Gabriel Orozco Photographs

GABRIEL OROZCO PHOTOGRAPHS

Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Steidl, 2004

Photography for Orozco is, above all, a way of pointing to things. The manifest message of nearly all his pictures is the simple imperative: "Look at this." The things he points to are part of the ubiquitous scenery of everyday life: puddles, clotheslines, cars and bicycles, empty chairs and tables, containers and vessels, dogs, kites, trees, fruit, shoes, stray trash, and marbles. He photographs these things in the least “expressive” way possible: from a middle distance, with the primary object of interest positioned bluntly in the center of the picture. His compositions are simple and straightforward, dominated by circles and diagonals, with very little going on at the edges of the frame. Like snapshots of collectibles on E-bay, his photographs depict their objects with a purposeful clarity. ... Orozco’s photographs are uncomplicated, which is not to say that he has no idea what he’s doing with the camera. His approach to the medium is simple and utilitarian____Up until the mid-1990s, most of his photographs were documents of his own sculptures, installations, or interventions in the landscape—pictures that recorded the results of his physical encounters with the world around him. At the same time, he was also making what he calls “iconic” photographs—images of objects or situations as he finds them. After 1995 or so, the balance of his photographic work shifted toward the iconic—work in which the act of taking the photograph not only records but constitutes his encounter with the real.

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Orozco continued

—from Mia Fineman’s essay