mark that’s in a scene. There might be 5 marks, or 20, or in some cases, 40 or 50. I found a lot of marks in a school in my neighborhood, where it wound around most of a block.
Matt: The ones that are just the line that are right next to the crack in the sidewalk? There’s something really compelling in that repetition. There’s so many of them.
Ari: Yeah, there’s so many. They’re so similar, and the typology-style presentation helps me tune-in by eliminating everything else from the frame. I don’t show the context of the sidewalk — the buildings, the street, the pandemic — nothing else. That helps tune into the differences, the small differences between these very similar-looking things. I hope there’s enough variety that it doesn’t get boring, although I’m questioning whether my job as an artist is to avoid people getting bored?
Matt: I love that question. For me, the question about boredom is connected to the minimalism you mentioned earlier. There’s a real tension there. Minimalism, in its origins in the 1960s, had this idea of rejecting the role of the artist as creating a spectacle. I’m not sure it really worked out the way they had hoped — but there was, at the beginning, a kind of counterculture impulse behind it.
There was a strain of minimalism that was trying to create spaces where suddenly you are more aware of your body, by making objects that evoked an absent body. This maybe has a connection to meditation and the awareness of being embodied. It also brings up questions about whose bodies were being suggested by these absent bodies, because most of the canonical minimalists were these white dudes. I’m thinking about Ana Mendieta’s work. She did these amazing body shapes created out of natural materials and dug down in natural places, surrogate bodies that she would then photograph or do performances with.
In your work, these marks were made to be stood on, they’re made for bodies. People will stand on them, their bodies will be oriented towards them in different ways. And the missing bodies — that pandemic period where everything emptied out and the bodies we expected to see everywhere in public spaces were gone. Some permanently gone, while other bodies, belonging to people who didn’t have anywhere else to go, suddenly much more visible on the street.
Now that these marks are aging away, they somehow evoke ghost bodies, the bodies that we inhabited during that time. Not because the pandemic is all that different now. Obviously, people are still getting sick — you have the COVID virus inside you right now.
Ari: I’m distressed!
I like how you’re talking about
bodies, the pandemic is all about the body. Each one of these minimalist marks is a stand-in for a body. It’s only there because it’s supposed to have a body on top of it. And I like the interplay between how it controls us versus how it protects us — that is very relevant to this discussion of the physical body. There are visual meditations where you have a candle or some other physical object and you keep your eyes open and meditate on the object. So as a meditative practice, these images are not so different than what may be used for some meditation practices.
Matt: Is visual meditation something you’ve ever practiced?
Ari: No, I haven’t. I’m so visually oriented — I like that I get a break from looking at stuff when I’m meditating.
Matt: Yeah. I don’t know much about meditation but I feel like centering your body is related.
Ari: The term used in Vipassana meditation is equanimity.
I want to get back to this question of distressed images and distressed prints. Presenting the work on the floor helps embody something unique about the ideas behind the work. How could I further embrace the distressed idea in the presentation of the work? I mentioned this idea of selling prints that are distressed, and having them distressed in this “natural” way while being exhibited and stepped on and de-installed. Maybe I could push that idea a little further by saying that I would only sell prints that have been walked on. As a way to emphasize that that’s what the work is about. A collector could still put them in a frame if they don’t have a place on the floor to exhibit — a strong adhesive sticker on the floor of your home is a whole other level of commitment. Also, I’m worried that people in the gallery will not walk on them at all.
Matt: I think you’re probably right, people will walk around them. Maybe part of the trick is to have a density of them such that people can’t avoid it. Especially at the opening or anytime there’s a good number of people in the space.
Ari: My first proposal was to fill the whole gallery, but have them six feet apart. And then there’d be up to 24 of them on the floor in a grid. In the end, the curator picked eight images and her idea now is that they’ll form a path from the door that leads to the wall signage for the whole show. I like the idea of making a meandering path with images approximately six feet apart. I’m printing them bigger than life-size because I want them visible without having to bend over. These are probably bigger prints than what I would want to present if they were on the wall.
Matt: It’s so funny that the curator wants a path that leads to the wall text! There’s an opportunity here, if there is going to be a path of images. You’re coaxing people, like a social experiment. It becomes significant where that path goes, what kind of path it is, whether it is a straight line, whether it meanders, where it starts, where it ends.
