Lars Müller Publishers, 2024
English texts by Corey Keller and Lukas Felzmann
8×12 inches / 20.3 cm x 30.5 cm
236 pages, 168 illustrations
Softcover
ISBN 978-3-03778-759-5
Printed in Germany
Available from the Publisher
distributed by ARTBOOK / D.A.P
signed copies available from the artist
In the Space of Not Knowing
Corey Keller
The pictures that make up the series across (and its conceptual sibling, ground) are the result of Lukas Felzmann’s five-year exploration of his geographically immense and environmentally complex home state of California. Between 2018 and 2023, he photographed orchards and parking lots, highways and rivers, crosswalks, sidewalks, and his studio. To guide such a daunting undertaking, the artist chose to rely on a system already put in place. As he explains, “The grid I ended up using was simple and already in existence. It is the division of California into 58 counties. The counties were created through a historical process over time, some borders are political, some geographical and many arbitrary.” The grid — imaginary lines imposed over nature’s unruliness to parcel it out into knowable, governable zones – offered an administrative conceit that set parameters for the project and gave it structure. Over the course of the project, he photographed in each of the state’s fifty-eight counties, regardless of what he might find there or personal inclination. By letting the pre-set framework determine where he went, he gave free reign to his intuition, inviting chance encounter and courting the unexpected.
If the grid’s order provided an organizing structure for the project, it also provided an ideological foil, something to push against conceptually. The grid and its geographic cousin, the map, offer the tantalizing illusion that the world we inhabit can somehow be rationalized, made sense of, brought under control. A map gives visual form to a place that is too large or too complex to be comprehended by sight alone. Though we know, intellectually, that maps are human inventions, and therefore as much shaped by bias and politics as by topography, they are designed to project a kind of aperspectival neutrality: the view from nowhere. There is an implicit hubris to such an endeavor: mapmakers often give form to this all-seeing omniscience in the aerial view, which, before hot air balloons and satellites brought it within human reach, belonged exclusively to the birds and the Creator. Photography has been yoked to this project of mapping and knowing since the moment of its invention. By the middle of the nineteenth century, surveyors and photographers had been dispatched across the globe to describe and document the entirety of its terrain. If the world could be measured and documented, catalogued and brought to sight, it could be known. This worldview is tenacious: we invest both maps and photographs with authority because we — wishfully, and against all evidence — believe them to represent reality, uninflected and true.
The photographs in across give the lie to such fictions. They show us the world not as it is, but as it was seen, reminding us, insistently, that photography is first and foremost an act of looking. A photograph like “Parking Lot,” for example, quietly demonstrates just how much of its affective power stems from its point of view. The poetic irony of the softly smudged pastel landscape painted on a cinderblock wall that blocks the view of the actual landscape is only the first layer of meaning. Three steps to the left or right and we would have missed entirely the splendid merging of the tree trunks’ linear forms with the long sooty traces that run down the top of the wall. Full of the thickness of experience, such pictures offer the contingent, the particular, and the time bound. As if to defy of the certitude of the map, the photographs made in one county are not easily distinguished from those made in another; the landscapes mostly cannot be identified or even linked to a particular place. The plainspoken titles – “Oilfield,” “Border Fence,” “Tree and Wall” — offer little help in the way of interpretation, but plenty of room for the imagination to play. Felzmann initially described this body of work as an atlas, but ultimately set that label aside. An atlas connotes a condition of totality and completeness, a state of knowingness that his photographs willfully disallow. Once the grid had served its purpose, it could disappear, allowing other throughlines, less easily articulated, more subjective, to emerge in its place. Shimmering through the sequence that makes up across is a series of radiating threads from and to a point of origin: a view from somewhere.
Landscape and photography are the subject and medium of the series, but also parallel languages for bearing witness to the human presence and the inexorable passage of time. The sequence of across (which adheres to neither geography nor chronology and embraces wildly disparate scales of time), doubles down on this idea. The copper plate that opens the book — corroded and transformed by age, humidity, and chemical reaction — later finds a counterpart in the sixty-five-mile-an-hour highway that slices through the primeval folds of the earth’s crust. A line of fire that chokes the sky and obscures the cityscape with smoke is echoed by the border fence that attempts to separate “them” from “us.” Once we start to look, we see the imprint of such traces everywhere: guard rails, tire tracks, tree rings, footprints, rust, graffiti, a palimpsest of chalk on a blackboard, the trails left by fingertips across a dusty windowpane. The world is marked much in the same way the negative registers light. Each image points to the conditions of picture-making and recalls the acts of discovery that lie therein. These themes are equally reflected in the use of so-called “analog” photography. The large sheets of film support a fineness of detail and an ineffable luminosity that digital cameras have not yet managed to simulate. But to work in film is also to insert a temporal and geographical delay into the photographic process, and to re-inject an unpredictability that used to be an essential quality of the photographic medium. To work with film (even in the hands of a skilled practitioner) is to plumb the vast potential of the gap between what you see and what you get, a kind of willful surrender to the condition of productive uncertainty.
California offered fertile soil for a broad photographic exploration of the intersection of nature and culture, a subject that has preoccupied Felzmann for decades. More critically for the project, it is also the place he has called home for forty years. As a practical matter, the decision to work in the state allowed him to divide the work up into sorties of manageable distance and remain close to his young family. But the notion of home also provides a philosophical anchor to the work: it is the place to which he returns after each excursion, and the place from which he starts out again. The intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic in the middle of the project added an unanticipated, but poignant layer of nuance: during the shelter-in-place order, home became confinement and sanctuary in equal measure. The photographer has described his forays into the field as peregrinations, a word that evokes both the predictable mystery of migratory birds and the devotional commitments of the religious pilgrim. The act of faithful seeking is implicit in both.
The German word “heimlich” (like its more familiar Freudian counterpart “unheimlich”) is one of those idiosyncratic words whose definition also contains its opposite: it means both familiar or “home-y” as well as secret or unseen. This is also an apt description of the physical and psychological terrain that across embraces: a place at once familiar and unknowable, well-trodden ground and terra incognita, mundane and mythic. By all rights, it ought to be impossible at this point to take a new photograph in California. Surely no state has been as thoroughly surveyed, mapped, or imaged over the course of the medium’s two hundred year history. The earliest photographers followed the gold miners and traversed the continent to its very limit, to the edges where the land gives way to the sea. They imaged the West’s terrain as a way of taming its exotic landscape, its visual consumption an analogue for other, less theoretical forms of co-optation. But deep in the familiar lies the strange, and Felzmann’s camera teases these places out: where the hard edge of a highway’s shoulder succumbs to a tangle of windswept grass or the tessellated hexagons of honeycomb squeeze out, irrepressible, between the rigid wooden slats of a beehive. The surefooted prose of the document makes way for the electrifying beauty of poetry. “I dwell in possibility,” the poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “A fairer house than prose.” It is in the precarious realm of possibility that Felzmann works, where the rational and the poetic are not just adjacent but also overlap, and it is where the photographs in across find their surest footing.