These questions about presentation lead me to a hard question: what is art? How are photographs of these marks different from the actual marks? Or getting some duct tape and making X’s on the gallery floor?
Ari: That’s great to think about. Although I’m trying to break out of certain conventions, the process of making my work is based in street photography — walking around and seeing what catches my eye. And I love that process. I’ve learned a lot doing that process over the decades. There is a documentary aspect to this work so it certainly would be different if I put tape on the gallery floor. Because these are real images — well, as “real” as a photo can be. And they’re all shot nearby, not too far from where this gallery is.
In one sense, these are artifacts of the pandemic — although a photograph is a recreation, so we can go in circles about the meaning and the metaphors. But I like that question.
Matt: It’s like you’ve created a strange photography-adjacent medium where the film or plate are these vinyl stickers on the ground, and people’s feet are the thing that’s making the image. And then, at a certain point, you fix it in order to capture something about that process. At the point where the metaphor is the most comprehensible or unbearable, or whatever it is that you’re wanting to convey. Is that too far-fetched?
Ari: I don’t know if it’s too far. I have to think about that. We’re so far out there and that feels good.
Matt: Okay, I have a different question. I see a variety of different strategies in how these marks were made. Are there some that you found you are more drawn to? Do you think some of them were more effective than others? I never really thought about it, but looking at your pictures, it makes me realize that people did all sorts of different things to demarcate six feet apart. I’m curious if you had any observations about the variety of marks or how people made these things?
Ari: I definitely focus on trying to capture the repetition in one scene where there could be a bunch that are made the same way. My neighborhood has so many that are tape on concrete — that is the visual formula. But other places, especially in Japan, that was not the formula. More common were printed stickers on a terrazzo floor. I like displaying them as a topology where there’s a bunch that are the same but part of my challenge is how to display their variety, which says something about human creativity in a vernacular context. I hope to appreciate the minimalism of this type of mark. I think people who don’t think of themselves as artists still come up with unique aesthetics, and in a subtle way their personalities can come through.
Matt: Yeah, I love that quirky individuality. I guess it’s like any kind of mark, like a signature or graffiti. I think you’re right, it’s the informal ones even more than practiced ones that are artful. When people are making marks and they’re not even trying to make their own mark.
Ari: The repetition lets the viewer tune into these subtle details. Again, that feels like meditation, tuning into the subtlety. It takes time. That’s one reason I want to make this publication. Because I think the work benefits from seeing different groupings, even if you don’t spend that much time with each individual one.
Matt: It’s so interesting to see these different kinds of approaches to that question of how to make a mark. It feels very much like an art question because metaphor comes into it. Is it more enclosed so it surrounds your feet? One looks like a circle and that feels like such a different kind of body that would want to occupy a round space vs these other geometries. And this amazing star-shaped one! Which is ebullient somehow: “Yes, this is where I want my body, but I am really wanting my body to be in relation to lots of different things, I want to be connected there and there and there.” It’s a very outward, centrifugal force. The single X’s are much more of a “pulling-in”, centripetal kind of force.
Ari: It’s like the people standing on these marks were distilled into this two dimensional space underneath them.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah.
Ari: Hopefully not destroyed in the process.
Matt: And hopefully kept safe from infection.
Ari: Leads me to think, why isn’t the mark shaped like a real shadow? As if there was a light above a person standing there. Shouldn’t that be the mark, instead of an X? What is the shape of a person if they’re lit from straight above? Perhaps it’s just kind of a blob that’s not very recognizable. That connects back to what you said about the straight down perspective.
Matt: Why is it that you don’t depict people in your photos?
Ari: Well, I think it’s related to the limitations of my social skills. I feel like somebody who has more emotional intelligence than me could be a portrait photographer and engage with people directly even if it’s in the type of street photography that’s not anonymous, but my personality fits more of a “hide the camera and walk away quickly” mode!
And be lost in my own thoughts as I engage with the world around me. I’m not one to chat with strangers super easily and I do try to overcome that consciously and it can be so rewarding. But that’s not my default. So I never was interested in portraiture.
On another level, my interest is more in being unique than just making something that’s well-crafted. And making something that’s a signature piece that enhances my ego is a part of it. Even though I don’t think of it that way all the time.
Matt: I love that you said that a signature piece enhances your ego, because I feel like that’s a pretty universal motivation for artmaking, and not often acknowledged. I really love that you said that.
It makes me think about ethics also. There’s a conversation in street photography around the ethics of photographing people and permission and ownership and image and all this kind of stuff. One possible solution would be a hidden camera and on the other end of the spectrum could be a kind of radical openness that would lead to a shift in the genre.
Ari: It is such a tough conundrum for a street photographer who’s interested in capturing people and the way they are in public. In a sense, these images are not so different than all the security cameras that are on the streets. And there are legal protections in the US, if you’re on the street someone can take a picture of you but not sell it commercially. The fine art context, I believe, involves other kinds of fair use. And there’s different rules in different countries. I used to take anonymous pictures of people on the street, classic street photography, and I loved it. It was so great to capture an introspective moment someone’s having, or just a “moment” moment. I love that kind of photography and it was a bummer to have my consciousness raised that it could be socially problematic in terms of power dynamics. And once my consciousness was raised to that it took the fun out of doing it. If I stop to ask permission, then often I am not able to capture that same kind of observation. It drove me away from that kind of street photography and inspired me to come up with something else.
I did capture a few images in this anonymous style when I was starting these neighborhood COVID photos. And I was thinking, Oh, I’m doing that thing again. Can I do that? Should I be doing it? How can I make it better? Sometimes the simple solution is asking for permission after you take the photo — at least via some eye contact if not actually a model release. Oh, I just took this photo of you. Is that okay? To fully explain that I may present this in a gallery or other fine art context is a bigger burden and takes me out of the mode of taking pictures. It’s a very different headspace to be in.
Matt: That seems really challenging, to come up to some stranger and ask that. These questions of power relations and public space are super-interesting. Even though you stopped taking pictures of people there’s something about these new works that do address social norms and power: how we are in public space and the ways built environments shape behavior. It was such a huge shift, this idea of standing apart. And, at least in the cities that I have been in during the pandemic, it really worked.
We all changed our behaviors very quickly in an unprecedented way, and these photographs are an emblem of that shift. It has since become so much messier. Decision making around what kinds of pandemic era behaviors to retain, to not retain, have become much more individualistic and more differentiated in different communities and contexts. There’s something about these images that’s very suggestive of a time when, in a weird way, there was a lot of cohesion or agreement around behavior in public that normally doesn’t exist.
Ari: Yeah, this little mark represents lots of changes.
Matt: So this theme of them wearing away, the distressed part of it, has something to do with capturing a particular time that’s already passing, or blending into whatever the time is that we’re in now. The pandemic is still with us, but it’s a very different relationship that most of us are having to it.
Ari: I want to mention in relation to taking pictures of people in public, I hope that my artwork is outside of my ego enough that it has only the possibility to uplift people and not make them feel bad in any way. So I hope that my consciously getting away from just anonymous pictures of people on the street is tied to a bigger wish for a positive impact in the world.
Matt: I love that intention and ideal for what art can do. I think these are really helpful pictures. In a weird way, even though they are marking such a hard time, they’re lovely expressions of individual quirkiness and personality and the hopeful idea that we might want to take care of each other by following certain rules in public. That there’s some stake we have in others’ well being that’s expressed by these X’s and squares. I think it is super helpful.
Ari: Yeah. Wow. That’s a beautiful note to end on.
Matt: OK, you take care — don’t start exerting yourself too soon. Give yourself plenty of time. Even after you feel like you’re all better, maybe take a little longer just to make sure it’s all gone.
Ari: Yes, I gotta rest now, thanks.
Ari Salomon is a photographer whose work is rooted in reinterpreting the tradition of street photography. He takes the performative process of discovering candid people and places and gives it a twist. He is also interested in how photography can reveal the nature and limitations of human perception. Salomon grew up in San Diego and is now based in San Francisco.
Matthew Offenbacher is a painter and multi disciplinary artist who seeks constructive, positive positions at often difficult intersections of individuals, communities and institutions. His work has been called “freakishly egoless”, vulnerable, funny and queer. Offenbacher grew up in Portland, Oregon and currently lives in Seattle, Washington, USA. He also runs a press which publishes ‘zines and books by Northwest artists.
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